Thomas
What to say...
Friends in my spec-fic book club have been talking about House of Leaves off and on for a while. I took one look and said, “not for me, babe.” A few weeks later I was having drinks with some folks and one asked something to the effect of, “do you like ergodic literature?” After ensuring they hadn't said, “erotic literature,” I replied, what the hell is ergodic literature?”
A while after that, I was in my neighborhood bookshop looking for a copy of something I can't remember. I was in a money-spending mood and saw House of Leaves poking out of the shelf, one copy, already a little removed. Is this for me?
I opened it up and thumbed through. One of the first pages proclaims, “This is not for you.” Well, we can't have that, can we? But $30 for an odd book that I might hate? I was in the right mood for it.
I did a lot of chuckling as I read, because it started to teach me a lot about how I read and interact with books. A bit in, I caught myself writing a note, asking a question in the margin. I thought about that. Here I am, asking a question in the margin (asking who?) of a fiction novel that is essentially about an academic write-up of a movie that may or may not exist, about a house that may or may not exist, that may or may not (but definitely isn't) be cousin to The Doctor's TARDIS. Oh, and there are footnotes by not one, not two, but three different sources and connections to not one but two appendices.
It's just clever! I enjoyed engaging with the story. Decoding messages in an appendix after reading 50 pages of someone's descent into mania and psychosis - why not? But decoding a second message in the same place? That practice making everything else suspect (do the dropcaps mean anything? Does the translation say what the editors, what JT, says???).
All very, very, fun for me. I loved the constant in and out of the multiple stories, the intentional immersion breaking, the mystery. Nothing is true, but everything is true. Who can you trust? It's a work of fiction, what's it matter? Why are you flipping back to a piece of paper that's in a collage to identify a symbol, what are you some kinda nerd?
I had a really, really, good time reading this. I may have looked a nut rotating it and taking pictures and flipping them so I could read other parts, but it just tickled my fancy. I'll let other, smarter, folks talk about what it all means. I just had a good time.
Wow! Incredible read. I wondered a few times if this is one of the scariest books I've read. I'm left contemplating this, because it is so much more than a ghost story. Morrison's writing is beautiful and haunting. There are times when I had to re-read passages several times to track what was happening, but not in a way that was unpleasant. It felt intentional and designed.
The book also does some interesting stuff with spacing that I found enjoyable.
Having finished the book just a few minutes ago, I don't know what else I can write about it. It's still banging around in my head. I feel like it will be for a long time. This is one I'll re-read in the future, and I think it will be a rich experience. I may update this review later with more thoughts.
I thought this was really good! It is descriptive, not prescriptive, providing a scaffolding that one can use in approaching street photography. I particularly enjoyed the photographer profiles and examples of their work. For inspiration, I bookmarked a lot of websites and followed a lot of folks on Instagram, not to mention added some books to my watchlist.
I listened to the audiobook of this through my local library / Libby. I think it would work better as a workbook - I think you'd benefit from writing some notes or being able to have this open on your desk or something to reflect on. In general, I think it has a lot of useful things in it, things that I will look to incorporate or at least be mindful of.
One thing that the author says frequently is that (paraphrasing) nothing gets done in meetings. I have a bit of a bone to pick with that. It may be true in software or developmental work, where the “work” is code, but when you're working on policies or big questions and how they will impact a field of grantees, meetings ARE the work. You need to be able to bring people together, have conversations, and figure out thinking. You can pass a Word document around 5 or 10 people for weeks and weeks, trading comments and feedback, or you can set up a working meeting to nail things down. These are things that matter. So, while I get what the book is trying to say, I wouldn't have been so authoritative in saying, “nothing gets done in meetings.”
Otherwise, there is a lot of stuff in here that could be useful to folks working in bureaucratic systems.
Wasson puts out a pretty interesting book about Francis Ford Coppola centered on Apocalypse Now and One from the Heart as the dominating frames. There is a bit of biography on Francis, but the interest is really with his approach to filmmaking and his philosophy on artistic spaces. A lot of the text has to do with American Zoetrope, and later in the book, Electronic Cinema.
