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| 4.60
| 9,521
| Nov 14, 2011
| Nov 08, 2011
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it was amazing
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As a wargamer, World War II is one of my four main eras of interest, and while I love me some Eastern Front tank action (PanzerBlitz!), the Pacific th
As a wargamer, World War II is one of my four main eras of interest, and while I love me some Eastern Front tank action (PanzerBlitz!), the Pacific theater of war is something I had less knowledge of until now, except in broad strokes. This non-fiction book reads like a novel. Pacific Crucible only covers the Pacific War from 1941 until 1942, beginning with Pearl Harbor and ending at Midway, and making the author's second volume, The Conquering Tide, something I dove into with the eagerness of an eagerly awaited sequel, the first book I've ever preordered on Audible. Ian W. Toll's thick, detailed, but never-boring account of the first couple of years of America's entry into the war covers it from all angles � the political factors leading up to Japan's decision to go to war, the cultural issues that made them commit to a course of action that many of their leaders knew even at the time was almost certainly doomed to failure. The courting of FDR by Churchill, who desperately wanted (needed) the US to join the war against the Axis, and regarded Pearl Harbor as the salvation of Britain. But these high-level politics, including an assessment of Emperor Hirohito and his participation in the planning for the war, then take a backseat to the story of the fighting men on both sides. Toll gives brief biographical sketches of all the major admirals and generals, both the famous and some of the less well-known. Yamamoto, Nagumo, Kimmel, Nimitz, King, and many lower-ranking commanders are all here. The Navy is the star of the show, at least in the early war; General MacArthur makes little more than a cameo, as an occasional political foil for Admiral King, and few of the IJA generals are mentioned by name. Everyone with any knowledge of World War II knows about Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor. [image] A revered war hero even after the war (which he did not survive), and respected even by his enemies, Yamamoto is described in detail from second-hand and documented accounts by Toll as an ethical, not unflawed man who had great perceptiveness and played the political game well (several times forcing the rest of the Japanese high command to let him have his way by threatening to resign), but made some critical mistakes which even some of his subordinate officers commented on. Yamamoto was an early opponent of going to war against the US. He had been to America and seen what its industrial and manpower potential was. He knew there was no hope of Japan winning a prolonged war against the United States. Yet when war was declared, he served the Emperor. On the American side, Admiral Chester Nimitz earned the most fame as the Commander of the Pacific Fleet, replacing the hapless Admiral Kimmel, who watched his command (and his career) burn outside his window at Pearl Harbor. But Admiral Ernest King, as Toll points out, has somehow remained almost a non-entity in the post-war historical account, despite being Nimitz's boss, the Commander in Chief of the entire US Navy. [image] Like his counterpart, Admiral Yamamoto, King was a gruff and authoritarian commander with probably more humanity and sense of humor than most of his peers gave him credit for. Like Yamamoto, King was also apparently fond of extra-marital dalliances (Congress was at one point annoyed that the COMINCH was allegedly using his personal yacht as a place for trysts). King was an old-school officer who was not easily persuaded of the value of new developments like communications intelligence and cryptography, unlike Nimitz, who made great use of the work of Naval cryptographers like Captain Joseph Rochefort, in command of Station Hypo which cracked many of Japan's codes. [image] Rochefort was very poorly treated by the Washington establishment, which took credit for his work, and actively lied about his accomplishments and fitness, because he had angered some of his superiors by being right when they were wrong. There are so many stories here, beyond the lists of ships and battles. For example, inter-service rivalry was a severe problem that plagued both the US and Japan. You would think that during an all-out war, the Army and the Navy would be able to confine their rivalry to the annual football game, but in fact, combined operations were the exception rather than the rule. Army airmen and navy pilots came to blows after battles, over recriminations and blame-taking and credit-stealing. Press reports after the battle of Midway, for example, credited Army bombers with destroying the Japanese aircraft carriers, because it was the Army flyboys who made it back to the States first to regale reporters with their exploits. In fact, the Army planes didn't hit a single Japanese ship - it was all the Navy. [image] On the Japanese side, it was even worse - the IJN admirals and IJA generals were like old-fashioned daimyo in command of rival clans. The army regarded the navy as nothing more than a troop delivery system. The navy regarded the army as unsophisticated grunts trying to steal their glory and curry favor with the Emperor. Of course, the lesson both sides would learn, and learn hard, was the ascent of air power as the determining factor in naval warfare. This is one of the most interesting strategic and technological factors explained here. Toll observes that a sailor at the beginning of the 20th century would have found it easier to serve on a ship from centuries earlier than on the ships he'd see at the end of his career. The admirals in command of the war had entered the navy when radio was still a new-fangled invention, and they were all inculcated with the naval doctrines of Alfred Thayer Mahan, who wrote what was to be the Bible of naval strategy for every seagoing nation from its publication in 1890 right up to World War II. American and Japanese naval officers alike had learned Mahan's doctrines by heart, and his principles of sea power advocated, among other things, the preeminence of battleships - massive firepower concentrated into large, unsinkable floating fortresses. As the fate of the Battleship Yamato would demonstrate, this would prove to be utterly wrong in the age of aircraft carriers. [image] Pacific Crucible covers the early Pacific War, during which Japan seemed unbeatable. They were prepared, they had more ships and planes, they had a highly dedicated and highly trained military � and one whose competence they had very deliberately hidden from the Western powers, allowing the arrogant British and Americans to believe their racist assumptions about the pathetic abilities of Japanese pilots and soldiers. When the Japanese pulled off a brilliantly executed attack on Pearl Harbor, followed by operations across the Pacific that virtually kicked the British and Dutch right out of the South Seas and soon threatened Australia, Hawaii, and Alaska, it came as a nasty shock. In particular, Western airmen had never encountered the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. [image] These things terrorized the skies - lacking features that most fighter planes had, like armor and larger engines and self-sealing fuel tanks, they were pure maneuverability, and no Western plane was a match for them in the air until American pilots started devising tactics for taking them on. Despite Japan's many early successes, though, the clock was running from the moment they attacked Pearl Harbor. They had limited resources, and (as Yamamoto and others had predicted) they badly underestimated American resolve and military power. Midway, that great battle in which, armed with superior intelligence, Admiral Nimitz committed the US fleet and sank four of Japan's prize carriers, is historically seen as the turning point in the war. [image] The reality is that even if the US had lost the Battle of Midway, it would probably only have prolonged the war, but not changed the outcome. Pacific Crucible tells the story of the men, the ships, the planes, and the battles in that crucial early period when the outcome really did seem uncertain to both sides, and it's both deep and broad, being not just a series of battle reports, and much more than a history of events, but including all of these things in a well-woven narrative that kept me listening for many hours and not wanting to get out of my car, because I wanted to hear what happened next, even though of course I knew because it was history. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in World War II, and have immediately begun the second book, covering 1942 until the end of the war. Apparently Ian Toll is actually going to write a trilogy covering the Pacific War. ETA: The third book has finally been released! ...more |
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Sep 13, 2015
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Sep 21, 2015
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Sep 13, 2015
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Audiobook
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| 0679734228
| 9780679734222
| 0679734228
| 4.09
| 3,303
| 1941
| Dec 06, 1993
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it was amazing
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You might think a book written in 1941 about Hollywood would be too dated to be of interest to anyone but Hollywood historians. Wrong, baby, wrong! Th
You might think a book written in 1941 about Hollywood would be too dated to be of interest to anyone but Hollywood historians. Wrong, baby, wrong! This modern classic is a must-read for anyone who is fascinated by Hollywood, or interested in character studies of incredibly compelling anti-heroes. In the 21st century, What Makes Sammy Run? is essentially a historical novel, but it's still a damn fine character-driven story, and let's face it, Hollywood is still crawling with Sammy Glicks. The novel's eponymous question, "What makes Sammy run?" is asked by the narrator, Al Manheim, a reporter at a New York City paper who first meets Sammy as a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed 15-year-old copy boy.
Sammy runs, runs, runs, and Al Manheim is as obsessed as he is horrified as he watches Sammy shamelessly lie, cheat, and steal (ideas) and promote himself with the unselfaware genius of the truly narcissistic. He stabs his "patron," Al, to get a newspaper column of his own, and when a young writer comes to him with a story idea, Sammy calls up a big-name Hollywood agent, having no idea just how ridiculous the thing he is doing is, and soon is saying goodbye to the Big Apple and hello to Hollywood, leaving behind his friends, his family, his cast off fiancee, and the guy who wrote the story he's now launching his career with. Al manages to get snagged into the Hollywood writing gig himself a little later, and soon he's also making more money than he ever did as a reporter, but watching Sammy outstrip everyone. When Sammy becomes a $500-a-week writer (big money in the 30s!), he's seething with dissatisfaction because he knows some writers are making $2500 a week. When he becomes a $2500/week writer, he wants to join the inner circle of $5000/week writers. And when he joins them... well, who wants to be a mere writer, at the bottom of the Hollywood totem pole, when the big money and power comes from being a supervisor, a producer, a studio head... Sammy keeps running, and Al is there to witness it. Sammy Glick never writes a word himself or has a single original idea, yet he manages to keep rocketing up into the big time. Al trails behind him, modestly successful, held back by his own basic decency, a trait for which Sammy mocks him contemptuously and yet makes him Sammy's confidant and the closest thing he has to a friend, since whenever Sammy does something lowdown and dirty, Al is the only one he can confide in. Sammy's rise is the epic journey of an anti-hero. He's a louse, he's a creep, he's ! And as horrifically entertaining as watching the Grinch drive a lawn tractor over Smurfs. Al's obsessive quest to find out what makes Sammy run eventually leads him back to the Jewish New York ghetto where Samuel Glickstein grew up, and then back to Hollywood after being temporarily exiled for his participation in the struggle of the Writers' Guild against the big studios, where he witnesses Sammy's final triumph: marriage to the heiress of one of the Wall Street men who finances the studio, elevation to studio head, being feted and brown-nosed by all, and still, of course, running.
