Really short reviews + preemptive rave

[sabotabby]

So I should have read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz when it first came out, or at the very least, when it won the Pulitzer Prize, but it has been on my "hey, that sounds good, I should read this" list for far too long. Anyway, finally read it, and ZOMG. It's basically the history of the Dominican Republic and diaspora as seen through the life and death of an overweight nerd who wants to be the Dominican Gary Gygax. The writing is sheer poetry and it's essentially every bit as brilliant as people say it is. Check it out ASAP if, like me, you didn't read it back when you should have. It had me at the Miracleman reference and had me crying a bit at the Watchmen reference. Okay, more than a bit.

Anyway, a review of that book included a reference to a slightly older urban fantasy book about nerds of colour, The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, by Minister Faust (no, his parents didn't name him that, though they named him something almost as cool), so I read that too. It is not quite as awesome and could have used me as an editor (lose the poetry, don't write out dialect, seriously consider deleting any passage where you feel that you need to switch to a different font) but makes up for these flaws by making its protagonist a nerdy Sudanese secular Muslim community activist with clinical depression. Also by introducing all eleven first-person POV characters with their RPG stats. Oh, and it's set in Edmonton and makes the place sound actually interesting. Incidentally, in 2004 when the book was written, there was still the potential for urban fantasy to be good. It's unfortunate that instead of lively, inventive, city-as-character stories like this one, we ended up with stories about sparkly vampires.

Then a whole whack of books came in from library holds and a PM Press order, so I now have a stack that I'm reading in order of whether they need to be returned. I'm currently halfway through Them by Jon Ronson, which, as fengi suggested in my review of Among the Truthers, actually is the conspiracy theory book I was looking for. It's hilarious and did you know that David Icke and Alex Jones had a feud? Because I didn't. They both think each other is a plant of the Bilderberg Group. That is the best thing that I have ever read. I keep drawing looks on the bus because Ronson has Jones talk in CAPSLOCK (which, from what I've seen, is an entirely accurate depiction of how he speaks) and likes mentioning 12-foot-tall bloodsucking lizard aliens as often as he feels that he can get away with it. I have never longed so much for a cinematic adaptation of a nonfiction book. According to his website, said movie is in the works, but I can't tell if he's kidding or not.

What are you reading?

Comments

[lienne.livejournal.com]

<333

I am reading nothing interesting unless you count serial Web fiction which I totally do.

[sabotabby]

Totally counts. I cannot comfortably read online stuff on transit, though. My screen is too wee.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

rly? would it help if I got the author to make a mobile version, or is your screen just plain too wee to read on at all?

[sabotabby]

Nah, it's too small to read much of anything beyond short FB status updates, plus I have a line length fetish.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

ilu sabs

ilu

[sabotabby]

I mean is it just me or do e-readers fuck up line length by default?

[xturtle.livejournal.com]

I am on a public domain, free to download to my cell phone ereader kick. Most recently I've been adventuring with Sherlock Holmes, though there has also been some Frankenstein. Oh, and The Lodger, because early pop culture reactions to Jack the Ripper are way too interesting.

[sabotabby]

I need re-read Frankenstein on account of having just finished Kapital. Also should read more Sherlock Holmes because yeah.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

should read more Sherlock Holmes

yes

yes you should

also how's that going with the tickets?

[sabotabby]

The sites are all still non-compliant. The Steampunk Society peeps say that advance tickets are supposed to go on sale tomorrow or Thursday (they are also planning an outing). Fortunately, I am up early every day!

[lienne.livejournal.com]

bugger the sites.

XDDD

[sabotabby]

I shall be persistant at any rate. Stupid sites.

[xturtle.livejournal.com]

I really enjoy the story collections. The novels are fun, too, but I have a short attention span and a doctor-ordered bedtime, so the short stories really do it for me.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

Frankenstein-Kapital link? I am confused, but I have read neither. I always assume I have read Frankenstein because it is so well known, but then remember I have just seen films and read lots about it!

