shiny things in messy little piles

Year: 2015 (Page 2 of 2)

The Books of July

Dur­ing July I did­n’t get as much reading/listening done as I often do. Sum­mer takes up a lot of read­ing time.

Listened to:

The Water Knife — Pao­lo Baci­galupi (Nar­ra­tion by Almarie Guer­ra — who’s just fine to lis­ten to.)

A vio­lent and thrilling view of a near future filled with the con­flicts of the New West- when water is run­ning out and the drought just won’t lift. Sound famil­iar? Three char­ac­ter’s sto­ry arcs meet, cross, and recross. Angel the water knife: an enforcer employed by Las Vegas’ water mogul. Charged with obtain­ing (fre­quent­ly by duress) and pro­tect­ing the water rights that feed the Las Vegas fun machine and the arcolo­gies — near­ly self-sustaining liv­ing envi­ron­ments filled with water fea­tures and the rich who can afford to live there. Marie: a refuge from the dust bowl that is now Texas. One of the new Okies doing what ever she can to get by. Lucy Mon­roe: a jour­nal­ist who has come to iden­ti­fy, per­haps too close­ly, with the res­i­dents of the now water starved Phoenix. It’s fic­tion but not so far-fetched when you con­sid­er the amount of cor­rup­tion and vio­lence that has accom­pa­nied the fight for water rights in the West in the past 150 years. It’s also got some pret­ty graph­ic vio­lence and some almost tol­er­a­ble sex scenes.

* Adults only. * 

The Things they Car­ried — Tim O’Brien (narr. — Bryan Cranston aka Wal­ter White or whatever- I’ve nev­er seen the show, but the voice is pre­fect for OBrien’s stories.)

The pre­tense that these short sto­ries are true sto­ries con­tin­ues all the way through the book, right down to its ded­i­ca­tion to one of the char­ac­ters — Rat Kiley. These are sto­ries of Viet­nam from the reac­tion of a kid get­ting his draft notice, through expe­ri­ences “in coun­try,” to the sto­ries of those same sol­diers at home again and liv­ing in a nation that does­n’t know what to do with them.
It’s an inter­est­ing med­i­ta­tion on the nature of fic­tion when a sto­ry teller uses it to tell more truth than can pos­si­bly be told in straight non-fiction. There are strong par­al­lels to Phil Klay’s Rede­ploy­ment which uses a sim­i­lar tech­nique to exam­ine the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. O’Brien is IMO a bet­ter writer. As well, the nation­al cir­cum­stances in which the sol­diers were deployed and returned from deploy­ment are dif­fer­ent. And yet the same.

* An eas­i­er lis­ten than I thought it would be. * 

The Book Thief — Mar­cus Suzak (aban­doned)

A sto­ry of a girl in WWII Ger­many and books. Told from the point of view of Death — which I should have liked and maybe would have liked if I had read the book. But lis­ten­ing to Allan Cor­duner try to do the voic­es of chil­dren just did­n’t work for me.

* good read­ing book, bad audio book * 

Neal Stephen­son’s Sev­en­Eves (Great nar­ra­tors. For the first two-thirds of the book Mary Robi­nette Know­el — a writer I admire whose work I can­not stand to read. It hap­pens. For the last third Will Damron.)

Enjoyed the hell out of it. The moon breaks up and life on earth will end in two years. A race to get some frag­ment of the human race into space where they can sit out the destruc­tion of earth (some 5000 years worth of it) and keep the species going. It has space ships and robots and nice geeky peo­ple and a cou­ple of not so nice peo­ple. And a not too sur­pris­ing end­ing — but I loved get­ting there.
There have been com­plaints in var­i­ous cir­cles that the Stephen­son’s geek­ery is too much. That all those descrip­tions and bits of back­ground and occa­sion­al info-dumps make the sto­ry too slow. I don’t find that to be the case. Espe­cial­ly in the audio-book ver­sion. There’s a nice leisure­ly pace to be sure, but I did­n’t find my inter­est flag­ging. On the con­trary I’m spent entire­ly too much time plugged into my headphones.

* saga length, epic scale * 

Read:

(I’m read­ing less than I’m lis­ten­ing late­ly. One of the haz­ards of sum­mer — too much else to do while it’s day­light and too lit­tle dark left at the end of the day to get much read­ing done.)