Almost as interesting as the story is the historical background behind the novel and the author. Budd Schulberg was a "Hollywood prince," son of B.P. Schulberg, a founding member of the AMPA and a producer for the big Hollywood studios. Budd Schulberg grew up among a Who's Who of Hollywood in the 30s and 40s, so when he wrote What Makes Sammy Run?... it made a splash. A big ugly splash. Louis B. Mayer himself called for Schulberg's exile from Hollywood, and Schulberg heard from his own father those immortal words: "You'll never work in this town again." Much of the acrimony was over the character of Sammy Glick, whom Schulberg insisted was not based on any one person but a composite of Hollywood personalities and anecdotes he had heard over the years, yet apparently most of Hollywood thought they knew who Sammy "really" was. However, perhaps the real grievance was what's just a subplot in the novel, the attempted unionization of the Hollywood writers' guild. Schulberg was called a Red because of his sympathetic portrayal of an event that was still remembered bitterly by the major studios decades later. The edition of the book I read included an afterword by the author, written in 1989, 50 years after the original publication of his novel. Besides containing more amusing anecdotes and name-dropping (apparently John Wayne himself was one of those who never forgave Schulberg for siding with the unions, and the two of them nearly had a fistfight in Mexico), Schulberg observes that when the novel first came out, and over the next couple of decades, Sammy was viewed with fear and loathing, a sleazy anti-hero who is the personification of Hollywood's id. Yet in the 80s, young film and writing students started coming up to him and praising Sammy as an inspiration, a role model for ambitious career advancement! Schulberg, still a liberal after all these years, was appalled. And thus Sammy Glick is not only a fascinating anti-hero, a brilliant portrayal of a rags-to-riches narcissist, but also a textbook case of an author's creation who runs out of control, taking on a meaning and significance his creator never intended. Highly recommended! ...more |
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Dec 23, 2014
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Jan 04, 2015
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Dec 23, 2014
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Paperback
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| 0857682830
| 9780857682833
| 0857682830
| 4.00
| 3,380
| Sep 2011
| Oct 04, 2011
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it was amazing
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I discovered Sherlock Holmes
I discovered Sherlock Holmes at about age 12, when I read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's entire collected Holmes stories. Brilliant gems of Victorian literature, and fortunately for Hollywood and Kim Newman, now long in the public domain, Sherlock Holmes occupies a place in modern Western mythology not far below Santa Claus, and probably above Uncle Sam and Ronald McDonald. There have been many, many Holmes stories written by other authors, and hundreds of film and radio adaptations, both of Doyle's original stories and of new ones. I've only read a few � some are good, some not so much. Kim Newman did something entirely different, though. He wrote about Moriarty. Not just that � he rewrote the entire Holmes canon from the viewpoint of Professor Moriarty, the notorious villain who only showed up in a handful of Doyle's original stories, and Moriarty's sidekick, Sebastian "Basher" Moran, who was an even more minor character in the later Holmes stories, but for Moriarty: The Hound of the D'urbervilles, becomes the first-person narrator of the "true" story of the Napoleon of Crime and his exploits against the Thin Man of Baker Street. And it. Is. Brilliant. Starting with Moriarty.
That's how Colonel Basher Moran, big-game hunter, hero of the British Empire, and thoroughly loathsome cad, bully, murderer, card-shark, and unreliable narrator, meets the only man in England more loathsome and dangerous than himself. It is an unsentimental but enduring partnership as perfect as that bromance over on Baker Street. This book collects seven short stories which fit together chronologically, each one expanding Moriarty's world and his criminal empire: Chapter One: A Volume in Vermilion Chapter Two: A Shambles in Belgravia Chapter Three: The Red Planet League Chapter Four: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles Chapter Five: The Adventure of the Six Maledictions Chapter Six: The Greek Invertebrate Chapter Seven: The Problem of the Final Adventure You can see that these are distorted twists on the Holmes stories. Just as Moriarty doesn't actually appear in the original Holmes stories until late, and usually only by mention, so do the first few chapters of Moriarty not even mention the Baker Street detective, and then at first it's only by inference. Only in the very last story is the Great Detective mentioned by name, when Professor James Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes finally meet. The stories are instead about how Moriarty runs his Firm, a criminal enterprise spanning across England and with tentacles all over the world. But he is not the only criminal overlord out there, and Moriarty's nemeses are not at first a private detective and his medical sidekick, but equally villainous masterminds like the Lord of Strange Deaths, Le Vampires of Paris, and that bitch (as Moriarty and Moran both come to refer to her), Irene Adler, the New Jersey Nightingale and the only woman who could ever get under Moriarty's skin. Newman's stories are brilliantly plotted and as clever and full of twists, crosses and double-crosses, mysteries to be solved and incredible howdunits as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's detective tales. Not only that, but Newman doesn't just use Doyle's characters. He brings into this world an incredible range of Victorian and pulp era characters, seamlessly blending actual history with fictional history, with copious footnotes. For example, the first chapter, A Volume in Vermilion, pits Moran against Jim Lassiter, the hero of Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage. The Red Planet League is a tribute to H.G. Wells, in which Moriarty, normally involved in great crimes for profit and intellectual stimulation, instead devotes all his energies to discrediting a scientist who has pricked his pride. Spectacularly.
A host of other villains and protagonists from late 19th and early 20th century writers make their appearance, all copiously detailed by Newman in the appendix. Many minor characters that appeared in only one Doyle story become supporting cast here, from Irene Adler to Sophy Kratides This is truly a brilliantly researched book that pays respectful homage in tone, style, and wording, to its sources. Moriarty is an evil, cunning monster through and through, and Basher Moran is a murderous thug. He tells his version of the story in an obviously self-aggrendizing way, and the allusions to Harry Flashman are obvious and occasionally explicit. Yet they're both so endearing in their charmless, villainous way that you enjoy reading about them even though they would not hesitate to loot orphanages, shoot old ladies, and steal candy from babies. This was a fun book, exquisitely modeled after the original Holmes stories they subvert. If you are a Sherlock Holmes fan, then this is a must-read. ...more |
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Nov 24, 2013
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Dec 25, 2013
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Nov 24, 2013
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Paperback
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| 0553212737
| 9780553212730
| 0553212737
| 4.05
| 937,416
| Dec 23, 1815
| Feb 01, 1984
|
it was amazing
| Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; an Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. When I was younger, having read only those classics I was made to in high school, and not too interested in anything that wasn't SF&F published in the 20th century, I tended to see all 19th century authors as a sort of indistinguishable crowd of writers writing in archaic prose about manor houses and some great tribulation of the human spirit reflected in whether so-and-so marries Lady MacGuffin. Actually reading a few of these authors, not for purposes of getting through them to pass your English class, but the way you'd read any other author � and not just one book � is a cure for that attitude. I do love me some Austen, and her style is so quintessentially... Austen. Emma is probably her most famous work next to Pride and Prejudice. I had seen the Gwyneth Paltrow movie version, so I already knew the story this time before reading the book, but as usual, the book is much better. Emma Woodhouse is the rich, spoiled, pretty younger daughter of a hypochondriac widower. She virtually rules her country manor, Hartfield. The only one who ever contradicts her is her best friend, Mr. Knightley, who alone is willing to speak the truth about Emma's foibles: "Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen a great many lists of her drawing-up at various times of books that she meant to read regularly through—and very good lists they were—very well chosen, and very neatly arranged—sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule. The list she drew up when only fourteen—I remember thinking it did her judgment so much credit, that I preserved it some time; and I dare say she may have made out a very good list now. But I have done with expecting any course of steady reading from Emma. She will never submit to any thing requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding. Where Miss Taylor failed to stimulate, I may safely affirm that Harriet Smith will do nothing.—You never could persuade her to read half so much as you wished.—You know you could not." Emma frequently becomes vexed with Mr. Knightley for his willingness to puncture her ego, but it's obvious she secretly loves it, and since this is an Austen novel, the eventual course of the story is not hard to predict since all Austen novels end the same way � with everyone happily married. Emma takes a young Miss Harriet Smith under her wing. Harriet is a simple girl at a boarding school of unknown parentage, but Emma decides she's going to "elevate" her and in so doing, find her an appropriate high-status husband, since Emma fancies herself very good at matchmaking. She is proven disastrously wrong throughout the book, but never quite stops making matches in her head. The first thing she does is convince Harriet to refuse an offer of marriage from a very fine, prosperous tenant farmer who would have been the perfect husband for Harriet. Harriet, being naive and easily led, is soon completely under Emma's thumb, and as Mr. Knightley says, "You have been no friend to Harriet Smith, Emma." The book proceeds through one comedy of misunderstanding after another, most precipitated by Emma's completely misconstruing who is secretly in love with whom. The cast of characters and plot is typically Austenian: there is the brash rake Frank Churchill who is both better and worse than he seems, the vulgar snob Mrs. Elton who is there as a foil for the heroine, the comic offer of marriage from a completely unsuitable clergyman, the quiet, intelligent, upright Jane Fairfax who is the modest and unassuming contrast to Emma, and of course poor Miss Bates, the sweet but garrulous old maid who drives everyone crazy. The kick-the-puppy moment in which Emma, under the bad influence of Frank Churchill, turns her acerbic wit on Miss Bates, is probably the turning point of the book.
Oh, very badly done, Emma. And Mr. Knightley tells her so.
