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What are you reading these days?
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
I'm not going to lie, I have actually been counting down until this post so that I could talk about a book I love. I have been dying for an avenue to gush about this book.
House of Leaves
Author: Mark Z Danielewski
This has been my favorite book since I first read it in high school. It has an interesting and complex plot, the actual writing itself is great, the characters are all well-developed, mostly realistic and believable, and sympathetic. While the book focuses on the House, it is equally a story about loss, grief, and our relationships with one another. In my opinion, it is the pinnacle of ergodic literature. I can't think of another book where the way the words on the page are printed have so perfectly added to the feel of dread, suspense, fear, claustrophobia and confusion that the characters are feeling or the author is trying to get you to feel.
If you notice, I haven't really talked about the actual plot of the book. I wanted to bring up the plot up as a drawback actually. Not that the plot isn't good, I love the plot and think it is a strength. The problem is that the book is so fucking weird and complicated I still struggle to describe the plot in a way that makes sense without giving anything away.
If anyone wants to ask questions about the book or anything related to it, please feel free to ask. Danielewski has written many books, almost all of them are to some degree ergodic, and all of them are incredible IMO. Only Revolutions and The Fifty-Year Sword are two others of his I like a lot.
Then, if you read House of Leaves and like it and want more, you can try picking up The Familiar series. It was a planned 27-book series, written in seasons. He released the first 5 books which make up the complete first season of the series before putting the series on pause due to lack of readership. While I love Danielewki, The Familiar is a very big time investment, and he really takes his ergodic writing to a whole new level. For example: one of the narrators, Jingjing, lives in Singapore and so the entire chapter is written in Singlish, a creole language that is a mix of Malay, Hokkien Chinese and English, among other languages. So while you're reading his chapters you need to have some sort of translation dictionary open (thankfully, the community for the series posted a Singlish to English dictionary of only the words that appear in the chapters to make it easier. Or the software engineer where as he thinks new thoughts, ()[]{} are added to show it is a subthought. Again, this is really hard to describe, so here is an example via the first paragraphs of the first pages for this character:
[In support of his daughter's diet] Anwar abstained from ordering his favorite: the brioche French toast [always moist {but never runny <a key distinction for Astair>}] slathered with butter and grade A maple syrup. 'Are you sure you didn't want the French toast?' Xanther asks [of course Xanther would notice {would know <would care>}]. How does a twelve-year-old come to possess such a magnanimous heart? 'I was in the mood for something less indulgent, daughter.' Anwar had also abstained from his coffee [trying to quit {,Kefaya!> trying to sleep <better> <trying to forget the headache drilling out from just above his right eye>}]. One out of three wasn't bad [!{?}].But there's just a lot of shit like that in the Familiar that while I love, is very mentally taxing and so you have to be really ready to engage with the text. I only ever made it to book 3. Maybe now that I'm on ADHD meds I will give the series another go at it.
Anyway, I was here to talk about my favorite book, House of Leaves, and I think this little section from the wikipedia page for the book do a good job of summarizing the plot and many of the things I love about it:
Iain M Banks - Surface Detail, the 8th Culture novel. I've been at it for many years but one by one, I'm getting ever closer to the finish line (there are 9 Culture novels). Wild plot, as always, and it's hard to tell 100% where it's going as of yet. I hope the ending isn't as dissatisfying to me as Matter's.
I've set a goal to read 12 books this year, which I know isn't much, but I'm really bad about making time for books. I'm hoping to exceed that goal, but we'll see! The first book of 2022 for me was "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. I'm borrowing this from my Good Reads review:
McCarthy's choice to pretend quotation marks don't exist is an interesting one. I've read that he believes dialogue can be adequately presented without them, which I can agree with to an extent. "The boy said", "the man replied", etc. can be immersion-breaking if you're reading a long stretch of dialogue and I'm sure it's tiresome to write. While I don't take issue with that decision, I will say that once you add a third person to the conversation it does get a bit confusing. But even with just the Man and the Boy I found myself having to re-read some conversations a few times to keep track of who was saying what.
I found the relationship between the Man and the Boy to be very realistically portrayed. The Boy's unbreakable optimism and desire to do good, the Man's struggle to foster that and shield his son from the horrors of the world all the while having to do questionable things to keep them alive. The father's cruelty towards others at times pained me, but I get it.
In a world with basements full of humans kept as cattle and newborns consumed for sustenance, can anyone afford to be truly good? I think that's the ultimate question this book poses. And I think it does a good job of providing the reader with all of the possible answers without picking one.
The cannibals are the definitive "No". You have to be cut-throat and do everything you can, no matter how previously distasteful, to live. You see this archetypes in a lot of post-apocalyptic media. There's always a segment of the population that will do literally anything to survive. Steal, murder, rape, eat people, anything. What's interesting to me is that unlike other PA books I've read, it seems like the majority of survivors fall into this group. Good people are few and far between.
The Boy is the definitive "Yes". You can and should do good things. Help people who need it, even at your own expense. The problem with this approach is that you put yourself in harm's way constantly. In their world, people will backstab, exploit, or outright kill you even if you treat them right.
The Man is the "Maybe" answer. Helping folks at your own expense will get you killed, but that doesn't mean you resort to murder or cannibalism to survive. I think the reality of the world pulled him in one direction, but having his son with him pulled him in the other.
I do have some issues with book. Mostly that when horrible things happen it's usually just a quick sentence or two. There's no dwelling on it or in-depth look at the characters processing it. The Boy just becomes a little more jaded, The Man regrets his son had to see it, and then they have bad dreams. There's no talking about it, or trying to understand it (if such a thing is possible). It's just "bad thing happens, they ran away quickly".
I'd also hoped we'd see some sort of decent human settlement along the way. In a lot of post-apocalyptic books there's a group of good people who come together and build a small town. Their slice of paradise becomes a target for the raiders, or cannibals, or whoever, but we didn't really get that in this book. Which I suppose isn't necessarily a bad thing-- it is kind of tropey. But I'm left with a desire to see what that would look like in this setting.