Book Review/Recommendation topic

[speedchuck]

Did you just finish a really good book that everyone ought to read? Do you like organizing your thoughts on a piece of fiction? Have you found a hidden gem that you are certain a syndicate friend would love? Do you want to curate a comprehensive list of books every book lover should read?

Do you want to read through 50 Shades of Grey and trash it for our entertainment?

This is the book review/recommendation topic, the place to do any of the above, or comment on reviews and such. I will, at the very least, be participating.

[ColinIsCool]

Nice thread. I’ll have to post about the Murakami I’m halfway through when I get done with it (hopefully this weekend but looking grim).

[insertnamehere]

Nice thread. I’ll have to post about the Murakami I’m halfway through when I get done with it (hopefully this weekend but looking grim).

HELL YEAH HARUKI MURAKAMI

[ColinIsCool]

Today I finished After Dark by Haruki Murakami.

There isn't a lot of story to it; young people wander in the night and things happen, some very mysterious and some not. It's sort of like a Murakami take on Before Sunrise, and while it starts out feeling very quotidian by Murakami's standards, that's not the case at all by the end of it. There weren't very many passages that either spoke to me emotionally or really gave me pause because of the weirdness, but it was decent overall and there are some relatable themes in it.

Spoiler: show

Specifically, a lot of the book seems to be about the distance we put (or find) between ourselves and other people even in close relationships, like a sister to a sister or a husband to a wife. Mari and Eri are undeniably closer at the end of it than they have been since childhood, while Shirakawa is as distant from his family as can be and savagely beats a young prostitute for no reason that we ever learn — possibly because there is some fundamental fracture in him as a result of how far removed he is from anyone else.

I would rate it a 3/5 and place it in the middle for Murakami. Not mindblowing by any means, but it has some neat ideas and it's worth checking out if you're into him or magic realism (plus it's very quick).

For those of you who have never read Murakami, his work is usually described as dreamlike and nonsensical in a good way. He'll juxtapose a scene of someone making pasta in great detail with a cat looking up and speaking, or two moons appearing in the sky, or someone slipping into another world. In that sense he is definitely part of his own magic realist tradition, but if you're looking for something as clean as Gabriel Garcia Marquez think again — a lot of the time his work feels to me totally inscrutable and hard to discern a really clear thesis from. I walk away from Murakami books roused by certain feelings I had while reading it, but never with even a good understanding of what I just read. He's one of my favorite novelists, though, and worth checking out for sure.

As a bonus I'll rank the books by him I've read too (don't hate):

Spoiler: show

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle [a masterpiece]
Sputnik Sweetheart
Kafka on the Shore
Norwegian Wood [his most "normal" novel and not a bad starting point]
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
After Dark
Pinball, 1973
Hear the Wind Sing
1Q84
Hard-Boiled Wonderland the End of the World [really did not like this]

I have some old plays that an ex-girlfriend loaded off on me in college, so I think I'll read one of those next.

[dunya]

you rank norweigan wood as normal?

holy shit man, that book made me cry like a baby and depressed me for a month for reals.

wind-up bird chronicle is probably my fav by him too though so good choice.

[ColinIsCool]

you rank norweigan wood as normal?

holy shit man, that book made me cry like a baby and depressed me for a month for reals.

wind-up bird chronicle is probably my fav by him too though so good choice.

Emotions aside, it’s probably his most realistic. I don’t remember any of the usual Murakami oddities appearing.

[ColinIsCool]

I finished The America Play and Other Works by Suzan Lori Parks. It’s a collection of Parks’ plays from the late 80s and 90s and they all focus on themes of black identity, history, and, uh, other stuff I couldn’t tell you about. Parks is a MacArthur genius grant recipient and I’m sure these plays are interesting when staged — I’d like to see one — but as far as reading the text goes, holy hell are they hard to follow. I really couldn’t get into any of them for extended periods as there are almost no typical plots, just characters talking (sometimes to each other, but rarely). They’re also written in a kind of vernacular that’s supposed to be representative of AAVE, I guess, but it comes off as that annoying elitist style (bad, white) authors tend to write Southern characters as speaking in .... “The America Play” in particular begins as a really interesting monologue of a man known as the Foundling Father, a Lincoln impersonator who re-enacts the assassination for money, but it ends up going the way of the rest of them and was more or less something I endured. Overall I don’t recommend reading them, but if you have a chance to check out the live performances they may be interesting.

