Marcus
In a world where translucency is valued and opaqueness is a social sin, a man finds himself convicted of a crime he didn't commit, but can't plead innocent to. In Invitation to a Beheading we get to spend some time with him as he awaits his impending decapitation.
I don't think anyone else could have pulled this off, but Nabokov brilliantly, as usual, blurs the lines between fiction and science fiction and delivers a great story.
This book is awful. The language is unbelievably repetitive and the narrative style is as schizophrenic as the main character. Dostoyevsky calls the protagonist “our hero” 191 times and if that wasn't enough, just about every time he refers to him he also feels it necessary to say “the good Golyadkin, not the bad Golyadkin” or “the old Golyadkin and not the new Golyadkin.” It's so mind numbingly tedious that I could hardly get past it to take in the story.
I've always had a hard time with books that have no sympathetic characters, and this one definitely falls into that category. There's not a single character I could, or wanted to, identify with. It may be that you can write a story from the perspective of a schizophrenic and still have it turn out good, but Dostoyevsky certainly failed to do it here. It is painful for me to trash the book since Dostoyevsky is one of my all-time favorites, but the fact is, this book without such a famous author, would have have long been forgotten.
Sometimes you can take a simple idea and write a whole book about it and it have the book be incredibly successful. The War of Art does this. The idea is that resistance is the enemy of creativity and beating it is the way to become creatively productive.
The topic is explored from a number of angles and by the time you finish it (which will be quick, it's a short book) you should be motivated enough to get off the couch and write, paint, code or do whatever is art for you.
It's worth a read and I'm rating it highly because even though the topic is simple and the book is short, reading it is a low price to pay if it's enough to bump you out of a rut and up to the next level of creativity.
This plot driven book fell pretty flat with me. The writing wasn't bad, and there were some tense moments, but it felt like a bunch of paper dolls (ironic since some are based on real people) running around with the occasional deus ex machina moment to get them out of a fix. So, I wasn't a fan of the book, but It'd probably make a good movie.
It's hard to write good fiction when you have an agenda that is so close to the surface. It seems usually either the fiction suffers or the philosophy suffers. Breakfast With Buddha does a pretty good job though. The story is plausible and engaging and the ideas from Eastern Philosophy are nicely woven in.
It's impressive that someone had the cojones to go over to Somalia and interview these guys, and it was nice learning some about the geo-political system of the “country,” in the end though, it felt like the book could have been condensed to an article without losing too much. It turns out that the Somali pirates really aren't that interesting when it comes down to it. They hijack ships and use drugs a lot. I'm bailing on this one after about 1/4 of the book read and skimming bits of the rest.
Once I started reading I couldn't turn away. The story of Scientology has it all–good and evil, drugs and violence and a cast of characters and organizations that put any dystopian fiction to shame. If it wasn't so awful that real people get wrapped up in this, it'd make a great movie or tv series.
Scientology's “auditing” process is flat out scary. It makes such a strong appeal to the libido dominandi, the lust for power, that people seem willing to overlook all other aspects of the doctrines and history of the religion. You are promised that if you learn, and of course pay for, enough tech you will eventually become a powerful enough Thetan to do anything. Levitate stuff, control people, whatever.
Fine. We all know that no amount of auditing is going to get you lifting plates out of the dishwasher without getting off the couch, but apparently (and most dangerously) auditing has enough of a kernel of truth to it to convince people to keep going with it.
Eventually you become so enmeshed that it is difficult to leave the ‘church' without losing friends, the significant financial investment you've made and all ties a culture that has changed almost every aspect of your lifestyle, your vocabulary not being the least of it.
I doubt that Scientology is a net loss for everyone that gets involved, but it seems a lot like cocaine. There are apparently a few people that use it and never get addicted, they just enjoy the highs, but it's not something you'd ever give your kids to see if they're one of those people.
A liberal, by Hedges' reckoning, is part classical liberalism, which insists on basic human rights such as freedom speech and civil rights, combined with many of the social and economic ideas of Marxist socialism. The free market, capitalism and corporations are, by contrast, the source of most evil, and in this utopian vision, they would not exist.
By that definition, it's easy to take most of todays politicians who claim to be liberals to the cleaners for neglecting, or outright defiling, their purported values. Hedges does not hesitate to do so. The Death of the Liberal Class is about how almost every item on the liberal agenda is flawed. From healthcare reform to foreign relations, especially the wars we're in, to welfare to civil rights to public radio and television. None of it goes far enough. He advocates a peaceful revolution of civil disobedience that would overturn all corporatism, put the power back in the hands of the workers through unions and wealth redistribution and use government funding for socially conscious programs that didn't only pay lip service to equality, but that actually implement it. His heroes are Malcolm X (over MLK Jr.), Ralph Nader (though he thinks he's lost much of his former prowess in recent years), Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore (how he can intellectually justify that, I don't know). He excoriates Obama, Gore and every other so-called liberal politician almost without exception.