Emma Woodhouse is one of Austen's least likable heroines, as Austen admitted herself. Emma is not a bad person � indeed, the book is largely about her slowly growing up, becoming less spoiled and full of herself, and starting to think of others a little as actual people with feelings and ambitions of their own, and not as projects for her to "improve." But even by the end of the novel, she hasn't entirely lost her snobbery and her conviction that she's (almost) always right. I have heard some people say that if you've read one Austen novel, you've read them all. I can see that viewpoint � Austen always chose the same general setting: "Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on." Her comedies of manners have very similar character archetypes in each, and of course, you can read every Austen novel with the assurance that the heroine will get her HEA in the end. But, I would not call Austen formulaic at all. The details of her characters and the twists and turns each one takes in the story are different enough to make them distinct. Emma Woodhouse is not Elizabeth Bennet or Catherine Morland or Fanny Price. Mr. Knightley is not Mr. Darcy. The comic characters, the vulgar characters, the mean characters, all reappear in each Austen novel, but they're always different. And when I read Emma, I certainly found myself picturing Hartfield as a different place than Pemberly or Mansfield Park. Emma is a nice comfort-read sort of book. I would say Pride and Prejudice is still my favorite Austen novel, but Emma is now second, and it's probably a superior book on a technical level. It also gave us the best teen movie of the 90s: [image] ...more |
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Nov 13, 2013
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Dec 08, 2013
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Nov 13, 2013
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 1433254735
| 9781433254734
| 1433254735
| 4.08
| 45,644
| May 07, 1987
| Aug 15, 2011
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it was amazing
|
This is another book that gets 5 stars for being a great big hunk of enjoyable cheese. But it's historical cheese! Sarum tells the entire history of En This is another book that gets 5 stars for being a great big hunk of enjoyable cheese. But it's historical cheese! Sarum tells the entire history of England, from its ice-age prehistory when the first men arrived on the island to the 1980s, by focusing the passing of ages on the city of Salisbury, once known as "Sarum." Located on the edge of Salisbury Plain, at the juncture of five rivers, archeological evidence tells us it's been a trading settlement since prehistoric times (and of course, it is located only a few miles from Stonehenge). Rutherfurd uses a mixture of archeology and recorded history to tell us the complete history of Sarum from the arrival of Hwll the Hunter, seeking high ground as the ice melts, to the last in the line of the Shockleys and Masons, who have entertained us with their family dramas for centuries, trying to restore Salisbury Cathedral in 1985. How historically accurate is this book? It would take a historian to criticize that aspect of Rutherfurd's storytelling, though obviously everything involving the neolithic settlers, followed by the bronze age settlers, ancestors of the Celts, and pretty much everything up to Roman times, has to be more speculation than known fact. To this day, we don't know for sure exactly when Stonehenge was built or for what purpose, and I remember an Irish history professor in college telling me "Don't believe anything anyone writes about druids - crazy people write about druids." So Rutherfurd's take on the bloodthirsty rites of these Bronze Age tribesmen is probably as likely as any other. This is not primarily a history book, though, but a multi-generational (many, many, many generations) soap opera, through which history is told. Of the many families living around Sarum, Rutherfurd invents several � the Wilsons (descended from "Will's son" though actually present as fisher-folk living on Sarum's rivers since the Ice Age), the Masons (descended from a medieval mason, who was himself descended from an old Celtic craftsman who learned architecture from the Romans, who was himself descended from the architect of Stonehenge), the Porters (descended from a Roman officer named Porteus), the Godfreys (descended from a Norman knight), the Shockleys, the Forests (a branch of the Wilsons that renamed themselves something more noble once they got money) � who frequently change names and reverse fortunes and have interwoven lives, feuds, and marriages with the passing of centuries. The family that ruled Sarum in Roman times becomes in the 19th century the tenant farmers living on land owned by another family that were Anglo-Saxon peasants in the 11th, and so on. Naturally they don't know their ancient noble (or common) origins the way the reader does, other than as family tales passed down which they believe to be largely fictitious, like Doctor Barnagel, who laughs at his family's legend of being descended from a Danish invader known for crying "Bairn nae gel!" ("Don't kill the children!"), not knowing that it's actually true. This is a historical epic told through the eyes of everyday people. Rutherfurd has each of his families passing down physical and personality traits through the generations that are more fanciful than genetic, but there is something pleasing and familiar in seeing what the scheming, "spider-like" Wilsons are up to in each century, or what form the next generation's incarnation of a buxom, Amazonish Shockley girl will take. It sprawls across all of history. How are these families affected by the Roman invasion? The Anglo-Saxon invasion? The Danish invasion? The Norman invasion? The Black Death? The Reformation? The English Civil War? The New World? The Napoleonic Wars? All the way into the 20th century, where things became a bit rushed, covering the passing of time from World War I to 1985 in as many pages as earlier were spent on a single generation in the medieval era. Stylistically, Edward Rutherfurd is a plain and unembellished writer and he often relies on cliches and tropes, particularly all the women with their "firm young bodies" from paleolithic times onward, and the aforementioned repetition of family traits, from the Wilsons' "long-toed feet," dating back to the Ice Age, to the precise fussiness of the Porters, dating back to their Roman ancestor. Chapters begin with a lot of historical exposition explaining what's going on in this era, then zooming into what our families are up to and which side they're taking. But none of this was a detriment to me; it was a long, long listen and very satisfying. The time spent to research and write an epic spanning over 10,000 years and yet get us personally invested in the lives of individual people made it well worth it. So, maybe Sarum really only "deserves" 4 stars but I'm giving it 5 because I liked it enough that I am pushing Rutherfurd's New York epic higher on my TBR list. ...more |
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Nov 2013
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Nov 28, 2013
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Nov 01, 2013
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Audiobook
| ||||||||||||||
| 0986690937
| 9780986690938
| 0986690937
| 4.40
| 48
| Nov 30, 2012
| Nov 30, 2012
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it was amazing
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Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friends, lend me your ears. This is one of those books that is special and unlike anything you've read before, and I'm going to urge you not
Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friends, lend me your ears. This is one of those books that is special and unlike anything you've read before, and I'm going to urge you not only to read it, but to go out and buy it, because it's an artsy small-press book with an audience of maybe seven people in the world besides me (okay, nine â€� look at how many Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ ratings it has â€� pathetic!) but it's wonderful, and it's about as far from "commercial" writing as you can get. I mean, how do you write an aggressively non-commercial YA post-apocalyptic story? You write it as an epic poem in blank verse. Yeah, seriously.
Thaliad is a slender volume, just over a hundred pages. It is, obviously, a sort of modern-day Iliad. The wayfarers in this tale are seven middle school children, sheltered in an underground cave during a field trip when the apocalyptic fire comes. Nearly the sole survivors in the world, they travel far and then settle in a lakeshore town, and in all the years covered in this tale, they are almost alone. This isn't a post-apocalyptic epic with cannibals and mutants and bandit warlords. It's a quieter End Times. Which makes the losses all the more poignant, because these are children, and they make mistakes, in a world that no longer forgives mistakes.
In a hundred pages of poetry, there are only those seven children (and a handful of other encounters), yet the poet makes each of them a person who squeezes your heart. This is what good poetry does - more characterization and reader investment in a few lines than many novels manage in a hundred pages. Thaliad is actually about coming of age and leadership and the need for community and motherhood. The titular main character, Thalia, though the youngest of the seven children, becomes their spiritual leader. She tries to keep them morally grounded, and when she loses members of her little tribe, she rages against God. XII. THE FACE OF LIGHT The chapter The Face of Light has obvious literary antecedents � Job and Odysseus were not the first tested by cruel deities, Thalia is not the last. Like all of her predecessors, Thalia makes a compelling if human argument:
And gets an answer.
There is definitely a religious vibe to Thaliad, but it's not an explicitly Christian fable, nor was the allegory abrasive to this atheist reader. Because in the tale of Thalia and her charge to be "phoenix to the world" there is still adventure, beauty, and, because it's the end of the world, tragedy. The world may look calm and placid, like a lake, but the world bites. This is a beautiful work, probably destined to be obscure and underappreciated, though it should be in classrooms around the country as an example of modern and relevant poetry. So please go buy it and read it. It's one of those occasional treasures you are only likely to stumble upon by chance, and I'm pointing you right to it. ...more |
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Oct 18, 2013
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Oct 20, 2013
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Oct 03, 2013
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0062263056
| 9780062263056
| 0062263056
| 4.13
| 128,464
| Apr 23, 2013
| Apr 23, 2013
|
it was amazing
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If you claim you like fantasy but you don't like this book, then what you like is silly wizards and hot werewolf-on-chick action, or else secondary wo
