Entries Tagged 'Books' ↓
June 1st, 2009 — Books
Books I've finished reading this month:
- Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer.
Rating: 
I now believe that it is not just Terry Pratchett; I seriously doubt that I will thoroughly enjoy anything in this vein in the near future. Somewhat odd, since it is similar to what I most often feel capable of writing; perhaps my subconscious always suspects that I would much rather be writing (post?)modern fantasy strewn with anachronisms than reading it.
- A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf.
Rating:
What issues I have with this book only arise because of developments in feminism and related areas that have come after it; it would be unfair to blame Woolf in any way for not being decades ahead of her time. Besides, I was instantly consumed by adoration of her natural, insightful, humorous manner, and she likes Jane Austen as much as I do (and for similar reasons). This is a lovely book.
- Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson.
Rating:
If A Room of One's Own is lovely, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is sublime. By turns funny and heartbreaking, and with odd deviations from the standard storytelling mode that only drew me in further, it is probably the best thing I have read so far this year.
- The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf.
Rating:
Strangely, this had some of the problems Woolf takes other authors to task for in A Room of One's Own, and I am not sure how satirical it was supposed to be. Apart from a thoroughly infuriating ending and lots of characters making sweeping generalisations on behalf of the author, I didn't mind it.
- Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen.
Rating:
This reads like it was practice for Pride and Prejudice, and judging by the end result such practice was quite necessary. I will have to read more Austen to find out if I actually like her, or if it's just P&P.
May 3rd, 2009 — Books
Books I've finished reading this (last) month:
- The Golden Fool, Robin Hobb.
Rating:
- Fool's Fate, Robin Hobb.
Rating:
- The New American Splendor Anthology, Harvey Pekar.
Rating:
The bits I really liked in this were bits I remembered fondly from the movie. A somewhat haphazard collection
- Sleeper Vol. 2: All False Moves, Ed Brubaker.
Rating:
Wow. Talk about trash.
- The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula le Guin.
Rating:
The first non-Earthsea book of le Guin's I've read, this was an odd combination of of original ideas about gender and the same old science-fiction gender-role narrow-mindedness. Also set in a pretty interesting world, though.
- The Salmon of Doubt, Douglas Adams.
Rating:
I'd avoided reading this for a long time because it seemed rude to read something the author hadn't been behind publishing, but there was actually some pretty enjoyable reading in there. And the Hitchhiker Fatigue that I've developed doesn't seem to affect Dirk Gently stories.
Then I got completely stuck on The Pickwick Papers, which I took forever to decide not to bother finishing, so didn't read nearly as much as I might have otherwise.
I have also realised that my star ratings have been skewed too far to the right, so I'm going back to rejig previous entries.
April 1st, 2009 — Books
Books I finished reading this month:
- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke.
Rating:
Lacking in substance for such a physically substantial book, but quite entertaining in its way. Would have been easier to digest as three volumes; pity the three "books" within don't work as stand-alone books.
- The Killing Joke, Alan Moore.
Rating:
- Maus II, Art Spiegelman.
Rating:
Mere words are insufficient to express how awesome this book is. The first instalment, which I read a couple of years ago, is just as amazing.
- The Complete Ballad of Halo Jones, Alan Moore.
Rating:
Oddly unengaging, but moderately entertaining.
- Everyday Zen, Charlotte Joko Beck.
Rating:
Despite her repeated disclaimers about not getting too "woo woo" (nb: this is probably not the actual phrase she used), Joko did lose me a couple of times because of the way she approached the concept of God (or "the Master", as she somewhat gratingly put it). Other than that, this was generally fantastic.
- Letters from the Asylum, John Knight.
Rating:
The thing about poetry is that I can recognise it as being probably objectively good without any sort of subjective enjoyment. I think I relate to poetry similarly to the way I relate to music, rather than prose: all that I want from it is an emotional response, which comes from recognising an expression of something that is true for me. Technical considerations have little or nothing to do with it. So I am sure this collection of poetry, which I struggled to relate to, is much better than I found it. (There were a couple of poems that I really liked, but the rest were fairly alien to me.)
- Fool's Errand, Robin Hobb.
Rating:
Reading this made me so happy! Robin Hobb was one of the authors that reintroduced me to "fantasy fiction that doesn't suck"™, but her Liveship Traders trilogy was so painful and unrewarding to read that I had feared the Farseer Trilogy was an anomaly. The first book in the Tawny Man series was a joy to read, however - possibly because the tone and setting are more to my liking, or possibly just because it wasn't all about horrible, tedious, self-centred characters. I'm not sure if what I saw as dramatic irony was supposed to be mysteries unknown to the reader for most of the book, but I am happy to forgive the occasional heavy-handedness for an original tale, well-told.
March 1st, 2009 — Books
Books I have finished reading this month:
- The Early Asimov Volume 3, Isaac Asimov.
Rating:
Science fiction of this vintage is a funny thing. Some of the stories seemed very trite or obvious, but would that be the case had I not had access to decades of Asimov-inspired work? Probably not. And there were a couple of stories near the end which, despite their age and the somewhat dated language, were excellent.
- The Nightmare Factory, various artists and writers, based on stories by Thomas Ligotti.
Rating:
- The Nightmare Factory Volume 2, ditto.
Rating:
I enjoy making impulse-borrowings from the library's comics and graphic novels section. Sadly, the pickings up here are much slimmer than at City Library in Melbourne, but some of the creepy stories in these books weren't half bad. At least one actually did inspire a dream, although I wouldn't call it a nightmare.
Also about halfway through a couple of other books, but focusing on anything long has been difficult this past month.