[ColinIsCool]

I finished Good Sex by Ray Belliotti. Dr. Belliotti was one of my favorite professors in school and his philosophy classes really left an impact on me, the last one being Sex and Love. This was the assigned text for the course, but he's a talented enough writer that I didn't mind buying it or finishing it later. It's a pretty thorough examination of sexual ethics from ancient Greece to contemporary feminism and also has some good diversions into selected problems. Belliotti proposes his own sexual ethic in the last half of the book after finding the other main schools of thought (Christian morality, sex with love, Marxism, several versions of libertarian contractualism and more of feminism) to be lacking, and it's hard (though not impossible) to disagree with his metric. I think it was pretty widely taught in the field for a while, so anybody interested in real-life philosophy applications might get good mileage out of it.

[Sloonei]

The last few books I've read have been:
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology by Joseph Campbell
God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert

Magic Mountain has blossomed unexpectedly into my favorite novel I've ever read for reasons that aren't fully formed yet. It painted a remarkably intimate and lucid portrait of the human psyche in various aspects. I will need to revisit it later. I was in it for an exceptionally long time. There is a break in the narrative somewhere near the middle where time jumps forward several months and when I reached that point I decided it felt appropriate to let a significant length of time pass in real life as well before picking it back up, but while I had it on hold it didn't really leave my interest. When I came back I found that I was even more engaged with it than before.

Crime & Punishment didn't resonate with me as much as I had hoped that it would, but I'm not sure it is at fault for that. I got through it quickly and it was certainly compelling. Perhaps reading it in such quick succession after The Magic Mountain took something away. Both are stories focused heavily on the mental state of their subjects, but the former was much more dense and sucked me into its aura a bit more thoroughly. I had complete sympathy with Hans Castorp and was still stuck at the sanitarium a little by the time I moved onto Raskolnikov's little garret. Magic Mountain is a very methodical narrative, whereas Crime & Punishment is (intentionally) extremely frantic.

Joseph Campbell is my favorite writer/scholar/personality of the last century and I've spent most of my time out of school consuming as much of his work as I can. The Masks of God is a four part series compiling the history, form, and evolution of world mythology. I'd read the first entry, Primitive Mythology, last summer, and just got my hands on parts 2 & 3 (Oriental Mythology, Occidental Mythology) this year. Part 4 is Creative Mythology, which has been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of years as I'm committed to reading them in order for some reason.
Oriental Mythology was as compelling to me as everything he did in his life and is exactly what it sounds like: a comprehensive study on the origins and development of Hindu and Buddhist myth and spirituality, starting with a look at some Egyptian and Mesopotamian mythic traditions, and eventually working into India, China, and Japan. I don't recommend it to anybody who's unfamiliar with Campbell though. As an introduction, since I know you all care so much, I'd recommend either The Hero With a Thousand Faces (for which he's most popularly known) or the documentary series The Power of Myth, which is available on Netflix.

God Emperor of Dune is the weirdest of the Dune series that I've read to date. I've been slowly working my way through Dune for a few years now. I like breaking the books up, revisiting the world and themes after some time away. I don't know why, but it's comfortable for me. Dune Messiah is my favorite in the series so far. God Emperor got decidedly wacky but never lost me at any point and I'm looking forward to the day that I sit down to read the 5th book. I forget if that's Heretics or Chapterhouse.

Now I'm doing preliminary readings for classes. I've got some basic literary theory to read about, and also some Arthurian legends, which is something I've always wanted to get around to anyway. But I need to wait for the latter to be delivered first.

[ColinIsCool]

That’s high praise for Mann — who’s the translator on your copy?

I wasn’t that impressed by Crime and Punishment when I read it either, but I was in high school and it may have been a little out of my depth. I don’t think I had a very celebrated translation either ... then again, I’ve been reading War and Peace off-and-on (mostly off) for 4 years now so maybe Russian lit isn’t my bag.

[Sloonei]

That’s high praise for Mann — who’s the translator on your copy?

HT Lowe-Porter, from Vintage International. I picked it up at a thrift store without knowing much about Mann or the book at all.

