- Bilirubin
- Feb 16, 2014
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The sanctioned action is to CHUG
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Sorry I am getting around to this a little late. In January we had folks review books they read over the month, and I will be picking the best to present to you to see which review makes the book seem the best to read in March. And something a little extra...the winner will get an av change or gangtag of their choice!
Recall, the rules were, review a book you got for Christmas (or just read) that was not a BotM for the past 5 years. And only the review will be posted here--you can read supplementary information to help guide your choice, but I'm not posting the usual wiki summaries. I would like to thank everyone who posted their thoughts on their books, both short and long, but not everyone can make it to the main show. I did a preliminary elimination round for content quality and suitability for a BotM. Apologies to the wonderful reviews offered for the Zizek philosophical tome and the Indigenous People's History in particular, but I wasn't certain those would really fly, but I will be reading the latter for sure myself. I'm happy to be wrong of course, so tell me that and feel free to suggest them for future BotMs.
And now the competitors...
1. The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester, reviewed by book goon Jordan7hm
First Santa gift book down. Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man.
Not as good as The Stars My Destination, but still a whirlwind of a story. There are two things that I loved about both Bester books I’ve read. The first is the way he just drops us into fully realized worlds and trusts us to follow along as he goes. He trusts the reader to keep up and I appreciate that. The second is that he writes with a purpose. He has some core themes and ideas to explore and he wants to get to them. The plot drives relentlessly forward.
The middle of this book is the peak. The back and forth of the Rough and Slick is fantastic.
I’d love to see another book set in this world. Specifically the dystopia about the peeper run society.
2. The Loser by Thomas Bernhard, reviewed by book goon cryptoclastic
Derp sent me The Loser, so that will be my book for this month.
So I am reading The Loser and I’m only about 30 pages in, but I’m enjoying it so far. It takes concentration to read because it’s very dense. It reminds me somewhat of Ducks, Newburyport in that you’re essentially reading someone’s stream of consciousness. Interested to see where things go.
Well, I finished The Loser.
I am not sure I completely get it. Basically, there are three characters who all seem like terrible people. At certain points I was starting to feel sorry for one or another of them, but then immediately reminded of how terrible they were. It felt like that was sorta the point.It was an interesting read, but I'm not sure I got everything I was supposed to out of it. Maybe Bernhard just isn't for me.
3. This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, reviewed by book goon McSpankWich
This month I read This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. I found it fascinating and gripping. At its core, it's a love story between two special ops soldiers on opposite sides of a war through time and space.
The real attraction though, is how it's organized, the chapters are extremely short and focused on a small snippet of whatever mission Red or Blue is doing, then finding the letter from the other, and then the letter itself. The chapters alternate from one to the other. Since they are so small, I found myself falling into the Stardew Valley "one more day" syndrome where I ended up reading it longer than I intended almost every time I sat down with it.
There is zero dedicated worldbuilding, zero background on the war itself, and almost no details on any other characters at all, it's amazing how little of the world is revealed in this book and yet how much of it I came out knowing. I loved how this book was organized and put together, the progression of the two main characters' story told through letters that take place linearly, while the characters themselves are bouncing around throughout all of time and space. This description sounds a lot more complicated than it is while you're actually reading it, I didn't feel any sense of "wait what was that?" "when is this happening?" because it really doesn't matter that much, the time and space travel is just a backdrop for the love story.
I would definitely recommend this book, it was an easy read for either short snippets or long sessions, and super enjoyable. Putting it on my list for a re-read at some point in the future for sure.
4. The Shepherd's Crown, by Terry Pratchett, reviewed by book goon Epic High Five
Book report time!
I finished The Shepherd's Crown as the culmination of my year+ long project to read through all of Pratchett's Discworld novels. I'm conflicted a bit because it's not a very good book on its own merits, but it also couldn't have been because Pratchett never got to actually finish it. I was expecting this to be deeply depressing but it was instead only bittersweet at worst, because it was also a labor of love of the man by the people who put it together on the strength that it is also is just a better ending point for the series than Raising Steam was.
My actually controversial opinion is that Making Money was probably the last book in the series that really felt like the old books. Unseen Academicals was fine but just didn't grab me, partly because I think the dynamic between the frumpy but solid character and the flighty but beautiful one was done better in Maskerade, and I was very sad that Agnes Nitt vanished as a character after that one. It had one thing that would come to bother me in the next two mainline books though, a strange and driving insistence that having a useful skill was the foundation of worth and that worth was the biggest thing to strive for. The entire time I could only think "and what if Mr Nutt wasn't miraculously perfect at everything he put his hands to? or "what if goblins really weren't instantly perfect at everything to do with railroads and klax towers, what if they were just okay at them and their salvation demanded tremendous expenditures to bring them back from where the Disc had put them and not tremendous profit from exploiting them as labor?" Would they deserve the mistreatment and oppression then? Would they ever have been offered a place at the table? It felt like a real detachment from the more humanistic tone of earlier books.
Snuff was pretty good overall but should've ended at the bonfire, if not a bit before that. Raising Steam felt like an endless stream of monologues with the actual established motivations and peculiarities of characters changing as needed to fit them, ones that would always start with a declaration of who they are. Everybody was walking around with a soap box and waiting for their turn to extoll the virtues of the coming technocratic meritocracy, contrasted with cartoonishly evil villains. It's why I remember these books as the saddest for me, because it was after he found out he would never be able to finish what he had in mind so I think he wanted to fit all the important arcs in.
