Carlos
An interesting blending of urban fantasy and weird western genres, which also achieves a solid noir vibe.
“The Great God Pan” is a classic horror tale, though pretty dated in its Victorian approach to sexuality. The Hill of Dreams is more interesting, an autobiographical tale of the dreams, frustrations and alienation of a sensitive young man and aspiring writer. Machen's introduction, where he details the sometimes frustrating process of creating the novel, is worth a read on its own.
With its themes of terror and the sea juxtaposed with queer sensuality, this hit me in all of the ways that Zarate's “The Route of Ice and Salt” did. It's the kind of narrative I don't always follow yet feel very much engrossed by.
La invasion is Piglia's debut collection, and though not at the same level as Nombre Falso or his novels, still reflects his talent and sense of storytelling. One thing I found interesting was how he manages to use the influence of predecessors like Borges or Arlt while still making the stories very much his own. Favorites include “Las actas del juicio” and “Mi amigo.” A couple of the stories–“Las actas del juicio” and “Mata Hari 55”–are included in some editions of Nombre Falso.
Initial reaction:
I enjoyed it more than Station Eleven but overall I'd say it was fine. I may try another St. John Mandel joint in the future but I suspect I'll never get out of her work what other people seem to get.
Additional thoughts:
I think as I've sat with this story, I've started to like it a little more. Though I have my quibbles with the way the story is constructed, I think it's an effective reflection of the experience of dislocation and isolation that we all underwent during 2020.
DNF at 25%. The book's not awful, but it's definitely not for me. Half of the story is a low-stakes romance set amidst Argentina's Dirty War. The other half, where a young socialite investigates whether her rich, handsome, urbane father was also a hero during the Dirty War, has even lower stakes. (For a while, I held out hope that we'd learn he had actually done bad things which could at least create the potential for drama, but this did not strike me as that type of book.)
While there are is some good information about Argentine culture and history, much of it is communicated through these info dumps that while often related to what's going on are poorly integrated into the character's voice & journeys.
Also, to be just a little political, but every time the rich male protagonist claims that his family–large land owners who are also “good Catholics”–has a reputation for being “politically neutral,” I cringed. Considering the role of class and religion in Argentina's history this is, at best, tone deaf.
I think the book is trying to balance information about Argentina and its often tragic history with a lightweight romance plot. But its blindspots and blandness made it an experience I felt I had to walk away from.
An entertaining ghost story with a unique setting which mostly suffers from trying to be in dialogue with Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. This is Rebecca as filtered through a modern sensibility, where the ghosts have to be literal, the heroine plucky and the lines between good and evil unambiguous. A solid debut novel from Cañas.
I've been following Silvia Moreno-Garcia's work since reading Love & Other Potions. It's consistently great, filled with unique premises, fascinating characters and engaging plots. I think this may be her finest work yet.
I had some concerns when I started this book. Concerns such as, “Am I too old for Kerouac? Is all this poet-hipster adventuring sort of pretentious?” So I was surprised by the deep current of melancholy that runs through the book. Jack Duluoz (Kerouac's alter-ego) certainly has his share of adventures in the poet-artist scene, but there's also a real sense of the madness and precariousness of the scene.
The story starts of with Duluoz' time spent as a fire lookout in the Skagit Valley national park. The solitude and melancholy is in some ways at its strongest here, with no drugs or companionship to take the edge off of it.
Duluoz then hithchikes and rides his way back to San Francisco to spend time with the Beats there. Here we meet his regular crew, including the Ginsberg stand-in Irwin Allen, who comes off as a fascinating figure.
One gets the sense of the ferment of the social scene, of how the desire to create and to challenge social norms led to experimenting with art and notions of the self. From here, Duluoz and friends head to Mexico, then Morocco, Europe and back to America.
I wouldn't describe Kerouac's style as my favorite, but it does a good job of capturing the feel of the era and his own spiritual hunger. Kerouac, in fact, seems already somewhat jaded by the reaction to One the Road, frustrated by the empty hipster pose it seems to have inmspired among many.
So, if I had to sum it up, a fascinating narrative of spiritual hunger and frustration, of social ferment and an era when one world of post-WWII conformity was about to break apart.
