Year: 2015 (Page 1 of 2)

Listened to:

Big Mag­ic — Eliz­a­beth Gilbert

Good on cre­ativ­i­ty and she reads her own work nice­ly. Good enough that I start­ed lis­ten­ing to it again just a day or two ago.

* self-help worth your time *

Star­Dust — Neil Gaiman

YA nov­el about a mag­i­cal boy and a shoot­ing star girl. It’s Nice to see a boy as a magical-hero.

* the master *

Pump Six and Oth­er Sto­ries — Pao­lo Bacigalupi

The short sto­ries that came before The Windup Girl and The Water Knife. Some inter­est­ing insights into the world build­ing that went into both novels.

* good short fiction * 

Furi­ous­ly Hap­py — Jen­ny Lawson

Either you love The Blo­gess or you don’t. I think she’s hys­ter­i­cal. I can total­ly under­stand why some peo­ple don’t.

* only if you can laugh along with the men­tal­ly ill * 

Palimpsest — Cath­erynne Valente

The first CV that I ever read. Lush, chewy, sat­is­fy­ing prose. It’s not the eas­i­est sto­ry to fol­low but worth the trou­ble. And the way that she plays out geog­ra­phy as a sex­u­al­ly trans­mit­ted dis­ease is stunning.

* mag­i­cal real­is­m’s latter-day cousin *

Death­less — Cath­erynne Valente

Sev­er­al Russ­ian fairy­tales and leg­ends mashed togeth­er into the sto­ry of one girl/woman and her rela­tion­ship to the Tsar of Life. Tak­ing in the var­i­ous rev­o­lu­tions and wars of Rus­sia in the first half of the 20th cen­tu­ry. It ends on an odd­ly hope­ful note for all of the dis­as­ter that befalls the main char­ac­ters. And it is a real­ly disaster-full book. Much clean­er more stream­lined writ­ing than a lot of CV’s more recent work. (Not count­ing her chil­dren’s books.)

* Utter­ly Russian *

Read:

The Ante­lope Wife — Lousie Erdritch

More about the Native Amer­i­cans of the Dako­tas. This one has a more chal­leng­ing nar­ra­tive struc­ture than Love Med­i­cine. Worth­while read from an author that I will con­tin­ue to seek out.

* worth the effort to piece togeth­er the nar­ra­tive threads *

The Sig­na­ture of All Things — Eliz­a­beth Gilbert

Botany is good. Multi-generational epics are good. Strong, if flawed, women are good. Adding them all togeth­er is good. The his­to­ry of a fam­i­ly her­itage of plant hunters and loves gone ter­ri­bly wrong. Ser­vice­able writing.

* if you have the time it’s worth your while *

You Are Badass — Jen Sincero

Yuck, just yuck. Read it based on a trust­ed friends rec­om­men­da­tion — “It’s not like any self-improvement book you’ve ever read.” It’s exact­ly like every self-improvement book I’ve ever read except with more swear­ing. The Laws of Attrac­tion are bull­shit — even when you dress them up with words like ‘bull­shit.’

* why am I even link­ing to this? *

What Poets are Like: Up and Down with the Writ­ing Life — Gary Soto

Some poet­ry, some prose, a lot of reflec­tions on a long career.

* light read­ing for writers *

Speak Easy — Cath­erynne Valente.

Sad­ly, I gave up on this one. The sto­ry of a 1920’s apart­ment build­ing and it’s denizens. It’s sup­posed to be a mash up of the twelve danc­ing Princess­es and the courtship of Zel­da and F. Scott Fitzger­ald. The exag­ger­at­ed jazz-age lan­guage was too hard to make it through to the sto­ry. And the sto­ry did­n’t real­ly appear. It’s all par­ty and apart­ment. I might go back and fin­ish it lat­er. But for the moment I need clean­er prose in my head. I think I am falling out of love with an author crush. But Palimpsest will always be with me.

* thank heav­en I did­n’t buy the lim­it­ed edi­tion hardback *

Late, because well, it’s late.