If you claim you like fantasy but you don't like this book, then what you like is silly wizards and hot werewolf-on-chick action, or else secondary world fantasy with elves and dragons and lost swords and shit, which is all well and good but I'm gonna be totally judgmental about any so-called fantasy fan who doesn't like this book because it's "too long" or too "slow-moving" or whatever stupid reason it failed to score with you. The Golem and the Jinni is a carefully constructed modern fable written as seriously as any historical literary fiction. The main characters, two creatures right out of Jewish and Arabic myth, blend perfectly into this novel of early 20th century New York. What is more fantastic than that? It's a rich book, reading at times like one of those sweeping classic character epics like Middlemarch or Les Miserables (but not as wordy and with far less infodumping). There are a fairly large number of characters, each with a character arc that runs the length of the book, eventually tying into the resolution. We start in 1899 in Poland with an unpleasant fellow who has been successful in business but due to being a poorly socialized schmuck, unsuccessful in matrimony. Rather than figuring out how to woo the ladies properly, he gets the bright idea to go to a local rabbi rumored to know dark Kabbalistic magic, and asks him to make him a wife. Helene Wecker does a wonderful job of describing just the sort of loser who'd buy a RealDoll. Since this is 1899, he buys a golem instead. Unlike RealDolls, golems can walk, talk, and think. They have their own personalities and desires � a fact upon which much of what follows hinges, as the golem's master-to-be specifies "curiosity" along with "modesty" and "obedience" for his clay bride. Unfortunately, there is also another little detail from Jewish legends that Helene Wecker weaves skillfully into the story: deep down, golems are murderous creatures who will eventually turn on their masters and have to be destroyed. Golem legends were of course the precursor to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Chava is not nearly so tragic � she awakens in the hold of a ship (her "husband" couldn't wait), but when her "husband" dies, she finds herself alone in New York City � obedient, modest, and curious. She knows what she is, but not what to do with herself. She is constructed such that she can pass as a human, so she manages, awkwardly, to integrate herself into New York's Jewish immigrant community, finding that her tirelessness and precision makes her very good at useful skills like baking and sewing. Meanwhile, in the Syrian immigrant community, a tinsmith named Boutros Arbeely is brought an old copper flask to repair. He manages to open it and release a jinni who's been trapped in the flask for a thousand years. "Ahmad," as he calls himself, has a very different personality than Chava. He is a creature of fire and caprice, bound to a human form. He's not evil or cruel, but he's used to doing what he pleases without worrying about consequences. His jinni powers make him an able assistant to Boutros Arbeely, but the mundanity of life among humans is soon driving him mad. Eventually, by chance, the golem and the jinni meet. They are both the ultimate foreigners in a sea of immigrants. Despite being from different worlds, they understand each other better than even the few humans who know their natures can. Their friendship is perfect, awkward, believable, and of course, it gets sorely tested. As a fantasy novel, The Golem and the Jinni succeeds because it makes golems and jinni fit in a perfectly believable fashion into the tapestry of early 20th century life. It's not a "secret wizarding world" setting � it's just a world where some of those old legends might actually be true. There aren't vampires and faeries and wizards everywhere, but here and there, if you look for it, there's a bit of magic. The magic isn't the point, though it's much more than just an incidental background detail. The natures of the golem and the jinni and the magic that forms them play critical roles in the climax, but this is a character-driven novel. Chava and Ahmad are both great protagonists. Chava is wise and kind and well-intentioned, but she's not a perfect helpmate � she becomes frustrated and bored with people, and deep in her heart is that murderous golem nature she's not yet even aware of. Ahmad is kind of a jerk � he likes building pretty things, seducing mortal women, and then moving on � but forced to live on the ground among mankind, he's also forced to confront their reactions to his actions. He's still impatient, petty, and arrogant, but he's not without scruples or compassion. The secondary characters fill in the edges of the story. "Ice Cream Saleh," a one-time learned physician possessed by an evil spirit, cursed to never look another person in the face until he sees a man of flame on the streets of New York City. The kindly Rabbi Meyer, who recognizes Chava for what she is, and his nephew Michael, an apostate Jew who runs a shelter for new immigrants and falls in love with Chava, having no idea what she is. There are many other characters whose stories intersect Chava's and Ahmad's, ending with a confrontation with Chava's creator, who has a connection to the events Ahmad has forgotten that sealed him in his flask a thousand years ago. This is Helene Wecker's debut novel, but I would never have thought it was a first novel. And unlike so many debut fantasy novels, it's entirely self-contained. Wecker probably could write a sequel, but I think rather than simply continuing the story of Chava and Ahmad, she'd do much better to write another book like this but with a completely different setting and characters. I will definitely read it! This is the sort of thick, juicy fantasy that should appeal to all fans of thick juicy fantasies and historical fiction alike. Rich in characters and setting details, judicious about using magic as a plot device, not a character, a mystical force that doesn't need to be meticulously systemitized to make sense. The Golem and the Jinni is literary fantasy that doesn't fill its pages with unnecessary side trips into some hidden magical world just to detail other creatures; it spends its time on character development and describing a vivid turn-of-the-century New York populated by immigrants of all kinds. My highest recommendation! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 30, 2013
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Aug 10, 2013
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Jul 02, 2013
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Audiobook
| ||||||||||||||
| 1475601166
| B00A7GP5ZW
| 4.02
| 20,871
| 2007
| Nov 13, 2012
|
it was amazing
|
This is a most unusual novel, especially for Western readers. It's strange and thoughtful and dark, full of psychological twists and turns, metaphysic
This is a most unusual novel, especially for Western readers. It's strange and thoughtful and dark, full of psychological twists and turns, metaphysical tangents, and the desperately humorous shenanigans of young adults carrying on at a grim Russian boarding school that is turning them all into... what, they do not exactly know. I described Marina and Sergey Dyachenko's novel The Scar as "swords & sorcery if written by Fyodor Dostoevsky." I don't think I'm stretching the Russian-lit analogy too much to call this book "Harry Potter if written by Leo Tolstoy." I liked The Scar so much that I sought out other works by the Dyachenkos translated into English. Sadly, there are was only one: Vita Nostra, the first book in their "Metamorphosis cycle." And it's only available on Amazon as an ebook. According to the afterword, it was translated by a Russian-born fan living in the U.S., which explains why the translation didn't read with the same professional smoothness as the Tor-published The Scar. The Scar, with its themes of morality and consequences, punishment and redemption, reminded me of Dostoevsky. Vita Nostra is an even darker story, with occasional flashes of humor surfacing in the dark waters of a story that seems to be dragging you along toward some unknown, unknowable fate, with characters who have few choices, who know they exist only to act out their predefined roles. They resist this predestination, even knowing that resistance is futile. This valiant effort to find hope in the face of crushing inevitability reminded me more of that grim old sourpuss Graf Tolstoy. Alexandra "Sasha" Samokhina is a 17-year-old straight-A student, preparing to apply to university. She's been a good girl, a dutiful daughter to her single mother. Then one day a stranger appears while she and her mother are on vacation at the beach, and makes an unusual demand of her. He demands she swim naked out to a bouy every morning at exactly 4 a.m. Following some instinct, Sasha complies... and each morning after her swim, she vomits up gold coins. She soon learns that the world is indeed fragile, and that refusing Farit Kozhennikov's demands has a heavy price. Farit's unusual "tasks" continue when Sasha and her mother go home. Sasha finds herself alienated from her friends, and distanced from her mother, who does not understand what strange pressures her daughter is under. It only gets worse when Sasha informs her mother that instead of the university they both planned on, she has to attend the Institute of Special Technologies, a technical school no one has ever heard of in a small town that's practically off the map. Aren't you tired of books being called "Harry Potter for adults"? But I'm sorry, it's such an easy comparison to make, and Vita Nostra may deserve that label, albeit it's set in an adult unworldly boarding school in a very Russian vein. Sasha has to ride a train to the middle of nowhere to arrive at Torpa, where the Institute of Special Technologies is located, but the Institute is no Hogwarts. The teachers are sometimes warm and friendly, sometimes cold and demanding, but they all force students to study things they don't even understand, pursuing a degree they can't comprehend, to do things after graduation that they can't even imagine. The oppressive lack of information and the constant undercurrent of foreboding, the threat of sinister consequences for failure, makes the reader as frustrated as Sasha for much of the book. What is the Institute for Special Technologies? Are they teaching magic? Are students learning to alter the fabric of reality? Are they being transformed into something inhuman? It's not really explained at all until near the end, and even then it's very abstract and metaphysical. Sasha undergoes transformations, exhibits frightening powers, and moves from a frightened, confused First Year to a confused, increasingly alienated Third Year, one with a talent that exceeds that of all her classmates, though her own teachers won't even tell her what her talent is and why she's so special. All of this takes place in a fictional Russian town with a heavy flavor of magical realism. There is a "Sacco and Vanzetti" Avenue. The townspeople seem to tolerate without really accepting or understanding the Institute's students. Sasha initially shares a dorm room with other students, and as she's struggling with her bizarre, incomprehensible subjects, she's engaged in petty roommate conflicts, college students getting illicitly drunk, and eventually relationship drama. The townspeople seem vaguely aware that Institute students are not "normal," but dismiss them as strange, not entirely welcome visitors to their town. In a very real sense � more real than most so-called "Young Adult" novels � Vita Nostra is a novel for young adults. It's about becoming an adult, and discovering truly hard tasks where failure actually has consequences, and doing so amidst the swirling temptations of song, dance, parties, alcohol and sex. It's about the confusion of not knowing what you're going to be when you grow up, of seeing yourself as a free-willed individual with choices lying ahead of you and then discovering that you are at the mercy of forces you cannot control or negotiate with. It's about trying not to lose the parent-child bond even when you are forced to let go.
