I feel like I’m not really giving Martha Wells her due when I say this was another good Murderbot book. This was another good Murderbot book. Writing series SF is hard and she makes it look easy.
Recommended.
Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club was kind of a thing. It caused a bunch of excitement and some hand-wringing when it (and the movie adaptation of it) appeared. I’m just acknowlegding that it is tough to talk about it knowing what it became.
I think a lot of the power of the novel is in Palahniuk’s prose. It is sharp, disorienting, and propulsive. He starts in media res and then gets confusing. I spend a lot of the book mentally off-balance in a good way. It is a lot of fun be dragged along with.
Fight Club is very much of its moment. I think a lot of the book is intended to be funny, and a lot of the jokes are references anchored in the 1990s. Palahniuk isn’t name-checking celebrities or anything so blatant, but part of the drive of his writing is referring to a movement or a mindset in a couple words that are evocative to a 1990s reader.
I’m curious how that will work as the book ages. I had no trouble playing along, but I was a young man in the 1990s. I can imagine English professors my age assigning this book to their classes assuming the students will be compelled and receiving blank stares from modern readers. But who knows? My fortunetelling abilities are not supporting my retirement.
Recommended.
A friend recommended this strongly to me, and though I’ve generally tacked away from Charles Bukowski, I dropped it on my LAPL hold list. If he always writes like this, that’s my mistake. Ham on Rye just blew me away.
Bukowski writes phenomenally sharply. I get the impression that every word on the page is there to do exactly what he wants it to do. I am even more impressed that he marshals his words without fanfare. There are not many quotable phrases or passages here. But I am always in exactly the moment he is telling me about.
He does this in the service of a first person narrative from a character who I probably wouldn’t want to spend too much time with. He puts a person on the page who is unapologetically outside society in some basic ways and walks us through his early life. The protagonist comes from an abusive home and a poor world. The language is raw and blunt. And perfect. Bukowski puts the reader exactly into the evolving mind of an amoral person. Even “amoral” is not quite right. His protagonist has a code, it’s just not aligned with society. It’s one of those works that the only thing that describes it perfectly is the thing itself.
Bukowski does this as Charles Bukowski. His persona is well defined as an alcoholic outsider. Any reader is going to see Ham on Rye as autobiographical. And he puts this perfect realization of a shambling mess on the page knowing people will think it’s him. That is bravery that I respect.
A must.
This is a Booker-award winning novel about 24 hours in the life of astronauts on a near future space station. The location and characters are used to literally look at our world from a higher perspective.
That is a good basis for a novel. Samantha Harvey’s prose is evocative and she does a nice job of balancing the ethereal with the mundane. The characters are drawn with a poetic blend of abstraction and specificity. She addresses the big picture of life on earth and how weird it is to work in space.
Man, that should be candy to me, but it does not quite come together. It always feels just a touch too writerly. I understand what she is aiming for in the abstraction of her characters, but instead of inhabiting that space between a living being and a symbol in a story they just seem like literary constructs.
Look, the book won a Booker prize. In general the folks who hand those out are better judges of writing than I am. But I am not a fan.
I did read the Aeneid. Obviously there’s a huge body of criticism and annotation that I’m not going to be able to add anything to. But for the record, I found it interesting as both a narrative and as a telling of a national creation myth.
I wouldn’t call it completely rip-roaring as a narrative for the modern reader. It is epic poetry about people who lived a couple thousand years ago and while many of their emotions are ours, there are many concerns that are not. And beyond that, these are embodiments of national virtues and outright Gods. Not completely relatable.
Yet I enjoyed a lot of it. I didn’t realize that this was a primary source of the Trojan Horse story. It remains an unbelievable narrative, but the story of the sacking of Troy was more affecting than I was expecting. Telling the story of early Rome as a prophesy embossed on Aeneas’s shield was new to me also. It’s a transparent way to teach some Roman history, but still interesting.
That’s mostly just me rambling. It’s the Aeneid. If you are curious about this time period or classic epics at all, it’s kind of a must.
Recommended.