January 31st, 2009 — Books
Books I've finished reading this month:
- The Photographer's Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos, Michael Freeman.
Rating:
This was so excellent that I am going to write about it at greater length at some stage.
- The Subterraneans (and Pic), Jack Kerouac.
Rating:
I suspect that The Subterraneans displays Kerouac at his worst, and I don't (just) mean in an artistic sense; without the journeys and discoveries of On the Road or The Dharma Bums, all we can see is the deeply sexist, racist, irresponsible, selfish artist as he portrays himself (with unflinching honesty, to his credit). Pic is more tolerable but at the same time appalling in its ignorance; "this is what black folks are like", says the "other"-fetishising white guy.
- Tales from Outer Suburbia, Shaun Tan.
Rating:
Beautiful.
- The Book of Three, Lloyd Alexander.
Rating:
- The Black Cauldron, Lloyd Alexander.
Rating:
- The Castle of Lyr, Lloyd Alexander.
Rating:
- Taran Wanderer, Lloyd Alexander.
Rating:
- The High King, Lloyd Alexander.
Rating:
The Chronicles of Prydain were fun to read over a couple of days. I liked the setting's inherited Welshness, and would have enjoyed the real series more if I had read it at a younger age; I tend to be much more demanding of fantasy fiction nowadays and found the simplicity a little wearing, especially towards the end (with its not-surprising-at-all big reveal and ensuing consequences, sigh).
- Lost Boys, Orson Scott Card.
Rating:
This is not as good a book as a three-star rating suggests. I enjoyed reading it not because it is a good book, but because it is a fascinatingly bald-faced piece of Mormon propaganda that betrays much more of Orson Scott Card's terrible values than any of the Ender series I have read so far. The whodunnit/ghost story wrapped around the outside simply gives the novel an excuse to exist; antagonists and plot points are set up with great care and little sophistication, and the real value of the book lies in immersing oneself in such an alien, intolerant set of values, presented with all the goodwill in the world.
What I learned from reading this book: the place of a woman is to make babies (LOTS of babies) and take care of the home, while also serving the community as much as is asked of her by people in the church who are more important; people who play Dungeons and Dragons are socially retarded savants who probably like to molest children; mentally ill people cannot function as normal members of society — HOWEVER, psychiatrists are malignant, religion-hating witch-doctors who think they know everything and basically aren't real doctors at all; personal concerns are unimportant and must always be secondary to the demands needs of the church hierarchy; women are weak and cry about things while men are strong and bear their burdens nobly, perhaps becoming angry sometimes; it is okay to behave in an abhorrent manner if you are righteous. Oh, and good always triumphs over evil.
- The Reality Dysfunction, Peter F. Hamilton.
Rating:
Would have rated higher if it weren't for the woeful clumsiness of the writing. Comma splices everywhere, semicolons where there should be commas, impenetrable forests of adjectives with nary a comma in sight, bizarre overuse of the verb "to boil" in various forms, and such poor expression generally that I fervently hope Hamilton has since found a better editor. However, the story was much better than the first couple of pages indicated, even if not much that happened at the end of the book rang true for me. A fairly fascinating universe and an interesting enough story to overcome the significant handicap of an author who does not write especially well, but I couldn't face reading the next in the series right away. (Sorry, Luke.)
- Night Watch, Sergei Lukyanenko.
Rating:
Vampires and wizards and magical goings-on in post-Soviet Russia. Unlike unread-but-surely-abominable vampire stories like Twilight or anything by Anne Rice, Night Watch is fun to read, perhaps because it is not actually a vampire story (it just has vampires in it). The writing is smooth and unobtrusive (as is the translation, incidentally), a real relief after reading Orson Scott Card and Peter F. Hamilton, and the world Lukyanenko has built offers an interesting blend of updated mythology (all that stuff about garlic and silver was encouraged by the bad guys, because it doesn't actually work) and a supernatural Cold War (a treaty binds good guys and bad guys alike, and much quibbling and rule-bending ensues), with all of the drinking and train stations and name-and-patronymic addresses that I've come to expect from everything written by Russians.
- Day Watch, Sergei Lukyanenko.
Rating:
Unfortunately not up to the standard set by Night Watch, Day Watch is still not a bad read. Perhaps because there is not much mileage to be had from introducing the universe after so much of that was done so effectively in Night Watch, or perhaps because it focuses on the "bad guys" who make up the Day Watch, Day Watch seems to meander a little despite the high stakes and soul-searching it contains. I did like the journey of the mysterious Vitaly, and overall Day Watch is not bad at all - just not as good as Night Watch.
- The Hand That Signed The Paper, Helen Demidenko.
Rating:
I have only the vaguest of memories of the Helen Demidenko/Darville controversy that raged years ago, mainly because I was in primary school at the time and thus didn't have my finger on the pulse of the literary world. As a result, I came to The Hand That Signed The Paper without too many preconceived ideas. I was struck by the way it humanised people on the "wrong" side in eastern Europe during World War II; the anti-Semitism of many (most) of the characters was hard to stomach, but so was the unavoidable question raised: can anybody really know that they would do the "right" thing, faced with starvation and torture and the absence of hope? It's easy to sit on a moral high horse when you've been comfortable all your life. That being said, the overarching theme of the book seemed to be that people responsible for atrocities during wartime should not be prosecuted for war crimes, which I can't agree with, and I can't quite believe that none of the characters' hatred originated in the hatred of the author. Uncomfortable reading, and absolutely worth my while.
At the start of this year I thought I would aim to read one book each week. I suppose I've built up quite a buffer against the inevitable burst of apathy that will come.