This is not a "traditional" fantasy novel. It defies Western genre labels. It's as much horror as fantasy, as much contemporary realism as it is magical realism. It's rather hard to describe and it was sometimes frustrating to read and there are depths that I sensed lurking beneath this translation that might be more evident to its Russian audience. If you like dark fantasy, I think you will like it. If you like Russian literature (and don't mind a fantastic element), you will definitely like it. But it's a very strange book, and it doesn't follow a standard Western fantasy arc. Things are described in vague, esoteric terms and the relevance and meaning is never always made clear to the reader, which forces you to swim in the same existential confusion afflicted upon the characters. Please, folks, go buy this ebook. It's only $2.99. Yeah, I know, it's Amazon. Someone should tell them how to sell ebooks on other sites. But I want you to read it and I want more people to buy it because I want more of the Dyachenkos' work to be translated into English. You may not love this (my final rating is 4.5 stars for a somewhat raw translation and many moments of befuddlement) but if you want something different from the same-old, same-old fantasy novel, these are some authors who deserve a wider audience. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 23, 2013
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Jul 27, 2013
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May 31, 2013
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Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||
| B007EJSB9W
| unknown
| 3.91
| 1,523
| 1996
| Mar 03, 2012
|
it was amazing
|
Wow. What an unexpectedly great read. I was hoping for some basic fantasy that might be a little bit different since this novel was originally written
Wow. What an unexpectedly great read. I was hoping for some basic fantasy that might be a little bit different since this novel was originally written in Russian. The Scar is indeed basic fantasy � basic, solid fantasy with no great innovations in worldbuilding or ideas, nothing that fantasy readers aren't thoroughly familiar with � but the writing, the descriptive details, and the character arcs that drive the story, are all so deft and evocative that The Scar is like a shiny, perfect apple sitting in a cart full of apples of acceptable but clearly lesser quality. I would compare The Scar somewhat with Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind, not in terms of style or story, as the Dyanchenkos' writing is quite different from Rothfuss's, but in the way it takes a story that's old hat, old school fantasy and still makes it new and interesting. Part of this is the writing, which was particularly delightful since translations are always a bit iffy, but while of course I can't compare it to the original Russian, there was a ton of evocative imagery, descriptive detail, and strong emotions conveyed in prose that pushes this book into something of true literary quality. The story is mostly about Egert Soll, a brash, philandering swordsman who's basically every jock bully writ large: he steals his friends' girls, he bullies and brags and treats the world as his playground, full of mud puddles that exist to be splashed in other peoples' faces, and he gets away with it because everyone loves him. Then he kills an innocent student in a duel that's murder in all but name, the ultimate act of jock-on-nerd bullying. He leaves the student's fiancee bereft and heartbroken. This is all the set up for Egert's oh-so-very-well-deserved smackdown. His comeuppance is delivered by a mysterious mage called the Wanderer, who goads Egert into a duel and inflicts a magical scar on Egert that curses him with cowardice. While this has the feel of a traditional fairy tale (or perhaps a Russian folk tale), it's Egert's curse that makes the story. Until that point, Egert has been a completely unlikable schmuck, someone you can't wait to see get dirt rubbed in his face. And when he kills Toria's fiancee, you figure he's passed the moral event horizon and you can't possibly feel anything but disgust for him and a desire to see him suffer. And suffer he does. And pretty soon you are feeling sorry for Egert Soll. The curse soon turns him into a feeble husk of a man, a hollowed-out shell of his former self who can't even take his own life. And as things get worse and worse, a remarkable thing happens: not only does Egert become sympathetic, but he becomes likable. By a cruel and ironic twist of fate, he is brought face to face with Toria again, the fiancee of the student he killed. And Toria, who also feels nothing but disgust for him initially, comes to feel sympathy for him as well. By the time the fate of their city, and of Toria, hangs on Egert's ability to overcome his curse, you are not just rooting for him, you're cheering for him. The climax is both epic and again resonant of traditional fairy tales: Egert is given very specific instructions as to what he has to do to get out from under his curse, and of course things do not turn out quite the way he expects. On the surface, this is a swords & sorcery novel, but the sorcery is treated the way sorcery should be, as something vague and mysterious and not usually seen, a plot device rather than a suit of powers. And there are only a few swordfights, and each one serves a very specific and dramatic purpose in the plot. So, this isn't really a swords & sorcery novel at all, though it has all the trappings. It's a very psychological novel about egotism, courage and cowardice, grief, and redemption. It's a heroic epic and a romance, and a dark Russian fairy tale with shades of Rothfuss, Wolfe, and Dostoevsky. There's some action and a little bit of magic, but the character arcs are more important than the plot arc. Apparently the Dyanchenkos are very popular fantasy authors in Russia, yet this novel is the first one to be translated into English. I hope more follow. While this book may not appeal to you if you have no interest in traditional fantasy, I highly recommend it for all fantasy readers, and I'd argue that it has a psychological depth that transcends its genre. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 03, 2013
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Feb 12, 2013
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Feb 03, 2013
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Audiobook
| |||||||||||||||
| 0312330669
| 9780312330668
| 0312330669
| 3.50
| 3,116
| 2008
| Jun 10, 2008
|
it was amazing
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I picked up this book because I found the concept amusing: a burned out author who now gets by teaching creative writing extension courses has to solv
I picked up this book because I found the concept amusing: a burned out author who now gets by teaching creative writing extension courses has to solve a murder in her class. The Writing Class follows the conventions of a "Ten Little Indians"-style murder mystery. We're introduced to an entire class of writer wannabes, and then we spend the book trying, along with the main character, to guess who the killer is. Jincy Willett is funny in a sharp and satirical but humane way, and she has a real gift for characterization. Each of her characters has depths to be unraveled, even the least-mentioned ones, and by the end, like Amy Gallup, the fictional author who one cannot help noticing seems to have a lot in common with Jincy Willett, it's easy to check off reasons why each and every one of them could or could not be the whack job who's escalated from leaving nasty, destructive critiques to murder. Willett is also just a damn good writer. This isn't a "prosey" book in particular, but the prose is controlled and clever all the way through. It's a pleasure to read a real Writer at work. The one conceit Willett allows herself � the "gimme" I'll give her for the sake of the story � is that even after it becomes apparent that someone with whom they're sharing manuscript critiques may well be a literal psychopath, the entire writing class insists they love the class so much they want to keep meeting. This works brilliantly in maintaining tension, since at every class (and the inevitable "gotcha" that follows as the person they dub "the Sniper" makes another move) everyone is a suspect and the reader is mentally gathering clues. While I found it a little implausible that a real group of random adults would all be up for continuing, especially after someone dies, I was almost convinced by their enthusiastic immersion in the class and by the frisson of thrill that was surely the real motivation for most of them. ("Holy crap, one of us is a murderer! Isn't this exciting?") There are moments, throughout The Writing Class, that made me envious of Willett's observational powers and skill at crafting her observations into words. Amy Gallup of course gets the most page space, and as her own life story emerges in dribs and drabs until we have the whole complex human being laid out before us, we also get to see into her mind, which is the mind of a gifted if jaded writer with powerful skills of observation and analysis, making the entire book suspect as an exercise in meta-fiction if we make the mistake that Amy Gallup advises her students not to make, and infer too much about an author from her characters. On another level, The Writing Class is damned funny for anyone who's dabbled in being a writer, whether you're a published author or an MFA student or just someone who's taken a workshop or two. It's not accurate to say Willett "skewers" the writing industry, as she obviously has a great love for real writing, and like Amy Gallup, she has genuine affection for those who truly want to be writers, however hapless most of them may be. But there's a true-to-life cynicism in Amy's assessment of her students and their work (Willett actually presents excerpts from each student, written in a variety of styles and levels of skill, an accomplished feat of writing in itself) and the sort of people who take writing classes. Purely as a murder mystery, The Writing Class also worked well for me. I confess: I didn't guess the murderer. I thought I knew who it was by the end of the book, but I was wrong. I was a little worried that Willett would pull some gimmick out of her ass like some mystery writers do, but no, when the culprit was revealed, everything made sense, and I skimmed back over the incidents involving each suspect and agreed that it fit. (Though I still think my guess was reasonable too.) I'd never heard of Jincy Willett before I read this book, and now I want to seek out her other books. It was an unexpected surprise, and gets my highest recommendation, especially if you are a would-be writer. I want to take a writing workshop by Amy Gallup! Without the murders, hopefully. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 25, 2013
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Jun 09, 2013
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Oct 25, 2012
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0670061565
| 9780670061563
| 0670061565
| 3.34
| 433
| Apr 12, 2012
| Apr 12, 2012
|
it was amazing
|
You can almost feel the premise of this book and the story John Barnes wanted to tell crashing against current market forces. He's written a hard SF "
You can almost feel the premise of this book and the story John Barnes wanted to tell crashing against current market forces. He's written a hard SF "teens in space" YA novel with echoes of Heinlein, and today, it's estimated that somewhere around 80% of YA readers are girls. I am not saying girls can't read hard SF! Indeed, it would be great if more of them did, and clearly Barnes is trying to encourage more young readers to embrace the geeky science stuff. But the truth is, most girls don't read hard SF, so Losers in Space is competing with hot magical boyfriends for a mostly female audience. Even though the protagonist is a girl and there is a fair amount of sex (and all of it straightforward "Yes, they are teenagers, trapped on a spaceship, what do you think they're going to do?"), there is not much romance. So I'm not surprised I haven't seen a lot of buzz for this book, even though John Barnes is a veteran author. The fact is, Losers In Space is one of the best YA novels I've read in a long time. Of course my biases are obvious: not only do I love "teens in space" stories, but the novel I am working on is one. (Yeah, we are all recycling Heinlein.) Losers in Space is set in post-scarcity society, and initially, it seems like a utopia. PermaPaxParity guarantees everyone on Earth a basic standard of living that is luxurious by early 21st century standards, and people pretty much do whatever job they want to do, or no job at all if they just want to sit on their asses all day. You can be an astronaut or a schoolteacher or an engineer or an artist or a doctor or whatever else you can qualify for, but you'll be paid pretty much the same. But since it's no longer legal to inherit wealth, the only way to become rich - really, really rich - is to become famous. The nine teenagers who are our "Losers in space" are all the children of rich celebrities. They very much want to become rich and famous themselves, but they're competing with a planetful of aspiring celebrities. So one of them comes up with the brilliant idea of stowing away on a ship heading for Mars, in a stunt that will make them all famous. And in the PermaPaxParity society, you can literally get away with murder if you are entertaining enough. What makes this book great is that every one of our not-so-intrepid teenagers experiences character growth. The main character, Susan, starts out as an annoying Lindsay Lohan type, trying to get famous by providing mediagenic flashes of cleavage and crotch and hooking up with bad boys at drunken revels. We learn that until age 12, she was actually a geeky Science Girl, and then she hit puberty, discovered she liked boys and fame (not in that order)... and also her BFF, another geeky Science Girl, took a drug called Happistuff that is a sort of cross between Mad Cow Disease and Ecstasy: it causes progressive and irreversible brain damage while making the user unable to feel anything but happy. Susan's friend Fleeta, once as smart and curious as her, is now a bubbly bimbo whose every smile is a knife through her friend's heart. Fleeta comes along for the ride, joining a cast of other stock teen archetypes who also grow and change over the course of the story. There's the geek, the jock, the bully, the New Agey dingbat, the misfit, the nice girl.... oh, and the sociopath. That would be Susan's boyfriend. Their adventure is long and suspenseful, especially when we get to the inevitable betrayal by the sociopath, but it's a story full of humor and humanity and heartbreak, all the way through the epilogue. Now, Barnes does one thing in this book that kind of irritated me and I'm knocking off half a star for it, and other readers seem to have knocked off more. Since he's writing hard science fiction and he is really pushing the "science" part, he fills it with explicit infodumps. He does this in an ingenuous way, by making them skippable "Notes for the Interested" running in sidebars, in which he explains the physics of space travel, astronomical details, and information about the world of 2129. You really could skip them and still follow the story, but of course I read them all, but found them to sometimes be an annoying interruption in the narrative. It was an interesting idea, but I prefer when authors just skip the infodumping entirely. Tell us what we need to know for the story, don't overdo the "Science is soooo cool!" aspect. Nonetheless, this was a fantastic and believable story and I was really attached to Susan and her friends. Especially Fwuffy. 4.5 stars, must-read for any fans of Heinlein juveniles or other teens in space stories. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 12, 2012
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Oct 24, 2012
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Oct 12, 2012
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1440733082
| 9781440733086
| 1440733082
| unknown
| 4.31
| 1,251,154
| Jun 30, 1936
| 2009
|
it was amazing
|
I kind of don't want to give this book 5 stars. I'm going to, because it was epic. Seriously, it's a really, really good read and Margaret Mitchell wa
I kind of don't want to give this book 5 stars. I'm going to, because it was epic. Seriously, it's a really, really good read and Margaret Mitchell was a fantastic storyteller. She captures the feel of a lost generation and a bygone world and makes it real, pulsing with life and bittersweet memory and pride. Her characters are wonderfully vivid and complicated and conflicted, larger than life archetypes symbolizing the different elements of society each one represents. And the story is sweeping and grand. If you've seen the movie and thought it was gorgeous and epic, Hollywood only barely did justice to the source material. Gone With the Wind is deservedly one of the greatest Civil War novels ever written. But... there is a really big "but" here. [image]
There are a few things that Hollywood rather prudently left out in the cinematic version, like the fact that every white male character joins the Klan to oppose Yankees and freedmen in the period of Reconstruction following the war. And this is described in approbatory terms by the narrative viewpoint. In the book, unlike the movie, Scarlett finds Rhett Butler in jail because he killed a black man, for being "insolent" to a white woman. And this is treated as an example of how shocking, lawless, and hateful the Yankees are: they actually put a white man in jail just because he killed a negro! Indeed, throughout the book, Mitchell compares African-Americans to monkeys, apes, and children, describes slavery as a benevolent institution in which kind slave owners took care of their "darkies," and when the slaves are freed, society crumbles because black people are destructive children who can't function without white people telling them what to do. Reconstruction (in which the South learns that yes, you really aren't allowed to own slaves anymore and yes, you really did actually lose the war) is a horror beyond enduring, but we're meant to mourn the lost world of balls and barbecues attended by rich white plantation owners and their loyal, happy slaves. Now, you may be saying, "Well, sure, the characters are racist, of course former Confederates are going to be racist." And that's true, I wouldn't have a problem with the characters being racist and flinging the n-word about. That would be historically accurate. But the authorial viewpoint makes it very clear that Margaret Mitchell shared the POV of her characters.