I love many of Coppola's films. I couldn't help but think that he sounds like a real headache to work or live around. I have to imagine that his charisma must be nearly on the level of someone like a Steve Jobs to command the loyalty he did/does throughout so much consternation.
I agree with other reviews here that this would have benefitted from additional editing and structure. The book is only loosely chaptered and mainly operates on sections (Dreams and The Apocalypse) that kind of have no meaning. Sometimes, it felt disorganized and tangential. I think additional scaffolding would have helped.
Not sure where this falls on the spectrum of “entry-level” to “intermediate.” On the one hand, the questions posed are accessible and make sense for beginners to ponder. On the other, it gets pretty philosophical pretty quick. Many of these are also questions that practitioners will have already encountered or at least flirted with in day-to-day work.
I felt worried as I read the prologue, not knowing where this was going or what was going on. In the end, I'm still not sure what the prologue and epilogue are doing, but I liked everything in between them.
The first 1/3rd is pretty slow, but as things start to ratchet up, the story and discussions become much more interesting. I was not expecting a translated piece of Soviet-era science fiction to be quite so funny, but I was frequently chuckling at Don Rumata's bristling against people. There's a scene around page 190 where he comes up against some bureaucracy and calls the bureaucrat a “blockhead,” which gave me quite a giggle. He does that a lot.
I feel like the satire or speculation, which sort of simmers throughout the first 2/3rds, shows itself plainly in the final third and does so quite well. I particularly enjoyed some of Rumata and Reba's back-and-forth. I think if this were summarized at all, the best selection of pages to communicate the core ideas are probably pages 214-218, the conversation between Rumata and another character where the book's title shows itself and those ideas are explored.
I think I would benefit from a re-read somewhere down the line, as I'm sure the pro/epilogues have significance, but I'm not sure what it is.
I didn't realize how much I read about the development of nuclear war capability, and the after effects of a nuclear war, compared to the conduction of a nuclear war.
Of the 90 or so books I read last year, my favorite non-fiction was Richard Rhodes' 1987 THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB. It describes in close detail the scientific history leading up to the development of the most powerful bombs ever developed, at the time. DARK SUN, the sequel, which describes the sequel to the Bomb (the Super) is on my list to read.
In fiction, post-apocalypse stories are some of my favorite. THE ROAD is perhaps my favorite book, and takes place after some world-ending cataclysm (which is left ambiguous, but reads nuclear to me). On the other end of the spectrum, the video game series (and now TV show) FALLOUT has been one of my favorites for years upon years.
There's a theory about why we haven't encountered alien life called the Great Filter. It imagines that something makes it extremely difficult for life to progress to such a stage as to develop into something we would or could identify. Civilization-ending nuclear war (e.g., any and all nuclear war, Annie Jacobsen writes) could be a possible filtration event for our species. It would also be a filter through which survivors pass.
I read parts of this book sitting in Meridian Hill Park in Washington, D.C., about 2 miles north of the White House. After each section, I looked up to watch dogs playing, people running around, a little kid pick up a stick. I imagined what it would look like if these were instantly turned to carbon following a bright flash, all grass and trees around me vaporized instantly, the stoneworks and roads turned molten. In D.C., helicopters are constantly passing. Big Sikorsky VH-3Ds frequently pass over the Park, and each time I imagine that the President must be on it (who knows?). A large helicopter passed in the distance and I watched it and imagined being in the back cabin as the first pure white silent flash of a nuclear detonation blinded me. Not having time to understand that words like “time” and “reality” would no longer have any meaning to anyone nearby. Perhaps anyone, anywhere, if the scenario this book describes were to occur.
I told my mom what I was reading and she asked if it made me nervous. No, I live 1.5 miles from the White House. If a nuclear bomb is detonated, most likely I will be dead before anyone could hear it. Then again, I live in a basement, so perhaps I would live for a while crushed under the building. Or maybe I would be lucky and the force of the detonation would blow all of the buildings totally away and leave me with a view of the gray, fire-lit skies. Lucky enough to die imminently of radiation poisoning. Hm.
What makes me nervous is that everyone interviewed for the book knows that this situation doesn't work. Everyone. No one thinks it is a good idea for nuclear bombs to exist. At best they deter other people from using nuclear bombs. In a way, deterrence does less to guarantee that no one will ever use one, and more to guarantee that if anyone ever detonates one, everyone will detonate all that they have.
