I’m not posting much in the way of book reviews because I haven’t read all of these yet. Half the fun/pain of visiting Powell’s is that you end up with far more books than you came in to buy – since, hey, there’s a used copy of that book I’ve been wanting and it’s way lower than cover price, which means I can buy more books, and then HOLY SHOES MY GROCERY MONEY.
City of Books!
Comments Off
Sep 212010
Why I could never have majored in English Literature
Comments Off
Aug 082010
Shakespeare is one thing, but there’s a reason the whole Great American Writers passed me by, and Garland Grey nails it.
Jul 262010
A great disappointment, particularly as it was a “Staff Pick” at my local independent bookstore.
The author, Thomas Wheeler, is a screenwriter by trade, and boy does it show. A trivial example: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle takes a ship to America in order to meet with H.P. Lovecraft. The chapter starting on his arrival is headed, yes in all caps, “TWO WEEKS LATER”. Now, this is something you have to do in a movie, where there’s no really good way to explain the scene shift unless you’re using a narrator. Same for the hero looking through the notebooks of a dead magician, and finding the kind of mysterious expository scribblings that, in a movie are there to show the viewer what’s going on. In a book it’s ridiculous and reminds you that, yes, somebody is probably tilting this thing to be made into a movie.
Add in wooden dialogue, a frankly embarrassing portrayal of the lone female protagonist as a lonely sexpot, and a leaden Evil Conspiracy Opposed By A Good Conspiracy, and you’ll understand why I quit halfway through.
Mar 102009
Penny Arcade today pretty much sums up my opinion of the Amazon Kindle.
Jan 232009
I have an aversion to books that are part of a trilogy or other mult-ology. I’m better with series books, like the Discworld novels or the Old Man’s War novels, where each book is complete by itself, and reading the previous books is helpful but not strictly necessary.
But when I’m deciding to invest time reading a book, I don’t want to commit to reading (much less buying) multiple books if I don’t know I already like it. It’s a bit like agreeing to a first date and then having the other person ask you what kind of house the two of you should live in and how many kids you want to have; geez, buddy, I’m not ready for that kind of commitment!
And so it really pisses me off to get to the end of a book and only then find out it’s only Book 1 of a trilogy. Because that tells me that not only could you not fit a whole tale in a book-sized package, but you figured you needed to trick me into reading it, and then hope you’d hooked me into shelling out for two more books just to find out what happened next.
Not going to happen, hopeful author. I stopped caring about the characters right there and then.
Jan 292008
Edited: Athenian Abroad kindly pointed out that I referred back to the previous “the sky is falling” report by the NEA, which was issued in 2002. The latest report can be accessed here.
The National Endowment for the Arts is supposed to promote the arts, of course, so one is unsurprised to find them arguing that people need to, you know, spend more time doing artsy things. Especially those damn philistine kids with their PSPs and their Intertubes.
What’s unfortunate is that their advocacy piece is being taken as objective proof that “Americans don’t read.”
Saturday book nonblogging
Comments Off
Nov 242007
I would have been set to talk about The Janissary Tree, which promises to be a fairly intriguing book, except that I got to page 54 and discovered that pages 55 to 86 are MISSING. This in an autographed copy.
I am really not happy about having to exchange a book during the hellacious shopping season.
Sunday Book Blogging: Bug Jack Barron
Comments Off
Sep 022007
I’ve been meaning to read this one forever, as it’s one of the SF Classics. It’s recently been reprinted in paperback.
It’s no Iron Dream, but I enjoyed it. It’s one of the novels of the “New Wave” of SF, and it shows; at times the prose is very stream-of-consciousness, hip wordplay, irritating. Jack Barron runs a video equivalent of a talk radio show, where the average person can call in to “Bug Jack Barron” with whatever’s bugging them, and then Jack, on air, places a call. And God help you if you’re the person he calls–Congressman, corporate honcho–and you’re not there to be served up as entertainment. Jack’s no hero, and the slide from his and his friends’ youthful idealism to cynical and powerful adulthood is particularly relevant and interesting now when you look at what the Boomers are up to. It’s far from a simple morality play.
That said, the book was written in 1969, and boy does it show. The slang isn’t very far at all from the ’60s (“cool it” and “dig” are common), and where the book takes two steps forward in its awareness of racial issues, it takes about six steps back in terms of gender. The female characters don’t do much but take up spac, mainly in bed. Sarah, the heroine, is whiny, wispy and ineffectual. It’s hard to see why she and Jack are each others’ great loves except that, you know, she’s the chick. His chick.
Recent Comments