Matthew Rasnake
As much as I enjoy Kerouac, especially his esoteric/unconventional approach to poetics, I have enjoyed other collections of his poetry/haiku a little better than this one, which achieved its intention of being a comprehensive overview of his approach to the haiku form at the expense of a lighter/less selective editorial hand that resulted in a somewhat unbalanced, meandering straight-through read. Depending on what you're looking for, this may be a bad or a good thing.
I can generally recommend both Scripture of the Golden Eternity and Pomes All Sizes as being better representations (to my taste, at any rate) of Kerouac as poet and spiritual aspirant.
However, as a late entrant to the Kerouac canon, I do appreciate this volume for its chronological structure and the depth of its insight into Kerouac's pursuit of form.
It took me five years of intermittent attention to finish it, but I finally made it through. This is an incredibly dense book whose glacial pace matches the glacial pace of the plot itself. Slow, plodding, and choked with scientific minutia (both presumably real and clearly imagined), this is the hardest of hard sci-fi. If you're very interested in the prospects of establishing a human presence on Mars, or perhaps in the psychology of extreme life extension, you may well love this book. Just make sure you have time to focus and settle in for long passages about things like planting genetically engineered lychen.
The book itself was decently written and enjoyable. Nothing groundbreaking, but offering some bright spots in characterization and setting. Unfortunately, the narration was a little flat and there was a persistent transformer hum during most of it, which was made more apparent because of the bits that were filtered out during the silences. Some of the punch-ins weren't quite matched well enough to the surrounding recording, which had a dissonant effect. Audio issues were slight enough to be forgivable and not really detract from the overall experience.
As a prequel story, it leads—as it must—to the terrible down note that begins the series, which results in a disappointing conclusion here. The book itself is reasonably well-written, and attempts to illuminate the backstories of some of the new characters that populate the series. Somewhat inexplicably, unless I glossed over it somewhere, there's no mention of Laris until the epilogue, which seems a glaring omission.
A decent take on continuing the Hitchhiker's “trilogy,” but a bit too much fanservice and digression for my taste. In all likelihood it fits perfectly, and I'm just being snobby. The author manages to mimic Douglas Adams style fairly faithfully, but there are a few obvious instances where the author pokes his head in and throws things off just enough to remind you you're not dealing with the genuine article.
If you're a HHGTG fan, it's probably worth a read, if you're a purist, you're fooling yourself, and if you're not a fan, you probably won't see past the SEP field in the first place.
I listened to this as an audiobook, and while it was fascinating listening, I didn't quite get how this became such a seminal and influential work. Perhaps it's that I've heard so much about it (the hero's journey, the “monomyth”) from literally everyone who talks about modern storytelling, that the contents are too familiar to seem innovative. Perhaps I just missed too much and I need to re-read it as a physical book.
I adore the Sherlock Holmes canon, and this has to be the preeminent audio edition. It is splendid from start to finish. I can't imagine a better narrator than Stephen Fry, whose mellifluous voice, and deft use of accent and characterization bring every nuance of these classic stories to vibrant life. Early in the set, I was mesmerized by Stephen Fry's adept voice acting, but in the later chapters I heard only Holmes, Watson, and their supporting characters.
My singular critique is that Fry's default “male American” voice appeared with little variation between the stories which called for it, which left a very minor blemish in the veil of believability in the separateness of the characters. There were variations for other “male American” characters, especially when several appeared in a single story, but this standard voice was uniquely identifiable enough to stand out.
This is a phenomenal achievement, and if you're a Holmes fan I would hold this up—along with the Jeremy Brett television series—as one of the definitive, canonical Holmes collections.
I enjoyed “The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet” quite a bit. Others have mentioned that it's in the same vein as Firefly or Farscape, which is accurate, and puts it right in my sweet spot. The world is well realized and complex, and while there are occasional expository digressions to get some of that stuff worked out, it's by no means disruptive. Like the worldbuilding, the characters are well realized, distinct, and a joy to read. They can feel like echoes of more familiar characters—Kizzy is a clear echo of Kaylee, and Ashby is a more subtle echo of Malcolm Reynolds—but again, this in no way detracts from their distinctness, and mainly serves as a comfortable foothold.