Everything about the antebellum South (except its sexism, which is treated with satirical amusement and thoroughly lampooned by Scarlett in everything she does) is glorified and painted in a rosy hue. All sympathy is with rich white Southerners when Reconstruction destroys their world. Their former slaves? The author takes pains to describe how much happier and better off most of them were before being freed. Black characters are all offensive racial stereotypes who are constantly described (not by other characters, but in the narrative POV) as apes, monkeys, and children. "Gawdlmighty, Miss Scarlett! Ah's sceered ter go runnin' roun' in de dahk by mahseff! Spose de Yankees gits me?" I don't think you have to be overly "politically correct" to find Gone With the Wind to be a hard book to get through at times, with really glaring evidence of the author's Southern sympathies and unquestioned racism. And yet I'm giving it 5 stars. I suppose in the interests of political correctness I should knock off at least a star, but I have to be honest: I was just enthralled by this long, long novel from start to finish. Even while I was sometimes gritting my teeth at the racist descriptions and all the "Wah, wah, poor plantation owners, the Yankees took away all their slaves, life is so hard for them now!" I wanted the story to keep going and going. I wasn't bored for one moment. The protagonists, of course, are what make this a timeless love story. Note that's "love story," not "romance," because there's very little romantic about Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler.
Scarlett is an evil, conniving drama queen who if she had been raised in a society where women were actually allowed to do things would rule the world, but since she wasn't, she just learned to wrap the world around her finger and tell it to go to hell. She is absolutely the most self-centered character you will ever meet: in her mind, she is literally the center of the world. She sees nothing, understands nothing, and cares about nothing that isn't of direct and immediate importance to herself. And yet within her narrow, blindered view of the world, she's brilliant and adaptive and resourceful and unstoppable. The destruction of that glittering world of ball gowns and parties and negroes waiting on her hand and foot, in which she was raised to expect the world to revolve around her, is harrowingly depicted in her trials during the war and after it, and in her downright heroic accomplishments keeping not only herself but her extended family alive. Never mind that she never actually cares about anyone but herself, she does what has to be done, which is largely why her sister-in-law, poor Melanie Wilkes, believes to her dying day that Scarlett is a wonderful, noble, loving sister, even while the entire time Scarlett hates her and covets Melanie's husband Ashley. Then there is Rhett Butler. The most brilliant Byronic rogue ever. Rhett kicks Heathcliff and Rochester's prissy white English arses. He is a first class scoundrel and anti-hero with a dark, brooding swoon-worthy heart. Because he's ruthlessly pragmatic and mercenary, smart enough to know right from the start that the South has started a fight it can't win, and he makes millions as a "speculator," enduring the wrath and hatred of his peers and gleefully, smugly giving them the finger, and yet in the end he goes off to be a hero. And survives, and becomes a (very, very rich) scoundrel again, and his reputation keeps going up and down throughout the book. He is the only man who is a match for Scarlett, because as he points out, they are so much alike. Like Scarlett, he's awesome and caddish and hateful and the best character ever. Scarlett and Rhett's relationship is so much more tempestuous, conflicted, and compelling than in the movie. Every time they are together, it's like watching two grandmasters drawing knives and sparring. They were truly made for each other, they deserve each other, they could be happy together, and yet how could it end in anything but tears? Oh yeah, I loved this book. Parts of it are so offensive, it will not bear scrutiny to modern sensibilities (it was pretty darn offensive when it was written, even if they did make a toned-down Hollywood movie based on it a few years later), and if you can't stand reading Mark Twain and all his uses of the n-word, then Gone With the Wind will probably make you want to throw the book against a wall (which will make a big dent, because this is a big book). But it is powerful and moving, the drama is grander than any epic fantasy doorstopper, the romance is definitely there, and the characters are fabulous and melodramatic and you care about every one of them, even (especially) the African-American characters, despite Mitchell's offensive treatment of them. This is certainly not the only "problematic" book I've ever enjoyed, but never have I so enjoyed so problematic a book. If it weren't so damned racist, I'd give Gone With the Wind my highest recommendation. If it weren't so damned good, I could castigate it as a well-written but really offensive book whose author misused her gifts. But it's both, so I recommend it, but my recommendation comes with a big fat warning label. ...more |
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Feb 2012
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Feb 17, 2012
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Feb 01, 2012
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Audio CD
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| 0451527887
| 9780451527882
| 0451527887
| 4.02
| 210,923
| Mar 16, 1831
| Apr 10, 2001
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it was amazing
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Talk about being seduced by a classic. I was really not enjoying this book at first, but slowly it grew on me. Notre-Dame de Paris, or "The Hunchback
Talk about being seduced by a classic. I was really not enjoying this book at first, but slowly it grew on me. Notre-Dame de Paris, or "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" only becomes exciting in the last third of the book or so, but the first few hundred pages are a long, slow build-up that demands your patience and attention, and gradually you will realize what a masterful writer Victor Hugo was. The main character is not Quasimodo, nor is it Esmeralda, the beautiful gypsy dancer: it is the cathedral of Notre-Dame, which at the time Hugo wrote this novel was considered something of a medieval eyesore by the citizens of Paris. Hugo's book is part grand historical epic in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott, whom he admired, and part plea to his contemporaries to preserve the great architectural masterpieces of Paris. But you don't need that background to be sucked into the story. We are given a relatively modest cast of characters (there are probably a few dozen named characters, but less than a dozen have really important roles) and a few main plot threads which Hugo skillfully couples together. At the heart of the story is a priest, Dom Claude Frollo, whose passion is ignited when he first sees Esmeralda, a gypsy dancer, and he becomes so obsessed with her that he sends his minion, Quasimodo, a deaf and deformed hunchback whom he took in as a foundling, to abduct her. Quasimodo is foiled by Captain Phoebus of the King's Guard, who thus becomes a shining knight in Esmeralda's eyes. She is so taken with the handsome, dashing captain that even though he betrays and neglects her again and again throughout the novel, she remains hopelessly smitten with him to the end. Esmeralda is by turns kind and sweet and shallow and foolish; unlike some of the film versions, she's actually a young maiden of sixteen in the book. Quasimodo is hated and feared by the citizenry, which has turned him into a bitter misanthrope himself, but Esmeralda's kindness seduces him, too. However, this is no Beauty and the Beast. The entire novel is a story of misplaced and mixed loyalties, betrayals, ironies, and fatal misunderstandings. Besides commenting on history and architecture, Hugo also makes some sharp points about human cruelty and injustice, barbaric punishments, and the death penalty. He uses a surprising amount of humor, especially in the character of Pierre Gringoire, the poet-turned-Truand and Esmeralda's erstwhile husband of the broken crock. Captain Phoebus is also something of a comic figure, though I disliked him so much I never found him very funny, but the most comical figure of all is Louis XI, a king for whom Hugo paints a most unflattering portrait, even though he only appears personally in one chapter to set in motion the fatal events of the climax. I can't do this book justice in such a short review, but suffice it to say that I loved it, and that it is well worth wading through Hugo's occasional long expository passages (entire chapters about medieval architecture and long dialogs about taxes and speeches that go on for pages!) and seemingly unconnected subplots that go off on tangents. It all fits together in the end and is a great reward for the patient reader, who will be swept away by this powerful, passionate, sometimes grotesque and tragic novel. This was one of my biggest surprises of the year in my recent resolution to read more classics: I think The Hunchback of Notre-Dame has become one of my favorites. I didn't expect to love it like I love some British literature, but Victor Hugo is now rivaling Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Anthony Trollope for my literary affections. A long, slow read but easily a 5-star one. Do not settle for a movie version - they all suck compared to the book. ...more |
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Nov 24, 2011
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Dec 17, 2011
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Nov 21, 2011
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Paperback
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| 0441008933
| 9780441008933
| 0441008933
| 3.74
| 5,003
| Jan 2001
| Dec 31, 2001
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it was amazing
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This is the book that the movie Prometheus should have been: tense, scary, intelligent, with a building sense of dread that starts working its way up
This is the book that the movie Prometheus should have been: tense, scary, intelligent, with a building sense of dread that starts working its way up your spine the first time things start going awry, and gets worse and worse after each time the characters reach another level of We Are So F***ed. The Argonos is a generation ship, run by an Executive Council with nominal authority over the Captain. The first part of the book is largely political machinations: we learn that the Argonos has lost its original mission, or any connection with human civilization elsewhere in the galaxy. They occasionally find human-inhabited colonies, but infrequently and there is no substantial trade or diplomacy. Instead, they've become an insular, closed community, several thousand people divided into "downsiders," who are virtually serfs, and the ship's officers and crew, who spend most of their time playing petty political games. The main character and first-person narrator is Bartolomeo, an orphan born with stunted limbs and a misshapen spine, which he compensates for with an exoskeleton and prosthetic limbs. Nikos, a childhood friend of Bartolomeo, is now the Captain of the Argonos. Bartolomeo's gratitude toward the man who befriended him when no one else would and whose friendship now gives him a great deal of privilege he otherwise wouldn't have, is sorely tested when a group of downsiders try to enlist his help in a covert insurrection. The Captain's chief rival is Bishop Soldano, the leader of the ship's Church (never explicitly named, but clearly a futuristic Catholic sect). Although Soldano is an antagonist, the Church is not the villain here: one of the secondary characters who becomes Bartolomeo's close friend (and the object of his unrequited love) is Father Veronica, who brings a somewhat philosophical spin to the book, though really her conversations with Bartolomeo are pretty rote discussions of free will, the Problem of Evil, and so on. All this background serves to set up the interpersonal and societal conflicts after the Argonos reaches a world called Antioch, and finds the remains of a human colony. The colonists were slaughtered, in a horrific, nightmarish way. But when the Argonos leaves the planet, they pick up a signal from the erstwhile colony beamed to another point in deep space. Well, how can they not investigate? Of course it turns out that they really, really shouldn't have. They find an alien ship � the first encounter with aliens ever recorded � seemingly empty and abandoned. The scenes where Bartolomeo and his boarding crew explore the ship are all the scarier because there aren't any monsters. Yet. The ship is creepy and scary and even the most innocuous discoveries are just wrong in all kinds of ways, and you know the whole time (as Bartolomeo does too on some level) that this is Not Going To End Well. This is a book to which I find comparisons to movies come more readily than comparisons to other books, and that's not a bad thing. Think Alien, Event Horizon, or Lifeforce. (Okay, maybe not Lifeforce � that film was kind of crap.) But you will also find this kind of grimdark pessimistic sci-fi in another little-read favorite of mine, A Grey Moon Over China. Ship of Fools is space opera + cinematic horror, crossing Big Dumb Object SF with a haunted house. If any of these concepts sound intriguing to you, then you should read it. ...more |
