Rob
Actually started this a couple days ago, but just finished it. My fourth Vonnegut, after Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions. Mother Night is a fictional memoir of a sort-of Nazi propagandist. Definitely an interesting read; a far cry from Cat's Cradle and only very occasionally tongue-in-cheek, which I suppose suits a subject like this one. Liked it more than S5 and Breakfast, not as much as Cat's Cradle.
Incredible in all the ways that lesser books promise and to which they never live up.
I would never have picked this up of my own accord. I vaguely recall reading The Bean Trees, also by Kingsolver in freshman English in high school, and I recall virtually nothing else about it and until now had not returned to the author. I asked on Goodreads for a recommendation and this is one of the ones I received. It turns out to have been a tremendous recommendation that occupies a rare five-star spot on my ratings list.
Written long after its setting, this is a fictional account of a missionary family in the Eisenhower era, on mission in a remote village in the Congo. The center of the family is preacher Nathan Price, who brings with him a take-no-prisoners brand of religion to a village that has little use for it. But the story is told from five perspectives, and Nathan is not among them – the voices are those of his wife, Orleanna, and his four daughters, Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May. Each has a distinct voice that reads very differently from the others. The book covers their time in the village, for which the family is woefully unprepared, and eventually traces the aftermath for each member of the family. Along the way the local politics of the time are covered from an inside perspective.
It's just under 600 pages, and every one of them is worth it. It took me a while to get through, but it was very much worth doing. I asked for a “book for consequence” with good prose and it delivered in spades. The writing floored me from the first pages. Can't recommend this one enough.
Hard to know how to classify this one. A very Murakami story about growing up, love and loss. I enjoyed it, I will say that. It suffers a bit, through no fault of its own, from being translated out of its original language, and sometimes feels unnatural as a result, especially in its dialogue. For all that, very much worth reading,
Harkaway's sophomore effort, a follow-up to The Gone-Away World. It is possessed of similar literary flair, but was rather slower to get started; it picks up dramatically and is very much worth the wait. I didn't love it the way I loved The Gone-Away World, which would have been quite the feat, but I loved it all the same. An excellent effort by Harkaway.
Sometimes I think modern works like this, which to me are about privacy, civil liberties, corruption, freedom, and so forth are unimportant, because everyone knows about those things already. Other times I think they are they most important works of all, because so many people have clearly forgotten about all of those things, and so it's good to have someone raise them publicly.
As you've probably gathered, I'm a fan of this one. A note: Alan Moore hates the film adaptation. He hates adaptations of all of his works, so this is unsurprising. Personally I think the film does a fine job of capturing most of what the comic has to offer. It's missing a bit, so if you enjoyed the film and want to dig a little deeper, go ahead and pick up a copy. I rarely read graphic novels, for several reasons, not least of which is that the writing is so often garbage. Moore is one of the few who transcends the rest of the genre, and I think V For Vendetta is worth reading for that as well as for its treatment of the ideas it explores.
This book was written by a nice person with a good ear for humor. Unfortunately, it is basically about nothing. It is an erratic collection of things that Mindy Kaling decided were good conversation topics, which is an excellent format for a conversation between friends, but which unfortunately is not well-suited to a book.
I really enjoyed this book, but I can only recommend it to the fellow nerds of today for whom it was written. It contains references to all kinds of modern geek culture, ranging from Galaga to Cory Doctorow to Cap'n Crunch (not the cereal), and feels like the author is “one of us,” and not in a trying-too-hard way. If you can identify all three of the things I listed, give this one a good look.
Short version: a lot of fun, a noir classic for a reason.
Longer version: I picked up the 1946 Bogart film adaptation some time back when I was on a Bogart-and-noir kick. I don't remember it very well; it didn't seem especially coherent, and mostly I remember thinking The Maltese Falcon was better. I left it on the shelf and haven't watched it since.
That's really a shame, because the book is excellent. I started reading it when A Dance With Dragons didn't grab me right off and I decided to detour to something else until i was more in the mood for it, and this was the book of the month for the Something Awful Book Club. My understanding is that some of the seedier details were left out of the film for reasons of decency, and without them the movie doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I'll rewatch the film soon and see if that's true. Hopefully it will be more enjoyable now that I know what's going on.
I'm always a little surprised when I see older works with snappy dialogue, even though that makes no sense. Overcoming that illogical mental hurdle was what first got me into Bogart. The book has it too, and some admittedly overwrought writing, but that's sort of a hallmark of the genre, I think. The prose will probably not win awards. But it is very fun nonetheless.
This one is a quick read, weighing in at about 234 pages. It's worth a look, especially if you can imagine all of Marlowe's lines in Bogart's voice.
Takes a while to get going, ends up quite good. I don't read a lot of harder sci-fi; it was a little hard to get past some of the made-up terminology since it's never really explained, but you learn to roll with it. Ended up enjoying it, but I did consider abandoning it once or twice. By the end there is some very cool stuff going on, plotwise.