More than the worldbuilding and the characterization, I was drawn in by the prose itself. The author has an enjoyable style that really paints a picture. I'm a fairly sensitive reader, and this book had me all over the place emotionally. Anything that can make me chuckle involuntarily or tear up in the middle of a crowded coffee shop is clearly doing something right.
All that being said, and as good as this book is, I found myself wanting more. There are a few (only a few) missed opportunities or things that were glossed over or skipped that I would have loved to see on the page. Also, I feel that Rosemary, the main character, was not given quite enough room to develop. Her backstory was explained and examined fairly deftly, and she had a clear arc of growth from Solan to spacer over the course of the book, but I felt some of it, again, was glossed over. There were some things not well enough explained to really ground the character, and other things not quite setup enough to make her actions/choices seem completely natural.
Despite these few, very slight flaws, I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and highly recommend it.
Good, but not great. Entertaining, but predictable and cliche ridden. Vulgar and crass, in a somewhat amateurish way. Some characters made leaps of logic or understanding of which they shouldn't have been capable. Again, it was entertaining, and I did generally enjoy it, but I don't feel compelled to pick up the next book in the series.
I don' t have strong feelings about this book in any particular direction, it was better than 2 stars, but not quite three stars, so I rounded up to three.
The book was a mish-mash, interesting and entertaining at points, and occasionally engaging, but not consistently enough for me to ever truly enjoy it.
It was an interesting character study, though every character was broken in some way. It had a few explicit sexual encounters, some of which were interesting for their social connotations, and others which just seemed gratuitously provocative. It was also an interesting social commentary on times past, showing how the tides of social change wash over us, sometimes carrying us under and sometimes letting us ride the waves.
Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more if I had a stronger interest in historical fiction. As it is, for me it was a moderately interesting jumble of a book.
I am a little surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. I'm generally not a fan of period fiction, nor of the snobby pretensions of Victorian society. This book, however, despite the stilted late 19th/early 20th century language, was very readable, frequently humorous, and surprisingly engaging.
My only complaint is that it can be a bit long and tedious at points, but those points were rare.
This ended up being much better than I thought it would be based on the first page. It's not a perfect book, being a bit choppy in places, but it is engaging and visceral. I'm not big on dog stories, but I found myself identifying with Buck in many ways both endearing and disturbing. Overall, a nice little (short!) book.
At the beginning of this book, the author mentions how he hadn't intended to write a sequel to his original “The Tao of Pooh,” but since that book had been such a Remarkable Success, he eventually just had to. After reading this book, it seems to me that it would have been better if he hadn't. Perhaps he was short of ideas, or hurting for money, or trying to recapture earlier success, but whatever the reason it seems he produced something that didn't really even captivate himself.
Honestly, it's been a while since I've read “The Tao of Pooh,” and it's possible there was just as much political posturing as is found in this book, but I don't recall it that way. My memory says “The Tao of Pooh” was a well constructed, reasonably presented book with a coherent message. My memory says “The Tao of Pooh” achieved its goal in illustrating Taoist principles using excerpts and examples from Pooh stories.
Unfortunately, “The Te of Piglet” doesn't live up to its pedigree. It's a disjointed diatribe hiding behind an alluring premise. There's quite a bit of railing against modern society and its evils, and quite a bit about how the Eeyores, Rabbits, and Owls of the world are causing so much disharmony and destruction. There's even a bit about how Piglet is a Very Small Animal with a Very Big Heart, which seemingly is the purpose of the book, but which gets bulldozed over by the author's pre-occupation with pushing his own political agenda. And I'm saying this as someone who generally agrees with the author's political agenda.
Ultimately, I didn't buy this book to get assaulted by politics, I read it to get a unique perspective on an Eastern philosophy that I admire. And that, sadly, seems to have only been the secondary or tertiary purpose of this book for the author.
If you liked “The Tao of Pooh,” do yourself a favor and don't pick this up. In some ways, I feel this book has ruined my perception of the earlier book, and of the author himself, which is a shame.
It's not often that I will actually STOP reading a book, on purpose, once I've started. Sure, sometimes I'll put it down for a while and come back to it later, but like leaving in the middle of a movie, putting down a book–for good–without finishing it is something I just don't do.
Well, now I have.
The premise of this book intrigued me, with its vague intimations of a philosophic and Zen inspired discourse on time–how we perceive it, and how we might get back to a better relationship with it. Presumably, that discourse exists somewhere within the book, but I wasn't able to slog through the first few chapters to get to the meat of it.