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May 02, 2013
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May 09, 2013
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Nov 05, 2011
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 1441877614
| 9781441877611
| 1441877614
| 3.95
| 41,100
| May 10, 2011
| May 21, 2011
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it was amazing
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READ THIS BOOK! No, seriously, this book is every fairy tale and children's story and sad and happy and thrilling and scary Disney movie you ever saw, READ THIS BOOK! No, seriously, this book is every fairy tale and children's story and sad and happy and thrilling and scary Disney movie you ever saw, back when you were young enough for Disney movies to be taken at face value and you hadn't learned how to be cynical yet. Catherynne Valente writes with beautiful fairy tale prose that still sounds contemporary, and she balances the zaniness and fantasy of a down-the-rabbit-hole adventure with the darkness of true fairy tales and the lurking shadow of adulthood that only the finest children's authors can blend into a children's story without turning it either absurd or rendering it into something clever, something maybe even fun, but not quite timeless. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making is a story that should become immortal. It should join Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz and The Chronicles of Narnia on the shelf of books for Every Child in the World. I don't read much YA, and I read very little MG fiction, but this book won my heart and turned me into that 10-year-old who knew he was reading something wonderful again. If you have kids, read this to them, and if you don't, read it for yourself, because it's clever and subtle enough that even adults will find their hearts touched. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making begins with an ordinary 12-year-old girl named September who is taken by the Green Wind to Fairyland. It's so sudden and arbitrary it takes you a while to realize that Valente is very deliberately telling you right up front: "Yes, this is one of those stories where a child gets whooshed off to a magical world, and I'm not even going to bother making up a wardrobe or a tornado or a letter from Hogwarts to justify it." No, the Green Wind, wearing green jodphurs and with gold-green hair, just up and carries her away. On a leopard.
September, who is an ordinary girl with ordinary levels of intelligence, bravery, compassion, and maturity, then has Adventures. She makes friends. She is scared. She gets hurt. She is betrayed. And she discovers why she was brought to Fairyland. At every step, Valente shows a conscientious awareness of all the stories she is paying homage to -- sometimes she winks at them slyly, sometimes she practically dances them across the page complete with ruby slippers -- but this isn't a rip-off or a copy or a retelling, it's a new story. And September is awesome. I swear that every child who has ever loved a book, and every adult who has ever been a child who loved a book, will enjoy this. I see that some people have actually given this book a 1-star rating. All I can say to them is: [image] ...more |
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Sep 10, 2011
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Sep 14, 2011
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Sep 10, 2011
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Audio CD
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| 1441734317
| 9781441734310
| 1441734317
| 3.92
| 266,328
| Sep 21, 1962
| Mar 10, 2010
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it was amazing
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This singsong rhyme with which the villagers taun
This singsong rhyme with which the villagers taunt sisters Mary Katherine ("Merricat") and Constance invokes every creepy witch-taunting movie you've ever seen. Mary Katherine and Constance Blackwood live with their wheelchair-bound Uncle Julian in their once-grand family home. The Blackwoods have always been wealthy and apparently somewhat ostracized by the local townspeople because of it, but when almost the entire Blackwood clan is wiped out by arsenic poisoning, the survivors become outcasts, hated and shunned. It turns out that Constance was tried for the crime but acquitted; now she hides in her home, unable to face the accusing eyes and jeers of the outside world. The story is narrated from the viewpoint of Mary Katherine, whose life is full of strange rituals and talking to her cat, Jonas. It soon becomes evident that Merricat is a little... unusual. Disturbed. One might even say, out of her freaking mind. She is fascinated with poisonous herbs, she fantasizes about living on the moon, and she wants most of all to live with her sister Constance and never see anyone else. She creates magic words, buries things in the yard, and uses other spell-like rituals to "protect" the house and her sister, and since Merricat is the one telling the story, it's not immediately clear whether she's really crazy or not. The story unfolds slowly until you have a pretty good idea of what really happened before it is revealed, but the brooding, sinister tone of this short novel is creepy and dark and gothic, and by the end, it's not clear who the real villains are: the person who murdered an entire family, the greedy cousin who shows up looking for the supposed fortune hidden in the house, or the envious, grudging, small-minded villagers who feign concern and hospitality while mocking and slandering the Blackwood girls behind their backs (and often enough to their faces). We Have Always Lived in the Castle isn't your typical horror story; all the deaths have already happened before the book begins, and if you are looking for elements of the supernatural, you will have to look hard. This is what you might call an American psychological thriller, where the horror is what is very subtly revealed about Merricat and Constance and the Blackwood family, and the nature of ordinary people in ordinary small towns. 4.5 stars because Shirley Jackson's non-endings tend to leave me unsatisfied, and the plot is skeletal, a boneyard for the characters to dance in, but if you like spooky yet mundane, chilling but non-gory murder mysteries/thrillers, then this is a savory bit of creepiliciousness. ...more |
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1
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Sep 05, 2011
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Sep 10, 2011
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Sep 05, 2011
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Audiobook
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| 0812536355
| 9780812536355
| 0812536355
| 4.32
| 34,419
| Mar 1999
| Jan 15, 2000
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it was amazing
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Vernor Vinge has hit a home run twice in a row. A Deepness in the Sky had all the fantastic alienness mixed with human drama and far future sci-fi awe
Vernor Vinge has hit a home run twice in a row. A Deepness in the Sky had all the fantastic alienness mixed with human drama and far future sci-fi awesomeness that made A Fire Upon the Deep one of my favorite SF novels ever. I've become a lot pickier about my sci-fi, but A Deepness in the Sky has held up even better than the first book in the twelve years since it was written. At its heart is a conflict between two starfaring cultures: the Qeng Ho, a culture of interstellar traders who take the long view and regard planetary civilizations as customers, and the Emergents, a tyrannical empire powered by the secret of Focus, a virus that turns people into super-intelligent, docile slave-minds. The Qeng Ho and the Emergents arrive simultaneously at a strange star that flares into brilliance for a few decades and then goes dormant for centuries in a perfectly regular cycle. On the single planet orbiting the OnOff star is a race of spider-like aliens who have evolved to live on this planet that is only inhabitable for a few decades out of every couple of centuries. When the Qeng Ho and the Emergents arrive, the Spiders are dormant, frozen in their deepnesses, but when the star flares to life, they are poised to enter a modern technological age in the next generation. This three-way contest, with Qeng Ho and Emergents fighting a bitter war with each other full of treachery and dashed hopes, while the fate of the Spiders hangs in the balance, makes for a compelling story all the way through to the end. Vinge didn't drop the ball once, and he even made the Spiders relatable and interesting characters, so that the shift between human and Spider POV never annoyed me the way some books do when a more interesting character's story is left hanging to shift to a less interesting one. There is a whole raft of characters and you root (or hiss) for all of them. The book was epic and fully self-contained and one of the "harder" space operas out there, meaning it's mostly believable. Vinge does not rely much on hand-wavium to make his technology and plots work. Just plain awesome. I give my highest recommendation for both this book and A Fire Upon the Deep. ...more |
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Aug 22, 2011
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Oct 22, 2011
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Jul 28, 2011
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0143058150
| 9780143058151
| 0143058150
| 3.87
| 989,172
| Nov 26, 1859
| Jun 16, 2005
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it was amazing
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This is another one of those Charles Dickens classics I was supposed to read as a kid and never did. Since I've never seen any of the movies either, i
This is another one of those Charles Dickens classics I was supposed to read as a kid and never did. Since I've never seen any of the movies either, it was actually pretty unspoiled for me, though I did know how it ends (anyone growing up in the English-speaking world can hardly have avoided knowing Sydney Carton's famous last lines: "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.". Once again, I am in awe of Dickens's ability to craft larger-than-life characters whose defining personality traits and conversational tics carry them strongly through the story, and his depiction of France before and during the Revolution is as vivid and bloody as the Terror, despite his exercising all the expected Victorian restraint when it comes to actually describing bloodshed. He also contrasts Paris with London, and not always in London's favor; Dickens was a marvelous social critic of his time, and with understated clarity he shows the reader how, while the British aristocracy was no longer trampling peasants beneath their horses' feet with impunity, the English court system was hardly more just or less rapacious and corrupt than the French. The reader can be forgiven for thinking it's just a historical novel about the French Revolution and the thrilling escape of some of its would-be victims. Dickens tells us what the novel is really about in the last chapter: And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind. The story itself is typically Dickensian in that it is full of memorable characters who are all brought onstage separately and then brought together by a tightening web of plot threads that ends up tying everyone together one way or another. Once Dickens introduces a character, he means to use that character until the very end, and will use any improbable plot device to make sure everyone is where he wants them to be. So of course the spy who is known to the Defarges is the very same man whom Sydney Carton saw tried years earlier in London; of course the nephew of the Marquis who imprisoned Doctor Manette (who once employed Monsieur Defarge) is the very same man who flees France and marries his daughter; of course Sydney Carton and Jerry Cruncher just happen to be in Paris on business (with the "man of business" Mr. Lorry) when Charles Darnay goes there, etc. And there is the most improbable plot device of all, telegraphed at the beginning of the book when Carton faces Darnay during that London trial. But it all works to create a tense and very enjoyable novel. One of my chief complaints about Dickens (besides his overuse of coincidence) is his very Victorian view of women: always angels of one kind or another, whether fallen or still high on their pedestals. But he almost redeems himself of that in this book with his Angel of Death, Madame Defarge (and her sidekick, The Vengeance), one of the scariest ladies in British literature. And the final confrontation between Madame Defarge and Miss Pross was all the more epic for that Dickens so rarely resolves a situation with a scene of violence, and this time he did it with two bad-ass women, both of them practically waving their national flags as they went at each other. Definitely a favorite, and one I should have read earlier. ...more |
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1
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Jun 09, 2011
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Jun 19, 2011
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Jun 09, 2011
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Audio CD
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| 031613161X
| 9780316131612
| 031613161X
| 3.86
| 37,864
| 2006