A novel about the tension between Argentine identity and American identity, where Argentina's Dirty War serves as the source of the conflict. Though well researched and beautifully written, it felt somewhat brought down by two big factors. The first is that the descent to Hades functions principally as a very long flashback, so there is little tension as to the outcome. The second is that much of the protagonist's motivation is linked to his unrequited love for the girl he grew up with, which gives the novel something of an “angsty white boy” feel.
I feel bad abandoning this one, since I'm a fan of Cat Valente's work. Still, it was due back to the library, I have other books I need to get to, and was starting to feel like a slog.
Maybe I'll come back to it again some time in the future, give it another shot and see if it was just matter of my mood, of bad timing or some other ephemeral factor.
Strangely, I'd finished Valente's The Glass Town Game perhaps 2 or 3 weeks before this one. That one, a sort of Wizard of Oz by way of the Brontës, was delightful. So, I was expecting this one to be equally brilliant
I think it's really hard to pull off a work like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which Space Opera is aiming for. I figured Valente, a wonderfully talented writer, could have pulled it off. For lack of a better word, this just felt excessively twee, missing some element to ground it and make the jokes really pop.
Though Space Opera is better written, it reminded me of The Eyre Affair, another HGTTG-influenced work which didn't really work for me.
No star rating since I didn't finish, but the part I got through would probably be a 2.5 stars. I'm hoping I get a chance to revisit it and find I was wrong.
If you like Pertwee-era Doctor Who but feel all the “hapless British soldiers firing guns ineffectually at inhuman monstrosities” action would benefit from some awkward sex and bloody gore (as in “geysers of blood,” not “bloody good show”) then this is the book for you!
The novel imagines what sorts of dreams Einstein might have had while working on the theory of general relativity. In these dreams, time takes on varied and fantastic forms. In some, time runs backwards: in others, it depends on a person's perception, location or mood. Highly inventive and reminiscent of Borges' and Cortazar's surreal short stories, these stories trace the way that our lives and interactions are shaped by our perception of time.
DNF at 48%. It wasn't bad, but I had to return it to the library. When it became available again, I let it pass, realizing I didn't feel any investment in finishing the story.
It's an interesting concept, but I found the Power Rangers-style mechanics a bit juvenile and the politics kind of incoherent. It's a novel dealing with racism and New York City in which Lovecraft gets name-checked 9 times and Robert Moses not once. Overall, a rather surface-level take on both Lovecraftian horrors and social justice.
Some great worldbuilding and interesting characters in a story set in a world destroyed by a great flood. Falls a little bit into cliche at times.
One criticism I often heard of Danielewski's debut novel, House of Leaves, is that it seemed like there was a good horror story at the center but that it was undercut by all the postmodern wankery going on with footnotes, typefaces, formatting, etc. I count myself a House of Leaves apologist and thought that it was a rather weak argument. However, I now find myself in a similar position. Only Revolutions is an epic poem (or more accurately two epic poems) about Sam and Hailey, two seemingly ageless teenagers, and their wild adventures. The style is experimental, feeling perhaps like some cross between Finnegan's Wake and Ginsberg's Howl, but once I got into it, I found it quite moving, if sometimes a little opaque. I also like the fact that the book is written so that from one direction you get Sam's poem and if you flip it over and start reading, you get Hailey's poem. But much of the other elements, such as the sidebars of cryptic historical events or the colored o's just felt too much, distracting from an already challenging poetic tale.
If on a winter's night a traveler explores the experience of reading, and the place of the reader, author, text and rest of the world in said endeavor. The Reader (who is a character in the novel) finds his attempts to read the novel frustrated by incomplete texts, interrupted narrations, false translations, and other diversions, so that the novel is made up of the beginning of ten different novels as well as the Reader's own adventures with another reader and with the truth of the novel. Delightful, witty and inventive.
The Stand meets E! True Hollywood Story. DNF'd at 63%.
I'll avoid a deeper analysis for now, but I want to highlight the moment I turned against the novel. I continued reading but couldn't forget how much this line reflected the novel's flaws.
During an endless account of a character's rise to Hollywood stardom, we learn that several times he had to drop off friends at emergency rooms because of “exotic combinations of alcohol and prescription medications.”
Hollywood actors getting into trouble by mixing alcohol and prescription drugs has been happening before the Hayes code existed! What is the word “exotic” doing there, aside from trying to disguise the sheer banality of what's being described?
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Update. I've decided to rate this. I don't normally spite rate, but after watching and really enjoying the HBO adaptation, I decided to give this another shot.