There are a few scenes in the book where leadership fret about what appears weak and strong following the detonation. That is to say, once where I am sitting right now ceases to exist and once what survivors of government and military there are sheltered in Raven Rock pondering the end of humanity and proportional response. I had to set the book down and think about this. Is anyone concerned about looking weak after taking an intercontinental ballistic missile to the cranium? I thought it sounded a little unrealistic. Then I got nervous because it sounds a little too realistic.
I am not sure what else to say about the book. The long and short of it is, if there's ever a mistake or madness that leads to a nuclear launch (let alone detonation), there's a good chance that no one will ever say anything ever again. Or see, hear, or think anything ever again. At least not after a few months for the few survivors to starve to death. They might think of a few things. One of them might be, “oops.”
But probably not.
I haven't ready many short story collections, so have no idea how to review or critique these. I felt like the collection was uneven. A few stories stood out as enjoyable, or at least graspable. Some were flatly gross and I didn't really get them (the first two, in particular, which are also the most scatalogical).
There were plenty of times when I could detect satire, but knowing essentially nothing of the sociopolitical situation in Indonesia, the punch was lost on me.
Thanks to Tor and the Goodreads Giveaways for an ARC of this book.
This new novel, from debut author L.M. Sagas, is billed as “fast, brash, and wickedly fun” by Dayton Ward. On the inside, author J.S. Dewes says it has “earned its place among my favorite found family tales, alongside Killjoys, Mass Effect, and Battlestar Galactica.”
I couldn't stop thinking about Mass Effect the whole way through. Mass Effect is one of my all-time favorite video game series. There are big chunks of this book that read a bit like ME fan fiction. I don't know whether that is good or bad. Though I love Mass Effect, my joy here is less than full. I think it's because the story is so oriented around the “found family” and writing has a style tries to emphasize the ‘fun' and ‘gritty space crew' over everything else.
I kept thinking to myself, “I think other people would find this very fun.” I wish I did, but what I find fun in a video game is distinctly different from what I enjoy in a book. I have been reflecting on my reading (especially relating to my book club books, of which this is one), and I realize that I don't enjoy fun books very much. I had to work to finish the book. The way the author writes characters and dialogue is so far removed from what I like - every single emotion and motive is spelled out, sometimes over and over. There is so much telling, so little showing. Think words repeated, words in italics, words emphasized with “fucking” and other expletives (which does not offend, just doesn't work for me).
I also don't enjoy found family stories. There is a scene where the crew has a brief reprieve from the action and so they're dancing with one another. I had to skip pages to get past all of this, I couldn't take it.
If you're a reader that enjoys really light fiction with no thought required, where everything is explained, this would be a good pickup. If you want to read the novelization of a Mass Effect DLC that never was, I think this would be a good pickup. It's not reflective, contemplative, or serious in almost any way. That means it wasn't a good fit for me.
I felt obligated to finish this because it's a debut. I won't be picking up the novel's sequel, but I will check-in in a few years to see what sort of thing the author is writing at that time. This feels like an author finding their legs and using a very firm structure to manage that.
I feel like I've heard almost nothing but praise for this and Song of Achilles over the last few years. Song of Achilles has been on my list for a good while, but I happened on this in a little free library so I read it first.
Once I began approaching this as a series of short stories, rather than a single novel, I started having a better time. I think the chapter layout of this robs it a little, because while there are threads that weave throughout, big chunks of the book have nothing to do with the others. It felt like 3-4 short stories.
It probably sounds bad, but I feel like the novel didn't really hit its stride until just before Odysseus appeared. Perhaps that is because the mythology of Odysseus's interaction with Circe provides a firmer scaffolding. Perhaps I'm just too attached to the Odyssey. Who's to say?
Certainly, the back half (and more particularly the final third) is the best part of the book. The first third felt very slow, very boring. Hearing of the gods and titans is fun, but I found Circe kind of annoying, and not very interesting. That said, we definitely get a lot of character growth out of Circe throughout. The Circe at the end is not the Circe at the beginning and this is one of the better character developments I have seen written. Perhaps I enjoyed the final third so much because of all the things set down in the first 2/3rds that I found only passing.