I guess I don't have much to say about The Shepherd's Crown specifically, both because it was what it was and because in addition to being a book it also represented my completing the whole canon and my beginning point for seriously thinking about it as a whole. Pratchett remains my favorite author, tied with Le Guin. His humor and his characters and his worlds are alive, deep, and deeply funny in a way nobody else could match. Guards! Guards! is the book I've probably recommended to the most people, because it's emblematic of his ability to make something real, touching, subversive, and universal with his characters and plots that are firmly grounded and funny even as high fantasy is going on the background.
...
Because I was asked for a book report format, I have not reviewed or revised this at all, because I am deeply lazy and a bad student, hopefully it all makes sense. If I didn't know there were a bunch of Prachett fans here I probably wouldn't have bothered and kept it all to myself, so I'm glad this thread exists because I've got very few people irl I can talk to about the sort of books I actually find worth reading.
5. The Son, by Philipp Meyer, reviewed by book goon escape artist
My jaw is on the floor, as I just finished The Son by Philipp Meyer. I have seen it hailed as the best novel written in the 21st century, so that is quite the reputation to live up to. In short: it lived up to the expectations. A multi-generational epic that takes place during the Comanche raids in the 1850s, the border crisis in WWI and the oil boom of the 21st century, this book reminded me of Blood Meridian at times and East of Eden in size and scope. I will have better, more properly arranged thoughts in the near future.
6. Inventory by Darren Anderson, reviewed by book goon Glimpse
Inventory by Darren Anderson is sort of a memoir, I guess, but it’s more like an archaeology of trauma. It’s about Northern Ireland and The Troubles, and colonization and occupation. It’s mostly about Anderson’s family, whose stories he tells through objects.
Some of them are real, concrete things, like his aunt’s wedding dress that was thrown around her living room by smirking British solders who smashed her face with a rifle butt as a parting gift a few days before her wedding. Some of them are less concrete, like letters home from his grandfather in the war that he never found, maybe were never written.
Anderson’s a very engaging writer, always wandering off on extended tangents but never losing me along the way. Late in the book when he’s talking about his own teen and college years it did start to feel a little cliche for a bit, maybe that’s just the universality the angry young man story. It comes around at the end for a satisfying conclusion, though. I enjoyed this book thoroughly.
7. Mammoth, by Chris Flynn, reviewed by book goon Gertrude Perkins
This month I read Mammoth, by Chris Flynn.
This was a Secret Santa gift from the lovely NTRabbit, who assured me it was "weird Astralian fiction", and it is exactly that. The premise won me over to begin with: the spirit of a mammoth skeleton tells the story of his life and "fossilife" to an assortment of other museum pieces as they wait to be sold at auction. Thirteen thousand years of storytelling? In 256 pages, that's ambitious. But of course it's actually thick snippets of life and fossilife, mostly from the mammoth, but also from his companions. I don't think Flynn quite delivers on the promise of the premise (say that five times fast), but there are some great parts to this. I enjoyed the mammoth (Mammut)'s life story, his community and culture, and the skirmishes and rivalries with the incipient Clovis culture of hominids. The mammoth's narrative style is melancholic and occasionally florid, which seems to fit the idea of an immense, ancient, wise species.
The voices of the other characters are less enjoyable, unfortunately. There's a Tyrannosaurus bataar, whose impatience and pop culture references get old quickly, despite his pleasant, enthusiastic carnivore mindset. His own story is fun, and then he serves mostly to interrupt the main narrative from Mammut. And others who appear later are even more thinly sketched: an ancient penguin, what might be Hapshetsut, and a pterodactyl. They might have more going on but beyond introductions and a sense of mutual respect/tolerance they end up crowding things. An occasionally bickering chorus that serve as joke delivery mechanisms in what becomes a sadly unfunny book. It's a shame, as the story constantly hits little traffic jams of "There's no way you could have known that!" which get tiresome fast.
Mammut's story itself starts again with his being unearthed in 18th-Century America, and follows two pairs of unlikely heroes: the first, sons and amateur archaeologists intent on bringing the mammoth skeleton to France to demonstrate the young nation's prowess and rich history; the second, an Irish brother and sister who want to use the stolen bones to sell and support the nationalist cause against the British. The aforementioned interruptions mean that even the more interesting passages keep stopping and starting in ways that took me right out of the experience. Twice I left the book just sitting for a week before delving back in, a very slow experience. Again, there are some really good moments, like an encounter with Georges Cuvier or a disastrous trail into the American West, but none of it was allowed to grab me.
The tone, as a result, is strange. There are so many moments of sadness, hopelessness, determination in the face of failure. Humanity en masse is portrayed as cruel, stupid, ignorant, callous, selfish, which are all fine of course, but it takes on a level of sarcastic resignation...until the end. The last parts of the book, the end of Mammut's story and an intercession by the author himself, are properly good, interesting, bizarre and hopeful in ways that the rest of the novel fails to be. I was left puzzled as to why Flynn would sabotage the rest of the book with so many irritating moments and failed comedy. Maybe it was to add levity to a series of sad narratives that end in violence and destruction, or maybe it was to give the sincerity of the ending more weight by contrast.
I wish this book had let me enjoy it more. I feel disappointed, but also I know a lot of people who might totally love it. So maybe if it becomes BOTM everyone else will like it, and I will be the fool.
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Feb 26, 2024 03:28