| Jun 01, 2010
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it was amazing
| “Ree Dolly stood at the break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. Carcasse “Ree Dolly stood at the break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. Carcasses hung pale of flesh with fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.� This is why I read more literary fiction now. It's why I have made such a turnabout from my not-long-ago days of sneering at litfic as pretty words spewed out by MFAs at the expense of plot and characterization. Oh, I still love my genre books, and there are plenty of litfic writers who leave me slow-clapping unmoved (I'm looking at you, Philip Roth and David Foster Wallace and John Banville), but Winter's Bone is a novel that is as accessible as anything on the YA shelves, and it's about a sixteen-year-old girl and full of drama and adventure (and some sex), but it's not YA because it's got some stylized writing that might force the YA-junkie's brain to stretch ever so slightly, and there are no vampires or zombies or dystopian governments, and a hot boy is not the heroine's reward at the end of the novel. Winter's Bone is set in the modern-day Ozarks, a place where Daniel Woodrell (who has a MFA) grew up and still lives. Not the pretty Ozark towns and tourist resorts, but the back backwoods, a violent, insular, dirt-poor place, where the people are hard, poor, and proud, and most of the region's GDP comes from meth. Ree Dolly is a sixteen-year-old girl who carries her entire family on her shoulders. She has two younger brothers and a mother who's permanently checked out, mentally. Ree's grand hope was that these boys would not be dead to wonder by age twelve, dulled to life, empty of kindness, boiling with mean. So many Dolly kids were that way, ruined before they had chin hair, groomed to live outside square law and abide by the remorseless blood-soaked commandments that governed lives led outside square law. There were two hundred Dollys, plus Lockrums, Boshells, Tankerslys, and Langans, who were basically Dollys by marriage, living within thirty miles of this valley. Some lived square lives, many did not, but even the square-living Dollys were Dollys at heart and might be helpful kin in a pinch. The rough Dollys were plenty peppery and hard-boiled toward one another, but were unleashed hell on enemies, scornful of town law and town ways, clinging to their own. Sometimes when Ree fed Sonny and Harold oatmeal suppers they would cry, sit there spooning down oatmeal but crying for meat, eating all there was while crying for all there could be, become wailing little cyclones of want and need, and she would fear for them. Her father is a meth cook who's in and out of their lives. When he goes missing before a court date, the sheriff's deputy tells Ree that her father put up their house as his bond, and if he doesn't show, they'll be kicked out.
This is an amazing story about a tough, brave girl in a very hard environment. Most of the men are doing criminal deeds in the back woods, most girls wind up married on account of pregnancy, like Ree's best friend Gail, and as trapped as the men with no way out.
Everyone in this book is already on that hard, bleak road: some, like Ree and her brothers, you think could still get off that road; others, like Ree's terrifying uncle Teardrop, whose face was melted by a meth explosion and who's usually high on crank, have just enough humanity left to make them Greek tragedies. Ree sees her future looming before her, and the future of her brothers, and Woodrell doesn't give you any promises that they are going to be any different. He paints a harsh, vivid picture of stark woods, iron-faced women, trigger-happy men, blood-feuds, and honor killings, all in a place that could be America a hundred years ago except for the meth. Ree's quest to save her house by finding out what happened to her father means crossing the extended, violent Dolly clan that doesn't like anybody asking questions, least of all girls. Even knowing what she is up against, Ree doesn't quit. She is going to make them give her what she needs or kill her, one or the other.
I loved this book because the astringent prose is Faulkneresque, while the story, the characters, the real raw messy human hearts bleeding on the page, are superior in every way to what so many readers of less challenging fiction (i.e. YA) say they want but settle for from Magical Boyfriend books. [image] I actually saw the movie before I read the book, which means it was harder for me to judge the plot twists in the book when I already knew what was going to happen. I will say that the movie is fantastic, a real piece of art, and it's also one of the most faithful adaptations of a book I've seen. Scene for scene and line for line, almost everything in the movie is straight from the book. “I said shut up once already, with my mouth.� Brrr. Woodrell has a brilliant way of conveying in a few words that these are people with whom you do not fuck. Comparisons between Winter's Bone and The Hunger Games (which, despite my snark, I did also like) are inevitable. Jennifer Lawrence starred in both movies, for one, and did quite a marvelous job in both roles. But the parallels between Ree Dolly and Katniss Everdeen are pretty obvious: two girls living in oppressive backwoods squalor, forced to hunt squirrels to feed their younger siblings, trying to take care of a family with a mother who's mentally checked out and a father who's gone... it's amazing more people don't accuse Suzanne Collins of ripping off Daniel Woodrell than Koushun Takami. The life-and-death struggles of the Dolly clan are every bit as bleak and violent as those of District 12, except, you know, real. In terms of style and heart, though, Winter's Bone is much closer to True Grit, another favorite of mine. Ree is a little older and a lot more worldly than Maddie Ross, but Ree is more like Maddie, self-possessed and unswervable, than the passive pushed-and-prodded-into-action protagonist of The Hunger Games. Winter's Bone is a more grown-up tale than either of these other two books, though; it's got not just blood, but shit and piss and puke, not gratuitous but in all the places where human beings are messier than they can hope to be on film. It's ugly and beautiful and equally raw in both aspects, from the beatings Ree takes to the brief blink-and-you'll-miss-it lesbian subtext, to the ending, which, like the lesbian thread, is one of the few things elided in the movie. Violence and vengeance is like gravity; Ree might escape it, she might not, but not all those around her will. My highest recommendation. ...more |
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Dec 27, 2012
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Dec 28, 2012
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Jun 01, 2011
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Paperback
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| 4.44
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it was amazing
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This collection of short stories and essays by cult Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is amazing. He's like a hard intellectual blend of Gabriel Garc
This collection of short stories and essays by cult Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is amazing. He's like a hard intellectual blend of Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, H.G. Wells, and H.P. Lovecraft. It's impossible to put his stories in a single category -- there are elements of fantasy and magical realism, some of them have the surface form of a murder mystery, others of a pulp adventure story, and in the middle of any of them you might find yourself exploring theories of the mind, refutations of time, or the meaning of infinity. This is one of those books that, read at a young age, will probably warp your literary horizon, in a good way. Even at my relatively advanced age, it popped a few fuses, and I'm sure this won't be the last thing I read by Borges. If you are a traditional sci-fi/fantasy fan but want something really different that will challenge you, I can't recommend this volume highly enough. Don't be fooled by the relatively short length (260 pages), as even some of Borges's two-pagers will take a while to work through (unless your brain works very differently from mine).
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Jan 03, 2011
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| 4.60
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it was amazing
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Sep 21, 2015
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Sep 13, 2015
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| 4.09
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it was amazing
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Jan 04, 2015
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Dec 23, 2014
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| 4.00
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it was amazing
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Dec 25, 2013
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Nov 24, 2013
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| 4.05
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it was amazing
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Dec 08, 2013
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Nov 13, 2013
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| 4.08
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it was amazing
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Nov 28, 2013
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Nov 01, 2013
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| 4.40
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it was amazing
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Oct 20, 2013
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Oct 03, 2013
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| 4.13
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it was amazing
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Aug 10, 2013
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Jul 02, 2013
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| 4.02
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it was amazing
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Jul 27, 2013
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May 31, 2013
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| 3.91
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it was amazing
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Feb 12, 2013
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Feb 03, 2013
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| 3.50
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it was amazing
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Jun 09, 2013
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Oct 25, 2012
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| 3.34
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it was amazing
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Oct 24, 2012
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Oct 12, 2012
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| 4.31
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it was amazing
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Feb 17, 2012
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Feb 01, 2012
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| 4.02
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it was amazing
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Dec 17, 2011
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Nov 21, 2011
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| 3.74
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it was amazing
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May 09, 2013
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Nov 05, 2011
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| 3.95
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it was amazing
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Sep 14, 2011
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Sep 10, 2011
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| 3.92
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it was amazing
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Sep 10, 2011
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Sep 05, 2011
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| 4.32
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it was amazing
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Oct 22, 2011
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Jul 28, 2011
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| 3.87
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it was amazing
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Jun 19, 2011
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Jun 09, 2011
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| 3.86
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it was amazing
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Dec 28, 2012
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Jun 01, 2011
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| 4.44
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it was amazing
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Jan 09, 2011
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Jan 03, 2011
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