[sabotabby]

Marx references Frankenstein a lot of Kapital. Mary Shelley—the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin; can you imagine more awesome parents—was a feminist and a socialist, and the book is largely a critique of industrial capitalism. I like to think that Marx was a proto-nerd, but that may be a stretch.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

I have been thinking about Shelley (Mary) quite a lot recently as I have just read a biography Thomas Hardy and discovered that as a young architect he supervised the removal of graves for the redevelopment of St Pancras churchyard, and as Mary Wollstonecraft was buried there the Shelleys were there having to move her body at the time. The churchyard is near-ish where I live and always makes my flesh creep as I pass it on the bus or walk by. It looks so very historical in a very deeply dismal sort of way, and is overshadowed by the hideous Victorian building that was a horrible workhouse and is now a women's mental ward! Back then it would have been slightly less built up in the area.

My ex Ben used to cite Mary Shelley as an example of the sexism inherent at Cambridge. He started talking about "Percy Shelley" in his Cambridge admission interview, and the tutor interviewing him interrupted sneeringly, "we don't say "PERCY Shelley, you know, just SHELLEY will suffice, as there is only one Shelley" and Ben said, "I was comparing something in his work to that of MARY Shelley."

I must read Wollstonecraft.

[metawidget]

I'm reading the somewhat guilty-pleasure latest instalment of George R. R. Martin's Fire and Ice series. I promise I'll read something more nutritious next...

[sabotabby]

You shouldn't feel guilty about that! Those books are also on my list because I enjoyed the show so much and I feel that if I keep reading, eventually the earth will open up and swallow Joffrey whole. (Don't tell me if that happens; I haven't started reading them yet.)

[quietprofanity.livejournal.com]

I just finished reading the sixth Anita Blake book, and if I didn't already own seven and eight and been told that nine is the last good book I would stop already. The annoyances to fun parts ratio has long gone the way of the former. But yeah, after [SPOILER/TRIGGER WARNING] reading the part where Anita fights a wereleopard attempting to rape her on a snuff film set I realized I wasn't having fun anymore.

Before that I read The Social Contract by Rousseau, which was valuable but dense, though, so I appreciated the mental break. Now I'm reading The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, and it seems interesting but I'm only 30 pages in.

[sabotabby]

The annoyance to fun ratio ruled out reading the second book for me. Does it still describe her appalling wardrobe in far too much detail?

...wereleopard. Hahaha. Heh.

[quietprofanity.livejournal.com]

Weirdly enough I'd consider the second book the best. I just really like her zombie concept. The vampires seem like ridiculous cartoons to me (I can NEVER take Jean-Claude seriously) and I find the werewolfs boring but I find the zombies neat. idk.

But ohhhh yes on the wardrobe. Book six should never be placed in a neckbeard's hand because he'll point to the section where Anita wears a bra, panties and a collection of interlocking belts and be like "But women have heroines wear ridiculous outfits too!" and they'll all have to admit he has a point, even though LKH also to explain how Jean Claude is wearing a ridiculous leather-pants, leather boots, Seinfeld puffy shirt combo for the EIGHTH FUCKING TIME and there still should be some equity. Maybe. The future is horrifying. Still, it's not as bad as Merry Gentry, which at one point stopped a dramatic conversation so Merry could tell us what two of her boyfriends were wearing, even though they always wear something that matches their My Little Pony-esque skin color.

Heh. I am full of feelings.

...wereleopard. Hahaha. Heh.

Three words: Fourth book. Wereswan.

[sabotabby]

HOOOOO SHIT NOW YOU ARE MAKING ME WANT TO READ IT.

I do not want to read these books because there are books about spaceships. That blow up. I do not need to read all of Anita Black just because there is a wereswan and that is the funniest thing ever and next time I read some long, boring, but good-for-me tract about political philosophy I will be wishing I was reading about wereswans.

[quietprofanity.livejournal.com]

Hee. I remember that book (The Lunatic Cafe) being not bad but not that great. You're not missing that much.

[monster-grrrl.livejournal.com]

Have you read "The Men Who Stare At Goats" by Jon Ronson? I enjoyed it and I could lend you my copy sometime.

I've been reading fluff - well, heavy fluff, it seems. My attention span isn't great these days.