I will probably read Song of Achilles when I can find some time. Once I got through the first third, the book came into its own.
This is a pretty quirky little book. The core story is interesting. It chronicles the journey of an elephant from Lisbon to Vienna in the middle of the sixteenth century. There are numerous digressions along the way hinting at the era and location's politics, society, religion, and experience of elephants.
I found the book challenging to read. Jose Saramago has a writing style unlike any I've seen. He does not use paragraphs in the traditional sense - in one stretch of the book, a single paragraph goes on for more than 10 pages, if I recall correctly. Similarly, the period is demoted in the rank of punctuation to lieutenant to the Captain Comma. In one sentence I counted 53 commas (the sentence went on and on for perhaps three dozen lines, nearly a full page). This makes for strange reading. It also means if you get distracted or lose your place, it is a challenge to find it again. The dialogue is also written with minimal attribution, and exchanges all occur mid-sentence without quotation marks. The novel asks a lot of your attention.
The writing is so confounding that if it weren't so funny I wouldn't have finished it. Every few sentences has some quip or morsel that are all in varying degrees insightful, touching, funny, or at least odd. Here are a few of my favorites:
“A part of me learns and the other part ignores everything I've learned, and the longer I live, the more I ignore.” (period added by me.)
“As we know all too well, no one telling a story can resist adding a period, and sometimes even a comma.”
“As the poet said, the pine trees may wave at the sky, but the sky does not answer.”
“It is true that the X did not save the Y, but the fact that he had imagined it meant he could have done, and that is what counts.” (redactions to avoid spoilers.)
I think I'd give this a 3.5/5 if we were being very specific. It is perhaps the most gruesome of the McCarthy novels I've read, including The Road. The gruesomeness is not the same, with the exception of one particularly disturbing scene. But, the level of it is more similar to that in Blood Meridian.
Similar to Blood Meridian, there is an ongoing dread all the time. The co-protagonists wander the countryside. One, looking for her newborn child, encounters varying levels of kindness or at least apathy with a few exceptions. The other, seemingly wandering aimlessly*, encounters varying levels of violence, or at least apathy, with a few exceptions. The second character, Culla, claims at a few points to be searching for his sister, though I observe no evidence of this.
Culla and Rinthy, the co-protagonists, begin the novel in a cabin somewhere in Appalachia (Johnson County, I believe it is written). A tinker appears—I'd not heard or seen this word before and had to look it up: “a usually itinerant mender of household utensils” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. MW also notes that, in Ireland mainly, it is an occasionally offensive reference to Romani. That probably tracks for the setting of this novel. As the novel tracks the co-protagonists, we occasionally interact with three suited men, usually through remnants of their evils.
The leader of these three strikes me as being somewhat similar to Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. Not the same, but a similar incarnation of some sort of evil. Much of McCarthy's work deals with lowercase-e evil, but I think to simplify them as biblical would be a mistake. Clearly, McCarthy works with some biblical allegories, but I think the good and evil stand apart from any religiosity and deal mainly in the realities of human life. There are some evil, depraved things in McCarthy's writing. Yet, none of them is truly otherworldly, at least in my reading. Though, I've yet to read Orchard Keeper or Child of God, and perhaps those would force me to reconsider.
As usual, I love the writing. Particularly the dialogue. I am from Southern Illinois, which is not part of Appalachia. There is a lot of commonality, though, in the language/dialect. Sooo much of the dialogue I could hear in my grandpa or great-grandparents' voices, or in the voices of the old-timers that crowded my grandma's restaurant when I was young (and still when I visit, though my grandma no longer owns the place). This touch of familiarity means that the dialogue always rings true, and always rings warmly to my ear, even when the words are menacing. Perhaps then even moreso.
McCarthy is the best I've encountered at writing that dialect into words. “It's got pitchers”, “Lord god he's kilt hisself”, and poetically: “Mm-hmm. Sorry. Don't need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.” It all rings so true. The dialect is not a sign of intelligence. So many authors write characters that speak this way as a shorthand for stupidity or ineptitude. This is not so. I appreciate McCarthy for this writing.