His idealism is appealing. He is passionate and seems to be intellectually honest (to a point) and a compassionate person. He has witnessed war first hand and he hates it. The chapters on the horrors of war are the strongest in the book. His arguments are vehement and convincing. He brings home the awfulness with incredible clarity.
His critiques of liberals should embarrass anyone who voted for or supports Obama. He convincingly shows how Obama gives lip service to idealism but is just as much in the pockets of corporations as Bush was.
One of the closing chapters on the dreary future we face due to climate change and the coming economic collapse caused by our fiat currency is dark and harrowing and is an effective call to action for anyone who agrees with his premises. The writing throughout the book flows so smoothly from the circumstantial to the philosophical that the pages fly by.
On the other hand, the chapter on the Internet should have been left out of the book. Almost every sentence has some technical error or misrepresentation.
I think that Hedges, as so many other idealists, fails at convincingly meshing his ideology with human nature. At one point in the book he briefly gives lip service the human nature, but takes for granted that the reader agrees that socialism is a more natural state than capitalism. He never explains how a society with no competition is to work economically or how such a strong human instinct will be suppressed to bring about his idea of utopia. It feels like he consciously decides to stop short of a practical analysis of the implications of his ideas once carried beyond the initial revolution. As far as I can tell, he envisions a world of small, semi-isolated tribes sustaining themselves on primitive, low-impact technology and living in harmony with each other. This is never, of course, stated explicitly but for everything he advocates to have any semblance of possibility of working together I can't imagine any other way for the world to be structured.
The Death of the Liberal Class is worth reading because the historical analysis and critiques of our current political situation are novel and valid, and I'm excited to read his other books, but unless he is better coupling his ideals with the reality of human nature, I don't find his brand of idealism any more convincing than anarcho-capitalism or communism.
As long as this book was, I feel like it could have easily gone on another couple hundred pages. Most of what's in the beginning of the book we know from other bios and the end, everything from about the first iPod on, seems to go by in a blur. There isn't a lot of technical detail and the way the design process is explained seems superficial at times.
Criticisms aside though, the book gives a lot of insight into who Jobs was. While I'm still in awe of what he accomplished in his life, it's somewhat depressing to think that it takes this kind of personality to do what he did. Maybe a company like Apple could be the product of someone more humane and less flawed in his relationships, but as far as I know, it hasn't happened yet.
Jobs had his moments of compassion but it seems like they were far and few between. He'll be remembered more for what he created, the great, and often controversial, leaps forward in technology that he led and most importantly, for pushing people to do more than they ever thought they could.
I read American Pastoral about 3 months ago and haven't stopped thinking about it since. It's not just that the characters are so real and so tragic and the story so gripping, but it's the way the story is told. Everything comes across so informally. The narrator can hardly believe what has happened to his life. It feels like he's always skirting around looking his situation in the face. Something about that style of storytelling has made the entire novel stick with me, I'll catch myself looking at life sideways and bam. There's Roth again waving his American Pastoral in my face.
Four stars is probably generous, but since so much of the book is set in and around Seattle, I'll round up.
Reamde moves faster than other Stephenson books, but lacks his characteristic depth. The plot is fun and fast, the characters are somewhat flat, but if you're just looking for entertainment, you could do a lot worse.
Imagine being a fly on the wall at a dinner party hosted by Vladimir Nabokov (RIP) with Cormac McCarthy and Eminem as guests. Three guys who have faced their demons and lived to share them with the world. I don't know what they'd eat, but I bet their post meal conversation would be enough to shrivel your little tiny black fly wings.
It's been argued that the purpose of literature isn't to make you a better person, but that it is to help you understand yourself. If that's the case, it puts an interesting perspective on books like this that expose the darkest side of humanity. Child of God is a story that was written by a guy who is just as human as I am, and who was brave (if bravery is what you'd call it) enough to not run from his most depraved thoughts, and instead do what to me seems incredibly counterintuitive, and put them on paper for the world to see.
I feel like McCarthy has, in a sense, allowed me to dip into myself and understand, or possibly remember, that buried deep down in me there are two sides, one good and another that is in no abstract way, bad. And that as a result of a million things, conscious choice being the least of them, I have lived up to this point avoiding for the most part the evil side. I'm not patting myself on the back. The more I think about it, and when I read books like Child of God, the more certain I feel that a large part of who I am, who we are, is determined long before we draw our first breath.