The Book of Spec­u­la­tion — Eri­ka Swyler

If you like mer­maids, cir­cus­es, curs­es, mys­te­ri­ous books, librar­i­ans, and curi­ous fam­i­ly sagas then you should read The Book of Spec­u­la­tion. I can’t explain the title there isn’t real­ly any­thing spec­u­la­tive about the book. But the sto­ry and char­ac­ters are appeal­ing in a sum­mer read kind of way. And it’s sum­mer so that’s just about right. Not too long a book. Maybe a week’s worth of bed­time reading.

* There are libraries and books! * 

The Unnec­es­sary Woman — Rabih Alameddine

It’s easy to become unnec­es­sary in a world in which fam­i­ly is every­thing and old women only exist as grand­moth­ers. Aaliya lives in Beruit. She is 72 years old, unmar­ried (divorced actu­al­ly) has no chil­dren and lit­tle inter­est in her remain­ing fam­i­ly — a step moth­er and a hand­ful of boor­ish half broth­ers. But she loves books, and lit­er­a­ture, and phi­los­o­phy. Her pas­time is trans­lat­ing books that she loves into Ara­bic using a round-about method. All of the books she trans­lates are orig­i­nal­ly in lan­guages that she does­n’t speak. (She’s fond of the Rus­sians.) To trans­late them into Ara­bic she uses sev­er­al ver­sions of the books in the two oth­er lan­guages that she does speak, Eng­lish and French. What sort of trans­la­tion this cre­ates is a bar­rel of tex­tu­al mon­keys that is nev­er direct­ly address­es but the ques­tion of how much of the real you can access through rep­re­sen­ta­tions lives some­where at the core of the book. Nom­i­nal­ly it is about the every­day and extra­or­di­nary crises that attend being female, old, and unusu­al in a strong­ly patri­ar­chal society.

The voice of Aaliya is warm, wit­ty, and occa­sion­al­ly baf­fled by the incon­sis­ten­cies of the world. The dif­fer­ence between world as it should log­i­cal­ly be and as it illog­i­cal­ly is.

* You’ll enjoy Aaliya’s company. * 

I Believe (after Ron Shelton)

I believe in the image, the line, the stan­za, the iambic foot, the per­fect word. Asso­nance, slant rhymes, that the for­mal forms still have a place in mod­ern poet­ry. I believe that Shake­speare wrote the plays. I believe in a con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment out­law­ing poet­ry about poet­ry and the use of the word “suf­fuse.” I believe in revi­sion, inter­lin­ear trans­la­tions, pub­lish­ing in print — not on-line, and I believe in long, slow, deep, wet poems that last three days. 

Books of June

A writer’s notes about books. 

Here are the books I read and lis­tened to in June.

Read:

A Brief His­to­ry of Sev­en Killings — Mar­lon James

In which there are a damned sight more than sev­en killings. Some of the nar­ra­tive is true in a broad sense. The pol­i­tics of Jamaica, the US efforts to direct Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean activ­i­ties, the CIA fetish of Cuba, and the involve­ment of the Columbian car­tels in every­thing — all most­ly true. But beyond that? It’s pret­ty much up in the air, I can’t tell you what’s true and what’s fic­tion. The attempt­ed assig­na­tion of a char­ac­ter known as The Singer (a thin­ly dis­guised Bob Mar­ley) anchors the book. All the oth­er actions and actors spin into and out of that one act. 

It’s a tough read because of the wild num­ber of POV char­ac­ters that you have to track (each chap­ter is help­ful­ly labeled) and the heavy use of patois. You get used to the patois and you spend a cer­tain amount of time flip­ping back to see where you left that cur­rent POV char­ac­ter. It took a lot longer to read than most things and it’s real­ly long to start with. Still, I found the whole thing worth the trou­ble for the trip to times and places that are utter­ly unknown to me and the intro­duc­tion to Mar­lon James. I have his The Book of Night Women in the To Read pile. 

