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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 finished reading (actually listening to) a couple books for a book club:
The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
This one never clicked for me at all. I couldn't tell you what the plot was, or if it even had any discernible plot at all. Just seemed like a continuous string of long, pointless, meandering conversations between characters where, by the end of each conversation, I was so disinterested that I generally couldn't even remember what characters were having the conversation or why they were having it or anything else about what was going on. There were maybe 2 or 3 moments in the book where it captured my attention and had me thinking something interesting might actually happen, but if it ever did I missed it in the end.
The Rainmaker by John Grisham
Never read the book or saw the movie before, so I did both (in that order).
My opinion contains spoilers.
My main complaint with the book is that for almost the whole thing there was never any real sense of stakes or danger that Rudy could lose his case. It was just reveal after reveal of new evidence that the insurance company was even more evil and screwed than we thought last chapter. Especially with the judge backing Rudy so hard the whole time.The movie, on the other hand, did a much better job of developing that sense of danger by making the judge more neutral and threatening to exclude some of the important evidence due to technicalities, but I feel maybe it went a bit too far. I liked the element in the book where the defense lawyer was also an unwitting victim of the insurance company in many ways, but the movie basically turned him into a complete scumbag who was in on and trying to conceal all of the unethical practices that were going on. A lot of that was probably done to compress the story down into movie format--I would have loved to see this get a more nuanced mini-series treatment instead.
All that said, I enjoyed both the book and the movie quite a bit.
Now that I've got my book club obligations out of the way I've resumed where I left off in The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson (about a quarter of the way through so far) which I'm enjoying well enough, but maybe not quite meeting my expectations after having this series hyped up so much by some friends of mine who are massive fans.
I just recently picked up The Passenger, though I haven’t started it yet. I read the chapter published in the New York Times and thought it was pretty interesting. Have you read anything else by him?
I haven't read anything else he wrote, but I saw the film that was based on The Road and liked that quite a bit. The first chapter of The Passenger (which is the excerpt that the NYT published) was good--had me hooked. But to me it wasn't really representative of the style or tone of rest of the story, so it lost me quickly after that.
Salvation (Peter F. Hamilton)
I was in the mood for sci-fi again, so I decided to see what my favourite author has been up to lately. Apparently there's a whole new trilogy of books ready for my consumption! Excellent. Just finished up the first of the three last week.
It's weirdly structured. Primarily, it follows two different timelines. The first is in the year 2204, when a team of specialists is recruited to investigate a mysterious crashed spaceship in a distant star system. The second is set many years later, following a team of genetically engineered warriors trained from birth to fight a mysterious enemy, revering the five main characters of the first timeline as saints in a quasi-religion. But much of the book consists of a number of lengthy flashbacks focusing on the individual characters from the first timeline.
Actually, the book kinda reads more like a collection of short stories than a novel. Each flashback introduces a bunch of new characters, most of whom are never mentioned again after the flashback ends. At first, I thought the flashbacks were too lengthy, hampering the pacing, and it took me a while to warm up to the structure and lean back and enjoy the journey. In the final few chapters though, all the puzzle pieces come together to reveal the whole; quite suddenly everything made sense, and I realized how many hints had been placed throughout the book about what was really going on all along. It's one of the most satisfying endings to any novel I've ever read, and it made me immediately pick up the next book in the series and start reading.
The book still suffers a bit under the weight of too many characters, but the lengthy flashbacks are where the author sets up most of the world building. And world building is, at least in my opinion, one of Hamilton's greatest strengths.
Usually he focuses on a few revolutionary technologies, and how they would change our society. The big one this time is quantum-spatial entanglement portals, that allow instantaneous travel over large distances. The portal pairs have to be created in the same space though, and one end then transported to the wanted destination. But they have a few other uses than just transportation: Drop one end into the sun, and the other can be used as fuel to create enormous amounts of electricity; or strap the other end at the back of a spaceship as an immensely powerful thruster.
Instant travel and super-cheap electricity, in combination with AI and 3D-printing advancements, and medical advances brought by religious aliens arriving on an arkship, have together launched human civilization into its post-scarcity stage. Humanity has however been split into two factions with very different views on how this new era can best benefit everyone.
Overall, I think I like this book less than The Night's Dawn Trilogy and the Commonwealth Saga, but more than the Void Trilogy.
Two modernist books of the night: Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes, and Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce. I've talked a lot about Nightwood, this is my first reread though, and a couple things are sticking out: holy shit the racism, and holy shit the metaphors. It's like being dragged sideways through a dream set in the fin-de-siecle, every sentence is saying something wry and pessimistic about European culture, every character is tragically lost in their own assumptions of their life's direction, and the only person with any bearing is a nonbinary abortionist from California who insists on his Irishness. The doctor is probably just blowing hot air, anyway. Unknowability is necessary.
The Wake is somehow more obscure, but I can't quite place why...oh, right, it's because it's not written in a real language. Basically, James Joyce decided to write a joke book. Every word is a pun, every pun is multilingual, there are almost no coherent sentences even with that in mind. Scholars say there's a coded novel if you squint your eyes and tilt your head, and they may be right, but I won't read what they say. I've been reading a few pages at a time, rereading them, rereading them, rereading them. Every line has multiple valid meanings, most of which unify in some way, but they don't ever seem complete in their monoid forms. The experience is psychedelic, discerning constellations. There are shapes to be found, but only by means of judgment and perception, they don't stand in their own.
Edit for illumination: the title, glossed (every phrase is like this):
So, I kept up with 3/4 of my “confident” finishes from the last thread.
This is the book that won her the Pulitzer, and while it certainly had fascinating explorations and history lessons, I actually preferred her newer book, Under a White Sky (2021). There were a few topics that she covers briefly in this book that she reëxplores in her new one, that I feel I might have enjoyed it a little more had I read it chronologically (even for a non-fiction).
I really, really enjoyed this. I did not expect to care much for personal essays, but there’s really something to it that I can’t quite explain. He touches on events that happened recently, including the George Floyd protests and COVID-19 as well as things more personal to him like his sister’s suicide and her accusations against their father. I didn’t know anything about him or his family other than the fact that one of his sisters was Amy Sedaris, but the way he tells a story captures me. This is my favorite book of this list, hands-down.
So, the other books of his that I read were disturbing in their own ways, but they managed to tell a worthwhile story. This was fucked up and not much else. This one was not for me.
I also said I was confident that I would finish Upgrade by Blake Crouch, but that has not yet happened.
Outside of that, I read I’m Glad my Mom Died (2022) by Jennette McCurdy.
I’ll admit, I tried this one because of its popularity, but I’m glad I did. I wasn’t expecting an account of anorexia and bulimia, but it was quite interesting to get a perspective on what someone going through that experiences. But I think my main takeaway from the book is my jealousy for such a memory; I don’t understand how someone can recall things in such vivid details and I wish I could too.
I’ve started Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) by Jules Verne and The Cabin at the End of the World (2018) by Paul Tremblay, which is being adapted to Knock at the Cabin (2023) from M. Night Shyamalan, coming out next week.
Coincidentally, I'm reading White Noise by Dom DeLillo. I had no idea they were releasing a movie based on it. I'm almost finished and I like it. It's been on my to-read list for a long time and I saw a used copy at the bookstore for a couple of bucks. It's been hitting a lot of areas of my life that are relevant right now.
Maybe I'll even get around to watching the movie.
Next up for me is Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow. No reason, really. It was a book that was always on our bookshelf at my mom's house, so I finally borrowed it.