[juliets]

This thread makes me want to get back to reading some good books instead of the mystery-procedurals I gravitate to. I think the last two great books I read were The Gold Finch by Donna Tartt and Olive Kittredge by Elizabeth Strout, both Pulitzer Prize winners and I loved them both. I am currently reading another prize winner called The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright a non-fiction book about the history of Al Qaeda and what led to 9/11. Fascinating book if you like the history of cultures.

[ColinIsCool]

I just finished The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson. It’s easily the best thing I’ve read all year and one of the best novels I’ve read. I wondered going into it how it would portray North Korea — the book is about a sort-of-soldier who has a few different vocations — and it doesn’t disappoint; at times it feels like fantasy but then you remember it’s all actually happening. The book is clever, funny, and heartbreaking; it straddles a few different genres but does them all well. I think it won the Pulitzer when it came out, and I’d say it was well-deserved. It’s going to be one that sticks with me.

[juliets]

That sounds like a good one [mention]ColinIsCool[/mention]. I'll pick it up after I finish a few I have right now. Only $9.74 on Amazon.

[ColinIsCool]

I finished Well-Schooled in Murder by Elizabeth George. It’s no. 3 in a detective series I started reading for coursework in college, about a posh Scotland Yard inspector named Lynley who comes from wealth and privilege and his partner, working-class Sgt. Barbara Havers. I really like George’s mysteries because she populates them with very full, fleshed-out characters, and she always has good twists. Makes it hard to predict who the killer is, but this time I had the suspect in my POE. This one’s about a murder at a prep school and it’s very dark — all of her mysteries go to some pretty disturbing places — but it hits the spot. There’s like 18 of these books and some plots that continue through all of them, but you can pick up any in the series and be fine.

[juliets]

I finished Well-Schooled in Murder by Elizabeth George. It’s no. 3 in a detective series I started reading for coursework in college, about a posh Scotland Yard inspector named Lynley who comes from wealth and privilege and his partner, working-class Sgt. Barbara Havers. I really like George’s mysteries because she populates them with very full, fleshed-out characters, and she always has good twists. Makes it hard to predict who the killer is, but this time I had the suspect in my POE. This one’s about a murder at a prep school and it’s very dark — all of her mysteries go to some pretty disturbing places — but it hits the spot. There’s like 18 of these books and some plots that continue through all of them, but you can pick up any in the series and be fine.

I read the whole series and loved it. Keep reading in order.

[ColinIsCool]

That’s awesome! I read With No One as Witness in a class on mystery fiction in college, which has some, uhh ... big plot developments ... but I’m going back from the very beginning now.

[juliets]

That’s awesome! I read With No One as Witness in a class on mystery fiction in college, which has some, uhh ... big plot developments ... but I’m going back from the very beginning now.

I think that was the one book I hated for reasons that are surely obvious to you. Also I took a class in mystery fiction in college! I thought I was the only one!

[ColinIsCool]

Yeah, my favorite English professor taught it every few semesters and it was a blast. We did Poe, Conan Doyle, Christie, Raymond Chandler, Sue Grafton (thought that one wasn’t that good), Michael Chabon’s old Holmes book, maybe a few other things. I didn’t read a lot of mysteries before that class but I love them now.

[juliets]

Yeah, my favorite English professor taught it every few semesters and it was a blast. We did Poe, Conan Doyle, Christie, Raymond Chandler, Sue Grafton (thought that one wasn’t that good), Michael Chabon’s old Holmes book, maybe a few other things. I didn’t read a lot of mysteries before that class but I love them now.

It's like you are talking about my life. We also read Poe, Christie, Doyle and Chandler along with Sayers and Rhinehart and a few others and it was taught by my favorite professor. Since that class I have read all of the mystery books I can get my hands on. I look at the Poe Awards every year and try to read all those nominated for best fiction. (I have been slack the last two years though.) That class really gave birth to a life- long love.

[juliets]

I remember I was reading this book on an airplane coming back home from somewhere and sat in utter shock after finishing it. I heard the movie wasn't great and if you've seen it then the ending is ruined, but if not I recommend the read. Here's a review I just found that concisely sums up my experience.