Another thing I admire about McCarthy's writing is his attitude towards tradesmen and the depiction of work. He clearly liked knowing the steps of a process, and sometimes in my reading I feel as though his writing wouldn't be the worst reference you could consult if you hadn't an official source. His writing reminds me a little of Michael Mann's filmmaking (see: Thief). Take a look at these two paragraphs:
“Yep, the man said. He ran his forefinger around a tallow tin and brought forth the last of it like cake icing and daubed it over the tapered spline of the axle. Holme watched while he eased the wheel into place and while he fitted the nut and turned it hand tight. He gave the wheel a spin and it went smoothly, dishing slightly and whispering as if it rode through water. Where's that wrench now? he said. He was feeling along the ground and Holme thought for a minute the man was blind.
It's under your foot, he said.
The man stopped and looked up at him, then took up the wrench. Ah, he said, here tis. He tightened the nut and then took the cotterpin from the greasecup where he had put it for safekeeping and bent the ends with his thumb and fitted it and reflared it again. Then he tapped the cup into place with the heel of his hand and rose.”
How great is that? Makes you feel like a real teamster back in 190whenever.
All that praise and consideration aside, this did not feel at the same level as that of Blood Meridian, The Road, or the Border Trilogy. It felt like a bit like a canticle, if that makes sense. A series of interactions, but the resolution, if it can be called that, felt incomplete and without form. I almost felt that the last chapter could be removed. But I think I will restrain that judgement until I sit with this a while longer, and perhaps read it over again, because I also feel that the last sentence may be a key theme: “Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.” I wonder who McCarthy thinks that blind man is (all of us?) and I wonder who he thinks should do the telling.
Grann's new book is quite readable! I was very lucky to find a new copy, dust-jacket and all, in a little free library. It is a more straightforward story than that of Killers of the Flower Moon, and the thesis seems a little less pointed, but a quality read nonetheless.
Much of Grann's writing goes about recounting the differing perspectives of the survivors of the Wager shipwreck. The castaways, as they struggle with lack of food, shelter, and all the other needs, gradually break into factions and nearly lose their humanity. Grann explores, somewhat lightly, how quickly the bonds of brotherhood dissolve. He does not take much time to explore the things humans will do in these perilous situations. There are only a few passing references to cannibalism, for example.
I am not sure what Grann intended his thesis to be. Is it an exploration of the trials and tribulations of the crew? The personalities involved? That's accomplished quite well. However, in the final chapter, Grann writes this:
“After M___ returned to England, he published a forty-eight-page narrative, adding to the ever-growing library of accounts about the Wager affair. The authors rarely depicted themselves or their companions as the agents of an imperialist system. They were consumed with their own daily struggles and ambitions—with working the ship, with gaining promotions and securing money for their families, and, ultimately, with survival. But it is precisely such unthinking complicity that allows empires to endure. Indeed, these imperial structures require it: thousands and thousands of ordinary people, innocent or not, serving—and even sacrificing themselves for—a system many of them rarely question.”
I struggle to find Grann's point. The narratives of the people who survived a gruesome shipwreck, mutiny, months of hunger and strife are occupied in their writing with their survival, not the political thought of Empire? Wow, no shit. I also feel that Grann is looking at these folks quite clearly removed from time and space. The officers in this setting would have an interest in propagating empire, not curtailing it. Many of the officers would go on to be active players in developing the largest empire ever to straddle the Earth. Is that “unthinking complicity” ? No. It is, if anything, thoughtful abetting.
Grann clearly feels a need to address some elements that come up in the castaways' accounts, but I don't know if it works seamlessly. Grann frequently mentions that the written accounts come from Europeans with a European view, and that is a good and proper note. However, there is a relatively shallow examination of these contexts. I think there is a little more written about the press gangs at the start of the book than there is about the Kawésqar people later on. Perhaps in the paragraph I quoted above, what Grann seeks is not writing from the survivors on these topics, but from others. I don't know, and I don't know if he knows. I would have appreciated these things be better integrated throughout the story, rather than appearing in Chapter 26 and feeling somewhat tacked on — especially the paragraph above, which I feel has no precursor anywhere in the book. Perhaps the themes best captured across the full page count are hubris, social order in times of social collapse, and the time-tested want of militaries to engage in boondoggles.