Books Read:

Library of Souls: The Third Miss Pere­grine Book — Ran­som Riggs

Not as good as the ear­li­er books in the tril­o­gy. You can tell in places that he’s added mate­r­i­al (gen­er­al­ly sen­tence or two of descrip­tion of the appear­ance of a char­ac­ter — a walk-on part as it were) that is based on need­ing to add a pho­to­graph at that point. The pho­tographs con­ceit has worn itself out. Oth­er­wise it’s good enough and enough like the oth­er books to make it a quick read. There are bet­ter books. A lit­tle dis­ap­point­ing as a fin­ish for the trilogy.
* only if you need to find out how the tril­o­gy ends *

Man’s Search for Mean­ing — Frankl

Not all that. Beloved by many. Reducible to “for life to be worth hang­ing onto in the face of evil and sep­a­ra­tion it has to have mean­ing”. How you find that mean­ing is left as an exer­cise for the read­er. We already knew this. I was dis­ap­point­ed I expect­ed some­thing con­sid­er­ably more pro­found about the nature of mean­ing in life.
* if every­one else is read­ing it, oth­er­wise skip it *

Con­sid­er the Lob­ster and Oth­er Essays — David Fos­ter Wallace
The god of foot­notes (I love a good foot­note) pon­ders the ways of the world and the moral impli­ca­tions of boil­ing lob­sters. Also some bits of lit­er­ary review The one on the mak­ing of Gar­ner’s Mod­ern Amer­i­can Usage is a live­ly waf­fle on the ques­tion of descrip­tive vs pre­scrip­tive gram­mar and dic­tio­nar­ies. His medi­a­tion on Frank’s biog­ra­phy of Dostevsky and his work in rela­tion to the Russ­ian philoso­phies of the day is of inter­est only to the weirdos in the crowd who read too many Russ­ian Roman­tics in high school and stud­ied phi­los­o­phy as under­grads — oh wait that’s me.
* if you love a good foot­note or won­der about lobsters… *

The Vir­gin Sui­cides — Jef­fery Eugenides

Weird­ly nar­rat­ed by a voice that uses “we” and pro­vides the point of view of a group of teenage (bare­ly) boys. The sub­ject of their obses­sion a group of five sis­ters, all of whom com­mit sui­cide over the course of one year. That sounds awful. But it’s not. You’ll come to love the girls and to sym­pa­thize with the boys — who are drawn into a mys­tery that goes beyond the rea­sons for the sui­cides and plumbs the depths of what it means to be an adolescent.
* worth your time. can’t speak to the movie. *

Ana­grams — Lor­rie Moore

Bored by a third of the way through and dropped it. I pre­fer her short stories.
* Middle-aged aca­d­e­m­ic angst *

 

 

Cit­i­zen: An Amer­i­can Lyric — Clau­dia Rankin

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’m not too fond of oth­er peo­ple (a whole bunch of big name review­ers) telling me that I’m sup­posed to be impressed and react in a cer­tain way to some­one’s work. It leaves me cold. And I think that cold­ness affect­ed my per­cep­tion of this book. From the hood­ie on the cov­er to the vignettes of every­day racism as expe­ri­enced by the poet, the point of the col­lec­tion of poems is obvi­ous. The per­son­al­iza­tion of racism in the US makes an impres­sion. If you’re a ten­nis fan or know a ten­nis fan Rank­in’s per­spec­tive on Ser­e­na Williams’ expe­ri­ences is worth read­ing. There are oth­er pieces that spoke to me. But some parts — the video scripts in par­tic­u­lar — that are so mud­dled that I could­n’t keep what was going on straight.
* prob­a­bly required reading *

Non-Required Read­ing — 2014 — Daniel Han­dler ed.

How can a bunch high school stu­dents chose such an excel­lent col­lec­tion of writ­ing? Sto­ries, poems, non-fiction pieces and some that flit between all of these. There are a cou­ple of clunk­ers that show the youth of the edi­to­r­i­al board. But on the whole the qual­i­ty and depth of the cho­sen mate­r­i­al will restore your faith in the think­ing pow­er of today’s high school students.
* this series is always worth your time *

Invis­i­ble Cities — Ita­lo Calvino

Is this Venice? Or are these tru­ly cities of the imag­i­na­tion? — vari­a­tions on some eter­nal Pla­ton­ic City. The explor­er Mar­co Polo describes for the Emper­or Kubla Khan the cities that he has vis­it­ed in his trav­els. Each city is a small chap­ter per­haps even a prose poem. I love this book. I reread it every cou­ple of years to remind me how many vari­a­tions there on any one pat­tern. Also I love Calvi­no’s writing.
* How can I make you need to read this? *

Works and Days and Theogony — Hes­iod, trans Stane­ly Lombardo

Read excerpts from it in Fresh­man Human­i­ties. Revis­it­ing it as research for a screen play. There is more humor in it than I remem­ber. The trans­la­tion is good if a bit more casu­al in tone than I think of when I think of trans­lat­ed Greeks.
* real­ly, the Greeks could be funny *

 

Listened to:

Angel Mak­er — Nick Harkaway.
Romp­ing fun from the sec­ond world war to mod­ern Eng­land. With steam­punk bees, a fab­u­lous hero­ine, and a revolt­ing dog.

* Hark­away’s best *