Atonement
Ian McEwan; Introduction by Claire Messud
The powerful emotion and sensuality of Ian McEwan’s writing is an extraordinary thing the first time you experience it. For me, Atonement may be the zenith of his considerable skill and while it’s well worth multiple reads, nothing compares to the devastation that comes with working through the novel’s final pages for the first time.

[ColinIsCool]

I’ve always been interested in that. I’ll have to check it out sometime.

[speedchuck]

I just finished reading The Aeronaut's Windlass by Jim Butcher, author of the Dresden Files series (which I love.) I'd give it four stars or so. I liked it, and I'd buy a sequel, but I don't see myself rereading it.

The strength of the book is its world-building. Bit by bit it unravels a world of ancient spires rising from the dangerous surface world into the misty skies, airships driven by ether cores, etherialists (or crazy mages in touch with this 'ether'), bizarre creatures, and cat tribes. Each part of the world-building is really well-done. The cats that are frequently present in the story act just like cats, to an amusing extent. The action is well-described and frantic, especially the airship battles.

It's hard for me to pinpoint why exactly I wouldn't give this book five stars. It is competently-written. The characters all grow in some way or another. There are a lot of POV characters, but each one is interesting in their own way.

But if I had to guess, I'd say it's the war that kept this book from hitting four stars.

A big theme of the book is war. One or two main characters are veterans of many battles, and the others are completely new to it. For those new to the war, the main aspect of their character growth is overcoming reticence and acting in the heat of the moment. Learning courage, self-sacrifice, and what it means to be a soldier. Even the disillusioned veteran, unfairly dishonored in his days in the war, has to come back and relearn his devotion. These are good arcs.

They bore me.

I can't think of a single decision in the book that wasn't just 'buck up and do what needs to be done,' and that is the only part of the book that bores me. When I read character-driven books, I want the characters to make decisions. Big, bold decisions. Leaving the threat alone needs to be a viable option. Or perhaps, how they deal with the threat. Make it personal. Give them no easy 'right' or 'correct' way. There weren't many points in this book where I wondered what the characters would do, only what the outcome would be once they acted in a way befitting honorable soldiers.

Heck, if some of them had just straight up failed to make the right choice, it might have hit five stars. But while not perfect, every character made the right decisions. No lashing out in revenge, no cowering back to watch as a friend dies that they might have saved. Only the best that they could do, the whole time.

Good characters, good arcs, great world-building, great cats, awesome creatures, great action. No poor or nuanced choices concerning the characters.

4/5 stars.

[ColinIsCool]

I finished The Invention of Fire by Bruce Holsinger maybe a week or so ago. It's the second in a detective series by Bruce Holsinger, who is a medieval history professor and focuses his stories on the poet John Gower in long-ago London. I was seriously enthralled by the first one (A Burnable Book), but found its sequel pretty lacking for reasons I'm not totally sure about. Everything about it — the prose, the world-building, the direction of the plot, the crux of the plot, the side characters — felt ... lacking, and not nearly as captivating. I pretty much finished it just to finish it, which is never a good sign. I'd have to revisit the first one to know if it's really that much worse or if my tastes have just changed a bit since I read it three years or so ago, but I suspect it's a little of column A, a little of column B. Disappointing.

[juliets]

[mention]ColinIsCool[/mention] , do you read any other detective series?

[ColinIsCool]

I used to read John Swartzwelder (prolific author of many episodes of The Simpsons) and I want to get more Christie and Chandler. But I split my time in a lot of directions and read a lot slower these days so not really at the moment, but that said, I’d like to!

[ColinIsCool]

I finished Fates Worse Than Death by Kurt Vonnegut a few days ago. Vonnegut is "the guy" for me, so I liked it a lot of course, but YMMV — it's a heavily autobiographical memoir-ish collage of different articles and speeches he wrote during the 1980s, stitched together with thematic bridges on topics like family, art, war, mental illness, and more. I could read Vonnegut's thoughts on anything at this point and I pretty much have.

[ColinIsCool]

My reading has slowed to a crawl lately, but I am still chugging along. Senior year I took a seminar on Dante but we didn’t cover the third part of the Divine Comedy, Paradisio, so I’ve been rereading the whole work. Inferno is great and very heavy metal. I’m about halfway through Purgatorio now and it’s enjoyable too. You dig more into the meat of Dante’s moral philosophy in that one, I feel, and it’s interesting if nothing else. Get a good edition that has footnotes, though, because otherwise you’ll be lost.