The author is apparently of an American school of writing influenced heavily by the Beats. His prose attempts that Kerouackian stream-of-consciousness that Jack managed to pull off with energy and weight, but which this author only stumbles around with, coming off as amatuerish and disjointed. The book feels like a first draft, with the author repeating the same ideas several times in the course of several paragraphs, and revisiting them again later in the same chapter. By the third reading of the same statement, the reader is left saying “OK! I get it! Can we move on!”
Coupled with repeated assertions, the author employs broad, seemingly faulty interpretations of events or social phenomena to support his ideas. The first few times these weak arguments show up, the reader may be willing to overlook or forgive. But with each additional instance, the reader's patience is tried and the author begins to seem like a buffoon.
Ultimately, as I said, I only made it through the first few chapters before I had had enough of the faux-progressive prose and faulty logic. The book comes across as something that might have been an interesting idea for a 10-20 page essay, which has been expanded–to its great detriment–into a full-length book.
For the premise alone, I wish I could recommend the book... but I can't. Don't buy it, spend your precious time on something worthwhile.
It is hard to know what to say about a book like this... first of all, Obama is obviously a shrewd politician (with all the attributes that that implies). My impression of him, however, has always been that he is a sincere one, who truly has the best interests of the country and the people at heart. I also enjoy his oratorical style, over which, i've been led to understand, he exercises great control. It is with these impressions, and in the wake of his victory in the 2008 elections, that I finally grabbed this book off my shelf to read.
The primary feeling I have about this book is that it confirms my understanding the absolute sincerity of his belief in this nation. In every chapter, it is made clear that, while there are obviously hurdles across the long road the country still has to travel, he truly believes that if we just hold to the principles set down by the founding fathers, we can continue to perfect our union, and be the beacon of hope and prosperity that can lead the world itself into an era of peace and understanding.
He takes great care in pointing out how he, and those in his position are riding that razors edge, by necessity, between remaining advocates and representatives of the people, and becoming beholden to the rich and the special interests. He shows how he and his colleagues often have to go out of their way to connect with their constituents, and not get distracted by a schedule filled with private jets, black tie affairs, fundraisers, and lobbyists. Sometimes, yes, it seems like he's trying too hard to say “but look at all these real people I've talked to,” and “look how grounded I am.”
A good deal of the book is about his personal journey, his political and family history. He talks a lot about his wife and kids, his mom, and his grandparents. He also talks a lot about policy, even specific policy proposals that we've seen take shape and become further defined during his Presidential campaign. He also talks a lot about the troubles we still face, with the sharp partisan divide that's plagued the nation for so long. He places blame on both sides, and not undeservedly, I should think. And yes, he talks about race and the progress that we've made that should be celebrated, and the progress that's still to be made that has its roots in all sides of the debate.
He also, talks about the founding principles of the nation, and how we relate to them, how we remember them, and how, perhaps, we should re-embrace them for the betterment of our nation. He gives facts concerning the intention of the founding fathers, their beliefs, and how, in many instances the great compromises they had to make in order to ensure we had a strong foundation from which to build.
He relates all these things to the way that we, as a nation, have to come together. How we need to stop bickering for the sake of our entrenched and unreasonable positions, and come together by defining those things that we can agree on, and leveraging those to reach compromises on those things that we can't. American is not a nation of absolute truths, and black and white moral judgements, and it never has been. The only absolute truths to be found in the DNA of our nation are these: that all are created equal, and that all have the right to live their lives as they see fit in the pursuit of their happiness. As Americans, we have a common ground, we have a common language, and we have a common goal. If we cannot see them, it is because we've allowed ourselves to become distracted on our path to a more perfect union, by thinking that “the union will only be perfect when it's perfect for me.”
Ok, well, some of that was me leaking out, but somewhere in there is the gist of what he was driving at.
Bottom-line is that this a really worthwhile read. For those who are already in Obama's camp, this will surely solidify your understanding and appreciation, not just of the man himself, but of his sincere belief that we can make this a better nation with hard work and compromise.
For those conservatives and ditto-heads out there still harboring resentment and distrust of our new President, I recommend this to you even more highly. If your judgments are based on soundbites, policy breakdowns, and the haranguing of the conservative talking head crowd, you'd do well to get a real introduction to your President, straight from his own pen.