It lasted until page 2.
He'd dropped the British accent he'd been using earlier and now sounded as if he were from Alabama, which in fact he was.
this thing seemed like X, because it actually was
Pablo talks about metaphorical machines a lot, also the Man. He sometimes combines the two, as in “That's how the Man wants us, just trapped right there in the corporate machine.”
The word “thug” comes from the Thuggee (deceivers) who allegedly plagued India prior to the arrival of the British. Though there is some controversy nowadays as to the extent of their existence, tales of their exploits made a strong impression on the 19th Century British and helped justify a stronger colonial presence on the Indian subcontinent.
Confessions of a Thug is the story of one of these men, Ameer Ali, a Muslim thug who led a long and successful career as a Thug before his luck ran out. Ali relats his story to an English interviewer, starting with the death of his father at the hands of thugs and his adoption by the band's leader. Soon, he is grown up and interested in taking up the family trade, which his bravery and cleverness make him particularly suited to.
Though the interviewer occasionally interjects to render moral observations on the action, the voice that predominates is that of Ali, who comes across as an interesting anti-hero. With his cunning and boldness and his travels across India in search of those to rob, he comes across as an exotic adventurer-criminal, like some mix of Sinbad the Sailor and Tony Soprano. This is somewhat underscored by his tales of commanding men under the Pindaris, using freebooting armies to extort treasure from defenseless communities. Ali is as proud of his battlefield exploits as of his work with the strangling cloth.
An interesting story of crime and death on the Indian subcontinent, with many interesting local details. Somewhat dated nowadays, especially in its transliterations from Hindi, but still an interesting read.
A bizarre and haunting story of a failed poet who discovers an eerie hole in the storage room of the sleazy apartment building in which he lives. Not scary so much as creepy and sometimes morbidly funny.
To Live is the story of Fugui, an old man whom the unnamed narrator encounters while travelling around the countryside studying the folk songs and tales of the area. As a young man, Fugui came from a relatively wealthy family, but he managed to lose all of his family's property through gambling and carousing. Having brought his family down, he decides to devote himself to being a good husband and father. However, fate intervenes, first in the case of the war between the Communists and the Nationalists, into which he is conscripted. Having survived that, he returns home only to see the upheaval caused by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Yet, despite all this and the tragedies within his own family, he perseveres. It's a poignant account of one man's life in upheaval, which also has the feel of a Taoist parable about facing hardships.
Initial reaction: Just by the law of averages, the movie is bound to be better.More thoughts: I keep telling myself I should write a review before this book vanishes from my memory. It's the sort of high-concept thriller that will quickly fade. There is a good chance that in a few months, the only thing I'll remember is that the author doesn't know the difference between Spanish and Tex-Mex cuisines.Final thoughts: Dark Matter isn't so much a bad book as it is two mediocre books often working at cross purposes. On the one hand, there is the thriller, the pulse-pounding excitement of a man thrust into dangerous situations and having to think on his feet to survive. One the other, there is the speculative fiction, the thought-provoking vista into how a man's choices define him and what happens when he confronts the road not traveled. That is, Dark Matter would like to be Sliding Doors meets Face/Off.Yet, those two impulses end up working at cross purposes. It's need to keep the pace up keeps the novel from really sitting with the spec fic elements, leaving most of the potentially intriguing questions about choice and identity to be dealt in really superficial matters. On the flip side, the sci-fi conceit is fantastic enough that the protagonist spends much of the novel dependent on underdeveloped secondary characters for exposition and even survival, robbing the character of agency. It's not until near the end that he finally starts making decisions which don't feel idiotic, but by that point it's too little, too late.I can imagine a better version of this novel, one in which the sci-fi and action beats are better integrated, the characters more fleshed out, a greater sense of mystery and wonder cultivated. However, the version of the story in this reality is dull and forgettable.Though not in any way related to Crouch's novel, I'd recommend the Starz series Counterpart for anybody interested in the combination of thriller and speculative fiction.
A wonderful cross of noir and Cthulhu Mythos storytelling that never feels like parody.
Delightful story set in Lovecraft's Dreamland's. When a young student at Ulthar Women's College runs off with a boy from the waking world, Professor Vellitt Boe sets out to bring her back, unaware of the complications she'll soon run into. Johnson's tale works both as a critique of Lovecraft's male-centered views and a loving tribute to the worlds he created.