The Book of Phoenix — Nne­di Okorafor

Pre­quel to her well-known Who Fears Death which I liked a good deal. The term spec­i­Men jarred me every damned time I came across it. It’s a haz­ard, try­ing to fig­ure out names for future things. Good, read­able early-disaster sci-fi. Oko­rafor’s writ­ing is reli­able and occa­sion­al­ly spe­cial. A sto­ry of gen-tech gone wrong — which is noth­ing new. A giant tree in the mid­dle of NYC — new. Two things that looks like angels but aren’t — only sort of new. A phoenix-human hybrid would kind of look like an angel, no? Oh, and those spi­der things from the oth­er book (Who Fears Death) and that alien seed/nut thing. That’s nev­er real­ly explained. Set up for anoth­er book?

Lis­tened to:

Bossy Pants — Tina Fey
Yes, Please — Amy Pohler

Go lis­ten to Bossy Pants. Not read it, lis­ten to it. Real­ly, it’s so much bet­ter if you lis­ten to it. Tina Fey play­ing Tina Fey. It’s all here. Sec­ond City, SNL, 30 Rock, the Sarah Palin sketch­es, and the real­i­ty of being female over 40 in com­e­dy. She might be my new idol. Amy Pohler was (and still is on occa­sion) Tina Fey’s part­ner in crime. Amy’s book is in some ways fun­nier. It’s got a lot more gags. Fey’s book is about being fun­ny. Pohler’s book is fun­ny. You know what I mean?

I Shall Wear Mid­night — Ter­ry Pratchett 

The last of the four Tiffany Aching sto­ries pub­lished while Ter­ry Pratch­ett was alive. (There is one more com­ing in August.) I picked it to lis­ten to on my dai­ly walk to remind myself where the sto­ry had end­ed and because I remem­ber lik­ing it a lot. Maybe my favorite of the series? Until I remem­bered Win­ter­smith which has the bet­ter plot, and per­haps the most human Tiffany of the bunch. It cer­tain­ly has the best of the oth­er witch­es in it. Okay — I should have lis­tened to Win­ter­smith

Ink­heart — Cor­nelia Funke 

Why did­n’t I like this? Pre­co­cious 12 year-old. Okay, that’s enough for me to not like some­thing as much as I might. And yes, I under­stand that I am about to admit to lik­ing a book about a young boy. Go read the com­ments on Ocean, the part that I don’t like is when we end up inside the head of the boy with­out the man. 

The rest is okay. A lit­tle juve­nile — but hey, mid­dle grade book. One of those door-stopper books that mid­dle graders and tweens like. Think Har­ry Pot­ter but not so good for adults because the adults are one-dimensional. If you have an avid young read­er of your own hang­ing around some­where they just might love it. 

Ocean at the End of the Lane — Neil Gaiman 

Thor­ough­ly reviewed a dozen times in a dozen places. Either you like Gaiman’s lush brand of fan­ta­sy prose or you don’t. If you do, you won’t be dis­ap­point­ed. Either you like grown up sto­ries that real­ly con­cern chil­dren and vv or you don’t. If you don’t, I sug­gest Nev­er­land instead. 

Some­times the blend­ed adult/boy voice of the main char­ac­ter leans a lit­tle too far to the boy. Yes, it’s a sto­ry about a boy, but the sto­ry is the expla­na­tion of the man and it’s the man’s reac­tion to it that we’re watch­ing in the meta-view. SO the times when the nar­ra­tor’s voice total­ly aban­dons his adult per­sona I feel a lit­tle cheated. 

I start­ed and aban­doned The Girl with All Gifts — M.R. Carey. 

The set up and the two main char­ac­ters in the first hand­ful of chap­ters were inter­est­ing. But then it turned into a zom­bie infec­tion sto­ry. There’s just not much you can do with a zom­bie sto­ry that’s going to keep me inter­est­ed once you’ve hit me with the sci­en­tist, the griz­zled old mil­i­tary guy, the green mil­i­tary kid, and an ide­al­is­tic young woman, in an escape vehi­cle bro­ken down in the mid­dle of nowhere and oh, by the way, there’s a zom­bie with them. Nope, not even a child zom­bie that seems to have retained all her human fac­ul­ties. I stopped lis­ten­ing to it at the end of my walk one day and the next day sim­ply did­n’t care what hap­pened to the char­ac­ters, so I picked up some­thing else.

In non-fiction I’ve picked up the sec­ond and third Food52 cook­books. Rec­om­mend the 2nd Vol­ume. Not so enam­ored of the Genius Recipes, too many over com­pli­cat­ed preparations.

As well as iMovie: The Miss­ing Man­u­al. I urge you not to go there.

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