I’ve got a pile of books I’ve been putting off and ended up in a situation to read some of them.
I read Consider Phlebas (Iain Banks) first. Despite the back cover telling me plainly that everyone dies, I somehow didn’t get get what they meant by that and was surprised when no one made it out of the novel alive. I was a little frustrated by that but it held my attention and I’ll definitely read more Culture novels in the future.
The next one I started on was The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell). I haven’t finished it yet. It’s a difficult book (not Dhalgren difficult, just difficult on subject matter).
Which was lucky for me because it meant I didn’t have to start Ulysses (Joyce) which I accidentally brought instead of The Odyssey.
George, right now… WE LOVE YOU GEORGE, YOU LOVABLE NUT!
Me right now…
@Nightflyer, isn’t there also a WildCard series in the works, and I thought I’d heard about one of his other works being picked up (Nightflyers, maybe?). And he’s executive producing a series based on the works of Nnedi Okorafor, too.
Not so much what I’m reading, but some sad news for me anyway…due to some clumsiness, my Kindle became ever so slightly damaged last week. Planned to keep using it until the battery died as I’m a fan of buttons and these days, Amazon isn’t.
Still, picked up a Paperwhite and spent the evening sideloading about 1,100 books on there then organising them into collections. They’ve made a fair few improvements on the UI front and the screen looks great.
I just started on John Perry Barlow’s autobiography, Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times. I’m about halfway through it.
It’s excellent. It’s much like listening to him talk in person in a small group, which I had the privilege to do several times. The book is more a series of stories than a more formal, traditional autobiography. And the same as when he talked in person, he’d leave out big chunks of info and then circle around to come back to it later.
A fantastic read for me right after finishing one album and deciding the direction of the next.
It me.
This book gave me a new perspective on… damn near everything about myself, why my childhood was the way it was, why I like or don’t like various things, why I make the kind of music I do, and what I need.
Kind of a mixed read. Delves into the celebrity drama genre a little (though they were kind of anti-celebrities) and the kind of breathless music reviews that don’t often match my experience of the music. But no doubt, they were pioneers and iconoclasts before the world sort of passed them by in the 80s.
Currently reading:
Fun, even if it feels like I have seen most of these characters elsewhere. I like them all though.
I have to reply to my own post just to point out that after reading the Author blurb
Chuck Tingle is an erotic author from Billings, Montana
So many questions are suddenly answered. (Billing, MT is … different? Maybe you need to be from Montana to feel it, but the Montana Metropolis has a whole different feel from the rest of the state)
Bought this one at a library book sale, having heard good things about it.
I wasn’t taken with it at first – it seemed like it was going to be kind of pretentious. But then certain characters were introduced and things got damned interesting for a while. Creepy, wrong, tantalizing. And then it just sort of ran out of steam, some things happened without feeling like they meant anything, and the book just sort of shrugged and wandered away, averting its eyes.
I didn’t know until just now linking to it that was part 1 of a trilogy. That doesn’t excuse it though.
There was an entire side story with another few characters that never connected to the main plot in any way whatsoever – and that story seems like it wrapped up, with little satisfaction, and seems unlikely to relate to anything in the sequels.
I found a copy in one of those “little free library” boxes and decided I’d read it again, for the first time in 40 years or so.
IN HINDSIGHT: Overrated. Not much there. Manages to imply a sort of depth in the first act on which the rest of the book does not deliver.
The Three Ladies are really the only good or clever bit in the book, the only element with any ambiguity. (They’re GOOD but they seem like WITCHES and CRAZY PEOPLE) Every other evocation of good, evil, and the supernatural is much more straightforward and boring. The bit about the fifth dimension is not nearly as interesting as the same material presented in Flatland and it’s not really relevant to the story either. The story seems to be about how godless communists want to make everybody the same, boo hiss.
It’s about a girl whose mom is a scientist who is selected as the Chosen One by three metabeings who choose to portray thematics as old human women, and the girl gets to save her dad, who is also a scientist and who totally respects her intelligence, as well as his wife’s.
It is impossible to overstate how dynamite that was in the 60s when it was first published. It’s still dynamite now. The Left Hand of Darkness is waiting for us when we get older, but A Wrinkle in Time is the gateway for thousands of science-fiction-loving girls. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the plot holes and other drawbacks, same as boys skip over the drawbacks of other juvenalia.
The book got rejected over twenty times when it was first written. That it got such a solid and enduring reception when it finally found a publisher shows that, for all its faults, it is filling a need with readers that other books simply aren’t providing.
In my defense I’ll just say there are enough similarities with The Wizard of Oz* that Meg being the hero seemed like the obvious way to write it. The anomaly would be she’s traveling with her baby brother and not the dog
∗ The Wizard of Oz scrambled together with C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy maybe
Reading Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, nonfiction about, basically, a hippie kid who did some things right and a lot of things wrong. (Also a “little free library” find. I’ve seen the movie.)
The subject was about my age, a little younger maybe, and I was a little like that, and I knew people who were JUST LIKE THAT, so it feels pretty weird reading it all in a book, where you can’t actually talk to the characters and argue about their decisions.
I remember, in real life, rock climbing with a Bay Area guy who was JUST LIKE “Alex” and talking about how my climbing style was way more conservative than his. He was talking about mountain goats (he thought he was the goat) so I compared myself to an elephant seal. The elephant seal knows he’s no good at rock climbing and he’d better make zero fucking mistakes.
That guy, the guy I knew, he’s not a traveler/ street vendor/ farmhand/ con artist any more, I don’t think. Last time I talked to him he said he was some kind of college teacher with a wife and kids, which was consistent with his previous stories of going back to school. I can easily imagine if Christopher McCandless had just NOT DIED he’d be fine now.
I think I also have Into Thin Air (also by JK) around here somewhere, though I only read the first chapter. Or maybe I’m remembering having seen it at a café or something. My threshold of having so much stuff I can’t find anything is pretty low.
I finished Charles Stross’s old series of Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise, and Accellerando. I remember vaguely some of the discussion about the series (12-15 years ago) on some podcasts. It’s funny how he only really writes about the Singularity, mining the same thing over and over from different directions of genres.
I read Consider Phlebas (Iain Banks) first. Despite the back cover telling me plainly that everyone dies, I somehow didn’t get get what they meant by that and was surprised when no one made it out of the novel alive. I was a little frustrated by that but it held my attention and I’ll definitely read more Culture novels in the future.