[juliets]

My reading has slowed to a crawl lately, but I am still chugging along. Senior year I took a seminar on Dante but we didn’t cover the third part of the Divine Comedy, Paradisio, so I’ve been rereading the whole work. Inferno is great and very heavy metal. I’m about halfway through Purgatorio now and it’s enjoyable too. You dig more into the meat of Dante’s moral philosophy in that one, I feel, and it’s interesting if nothing else. Get a good edition that has footnotes, though, because otherwise you’ll be lost.

Wow Colin I took a semester of Dante at U of A when I was in school. I never thought I'd run into someone who did the same at another school. We did the whole thing. It's been a while ago though and I've forgotten a lot of what I learned. Should read it again.

[ColinIsCool]

It seems like you and I took a lot of similar courses! Mine was actually taught by a philosophy professor but it was similar to a lit course, just with frequent digressions into bigger picture issues and theories.

[ColinIsCool]

Finally finished the Divine Comedy — as I had somewhat predicted, the further you go, the less interesting it is. Paradiso is alright but it’s mostly Beatrice lecturing on astronomy or the perfect order of the universe, which doesn’t provoke the mind as much as the existentialism of the other 2 books. Plus the horror factor of Inferno captures the imagination better and makes it more fun in general. I realized my copy has La vita nuovo, Dante’s “little book,” at the end, so I’ll be getting to that eventually, as well as my old professor’s short textbook on Dante, but for now, I think I’m going with something released in the last year or so ...

[ColinIsCool]

I finished Universal Harvester by John Darnielle, aka the guy from the Mountain Goats. I don’t want to praise it too much, but it’s probably the best book I’ve read all year. Considering that John writes his songs in such a novelistic way (with a great sense for character, story, workd-building details, etc.) I shouldn’t be surprised but I’m very impressed. It’s about a video rental store where strange things start appearing on the tapes, and it’s very spooky and sad. It’s a little twisty so I don’t want to say too much but it strikes a really nice balance between horror and verisimilitude and I’m pretty excited to read his other books now.

I also quickly got through Dante’s Vita Nova, which is supposed to be a collection of love poems but mostly just creeped me out. I know the world was different when Dante was alive but ... the Dante-Beatrice “relationship” (in quotes, because it doesn’t exist) is textbook neckbeard incel stalker stuff, and Dante’s histrionics and metaphysical rambling honestly make him sound insane. So it’s enjoyable, but definitely not in any way that was ever intended.

[G-Man]

My review of the Thesaurus.

Overall Rating: B-

I wouldn't recommend it.

[ColinIsCool]

I finished 25 books in 2018, with Universal Harvester (see post above) being the best of them. Hoping to get those numbers up this year.

[S~V~S]

My review of the Thesaurus.

Overall Rating: B-

I wouldn't recommend it.

When I was a teenager, when I got grounded, my folks meant business. No TV, no phone, no radio, no fun books. I had to sit in my room and reflect on the evil of my ways. I was allowed school stuff and reference works. I skimmed the dictionary for words new to me (the probably source of some of the more obscure vocabulary words I pull out of the air on occasion), and the thesaurus as well.

But the big fun for me was my encyclopedia. This was before the internet, so I had an actual encyclopedia. BUT, my parents didn't have alot of $$ ... it was my fathers childhood encyclopedia, like it still had Stalin alive and the Queens Dad was still King. World War II was over in this version of the world, but not by much. I was in trouble alot, a baddie even as a teenager, so I made it through most of it over the years.

It was an interesting perspective. But I am not sure I would do it again if not compelled to do so, so kudos to you!

[G-Man]

I have the complete Time-Life Nature Library set from the 1960s to read through and I look forward to it. It was my grandmother’s set before she remarried. When she moved out of her apartment, I got the set. I loved looking at the pictures as a kid. It will be interesting to see how outdated some of the science is though when I read them.

[G-Man]

Reading Harry Potter Will Never Be the Same Again: A Review of the Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms

Overall Rating: B+

Wonderful little book. It's just not meant to be read like non-reference books.