[sabotabby]

I'd love to read it. I meant to watch the movie when it came out (I didn't realize until I looked up the author that it had been a book first) and somehow managed not to.

[curgoth]

Coyote Kings rocked my world. And, from what I've heard, Edmonton *was* interesting when Faust wrote that book. The scene isn't what it used to be (the scene was never what it used to be).

[sabotabby]

I just don't think of Edmonton being that multicultural! I mean, I've been there and it was more interesting than I imagined, but nearly everyone I saw was white.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

All beyond me. I haven't read Jon Ronson's books, though I used to read his newspaper stuff years ago. I am not sure I have heard of Alex Jones or remember who David Icke is! I am so out of touch, wah.

I have been reading novels by women around 1910 ish and some 1950s, Virago Modern Classics ones, which make my Englishness more pronounced as I think of teapots and scones and cream and jam all day. I have discovered Rebecca West. She was a feminist and socialist writer born in 1892 I think. I've just read two of her novels but she wrote political essays and literary criticism too, so I'm going to get those next. She is very intense so I've been in an emotional haze for a week.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

Ah just looked up David Icke - I remember now a friend of my mother's used to subscribe to a magazine that had a lot about the reptile Royal Family in it. Quite believable to look at them, no?

[sabotabby]

Yeah. It's really funny, because Ronson portrays him (and the other conspiracy nuts) very sympathetically, even while he obviously thinks they're all nuts. There's a whole section where he's trying to persuade Toronto anti-racists (some of whom I know personally, and I can totally see the scenario happening) that when Icke says "lizards," he in fact actually does mean lizards and not Jews.

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

it has been on my "hey, that sounds good, I should read this" list for far too long. ... What are you reading?

I have likewise finally started a book that I have been meaning to read forever - The Design of Everyday Things. Thus far, it looks good. Although, ironically, the two prefaces are redundant, both internally and externally. And twice in three consecutive lines he describes his principles as "powerful tools." Otherwise, it looks good thus far.

I have also recently finished - after meaning to read it forever - The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. The author can also be a bit repetitious and he over states his case in places, but I think his thesis is essentially sound. Like the book above, it starts out clunky but then picks up.

In TV news, you need to add Community to your list of sitcoms to see. I finally started watching it and zoomed through the first disc and a half in one sitting. seanmonster will verify it's awesomeness.

[sabotabby]

So way ahead of you on Community! It is the only comedy that makes me laugh. Favourite things about it currently include: both paintball episodes, the D&D episode, Inspector Spacetime, the chaos theory episode, the Claymation episode, and that bit in the last one where Jeff and Shirley become anime characters.

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

So I noticed from your subsequent post. I haven't finished the first season yet, so it is too soon to judge; but it seems like it might be of the same caliber as Arrested Development. seanmonster has seen both.

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

What are you reading?

(Channeling wouldprefernot2?)

Just started Catherynne M. Valente's Deathless.

Dipping into The Best American Short Stories of 2007 when I feel like it. (I finished 2011 faster, perhaps because it was an inter-library loan, but perhaps also because it was better.)

I've been reading Heinrich Böll's Der Engel schwieg on and off, but mostly off: By the time of day I am free to read, I am usually too tired for German prose.

I have a stack of literary magazines that I just spent way too much money on this morning, but will probably put those off in favor of library books.

And, thanks to your recommendation, I finally got around to checking Oscar Wao out of the library.

[sabotabby]

I'm completely channeling wouldprefernot2. He did, after all, figure out the best use for LJ—nerdy political types sharing book recommendations.

Oh, let me know if Deathless is any good. I remember it sounding interesting when it came out. I think I don't have enough brain for German prose, though.

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

Lucky for you, all of Böll's major work has been translated, including Der Engel schwieg (as The Silent Angel). It centers around a former German soldier at the end of World War II trying to make his way through the bombed out remains of Köln. I can't vouch for the quality of the translation. Böll, unlike most of his countrymen, preferred simple sentence structures and starkly descriptive prose.

[terry-terrible.livejournal.com]

I'm currently reading Royal Flash by George MacDonald Fraser