The implications of that statement are as big or as small as you want to make them. I am still not sure what it means, and I'm not trying to take any political or sociological or any other -ical stand. That's simply the way things are. I don't think realizing that necessarily changes the way I will live my life and it probably doesn't mean I am any better or worse off than I was before I read this, except that I have benefited by getting a glimpse of humanity that I would not have dared to dig up for myself.
So, I'll leave writing about subjects like mass murder, incest, rape and pedophilia to our dinner party guests and try not to judge them too harshly for dwelling on them, and at the same time, try not to judge myself too harshly for reading them, and, though I don't like saying it, enjoying it.
What do you have when you have a male protagonist who is rarely competitive, never aggressive, not jealous of another man being with the women he loves and is prone to flights of fancy about stage decorations? You have Jim. The only straight guy in the world who is completely passive about women, is satisfied with the occasional kiss or heart to heart talk by the river and never wants anything more.
The descriptions of the West were nice, simple and poetic, but not much happens in the book. None of the main characters ever really change... I don't know. I think if this book wasn't so hyped up I'd have been able to enjoy it more as a simple, beautiful book about normal people in the expanding West, but I expected a lot more and didn't feel like it ever really got great.
I expected the primary purpose of this book to be to point out patterns and obscure references and clarify the more difficult passages in Ulysses. To some degree, it does, but it's actually closer to Cliff's Notes in that the primary purpose seems to be to summarize the book. For some chapters of Ulysses I found that to be pretty useful, for others, unnecessary.
Quotable.
“”Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.”
“Memory is hunger.”
“To have come on all this new world of writing [...] was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you travelled too [...] there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems [...] in the daytime, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. At first there were the Russians; then there were all the others. But for a long time there were the Russians.”
and,
“People who interfered in your life always did it for your own good and I figured it out finally that what they wanted was for you to conform completely and never differ from some accepted surface standard and then dissipate the way traveling salesmen would at a convention in every stupid and boring way there was. They knew nothing of our pleasures nor how much fun it was to be damned to ourselves and never would know nor could know. Our pleasures, which were those of being in love, were as simple and still as mysterious and complicated as a simple mathematical formula that can mean all happiness or can mean the end of the world.
That is the sort of happiness you should not tinker with but nearly everyone you knew tried to adjust it.”
I think I've read enough now to realize that I prefer my books with the philosophy laid bare. I like the proverbs of Sancho Panza, the long speeches of Dmitri and Ivan in The Brothers Karamzov, the spectral prophecies of the Judge in Blood Meridian and even the blunt, thinly masked idealism of Ayn Rand.
East of Eden is perfect in that sense. Steinbeck makes no attempt to mask the things that are true and important to him through hidden symbolism or difficult characters. Sometimes that can make for a naive novel, but East of Eden is not that. It's not that there is no metaphor in the book. You could probably write dissertations on just that, and I'm sure people have, but if you were to ignore it all and decide to live the rest of your life relying solely on the wisdom found in Eden's earthy dialog, I imagine you'd do alright.
Even so, philosophy is just a fraction of what makes East of Eden great. Apart from that, it is a beautifully written book with enough depth that I'm already looking forward to reading again.
Why couldn't Stegner be decent and write a book with an antagonist toward whom I could detachedly direct my righteous indignation? Instead, he wrote the Big Rock Candy Mountain with Bo, who is not one of Cormac McCarthy's depraved evil doers. Jarringly, and despite what you might believe otherwise, Bo is me, only in different circumstances. When Bo lashes out at his children or disappoints his wife or goes after another pipe dream that will have him raking in the dollars, it is me. How could he be anyone else? His emotions are mine, only amplified. His intentions, his thoughts and his dreams are also mine and yet when I look at him, at myself, it is with loathing. I want to look away, to deny that he exists and that anyone could possibly write my story, could put me in a different time, (though in the same place, much of the novel is set in Seattle) and reveal my actions so rawly to anyone who cares to read them. It is embarrassing and it hurt to turn the pages, but I couldn't stop. I had to know what I would do next. Surely I would redeem myself? Surely my heart-of-gold would be enough to save the ones I love? Could Stegner really know my feelings and failings better than even I do? He did. He wrote them truthfully and tragically and I am better for having endured reading them. The Big Rock Candy Mountain is a course correction wrapped in a brilliantly written novel that gripped me like few books ever have before.
At about 1/10th of the way in I'm still not 100% committed to it... I get enough gossip and drama without having to read about it too, but we'll see how it goes.
... A little better than half way through and...
It's too much for me. There is just so much gratuitous in this book. I don't get it. I'm embarrassed to have read this far and have no desire to go further.