This probably sounds negative, but I really liked the book! It does feel less congealed than Killers of the Flower Moon, and less capital-I “Important.” It was an engaging and itneresting shipwreck read though!
P.S.: I accidentally deleted the last two paragraphs of my review and they were so good. Please accept this hasty substitute. Shame on me for trusting the goodreads editor.
Probably a little closer to a 3.75/5. While very different from DUNE, I found this enjoyable in a different way. This is much shorter, and more interior and cerebral. The cast of characters is a little different with some notable changes and absences, I found myself yearning for characters we don't see. What would X have thought? Why is Y absent? New cultures/species/organizations/what have you are present and these are interesting, though feel a bit shallower than those in the first book. I will say again that I think Denis made a wise decision to leave out all the CHOAM stuff in his adaptations - it was so boring in the first book that even Frank seems to have abandoned it.
Rare for me, I think this may benefit from another 50 pages. A few key things happen and then the final chapter wraps everything up quite quickly, with much happening in exposition describing off-page events. What a loss! It feels a robbery to lose closing moments in this way.
Spoilers follow
Probably because I've breathed the secondhand smoke of the Duneheads, I never exactly fell for Paul as a great hero, and so read the first book not exactly charmed by his maturation. Instead, I thought a lot about him as a somewhat willing victim(?) of his own machinations and prophecy.
MESSIAH carries this on, and makes it quite clear that Paul is not a hero. Not many heroes compare k/d ratios with Genghis Khan and Hitler. Still, for whatever it is worth, we believe that Paul believes he does things for some reason - something he still sees as a terrible purpose. For all his future sight and vision, he seems to have no insight. He willingly steps into his oracular visions and never questions this willingness in forming self-fulfilling cataclysms.
Perhaps the biggest losses in the closing are how Paul and the Reverend Mother are handled in the closing. I am kind of floored by this. What a strange thing to not depict...
2.5/5
I'm unusually conflicted about this book. On the one hand, some of the story ideas and characters are interesting and I found the book very readable. On the other, it's pretty repetitive, some parts don't make sense, and the editing is poor.
Most of what I have to say is about the editing. I stopped about 90 pages in to flip through the publication details and then the acknowledgements to find out the editor's name, because I had to know who let this thing out the door like this. I've never seen an author use so many commas and comma-set phrases and em-dashes and em-dashed phrases and commas inside of dashes and dashes inside of commas and such and such. Holy cow! I found it so distracting. The author is saying a lot that doesn't need to be said, and then covering it in a web of commas and clauses. The writing could do with simplification. If the story were any less interesting, this writing would have been inexcusable. The editor should have worked more with the author to hone this a little more.
The work has many influences and it wears them on its sleeve. Sometimes they're in neon green. There are clear-cut character lifts from other series, clear themes from other works, etc. Most of the time this is a workable shorthand for telling us what these characters are like.
Some of the original ideas (or at least ideas I haven't seen before) felt promising but a little under-exposed. Throughout the book, we hear a lot about the Ifs/“them”/“they”, but they aren't explained thoroughly and are only sort of tangential to the story. They really serve more as a vehicle for the protagonist's mental processing. It would be been more interesting to explore these rather than have two segments of the novel that feel more or less the same (the Pit and the trading post bit).
The writing is very melodramatic. Sometimes characters say or think things that made me groan. I wasn't into Ten's whole tally guilt until the origin of it was fleshed out a bit (which is all well and good). What really made me cringe was the romance(?)/fling(?) between two characters in the last third of the book that I found totally unbelievable almost to the point of it feeling nonsensical.
I think some of the melodrama comes from so much internal monologue. Many parts of this book could be improved by having characters speak or think less. Ten is an interesting character, but I found her internal monologue almost whiny and annoying. I didn't feel like it matched well with how she behaved otherwise.
My friend Laleh's review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4955092306) starts: “I'm not quite sure why I expected to dislike one of the most popular science fiction books of all time, but I did.” I felt the same, going in. When Denis's DUNE came out a few years back, people raved. I kept hearing, “you've just GOT to see it on a big screen!” Sometimes when things are universally loved and praised, and I'm told how perfect they are, I have a spiteful urge to abstain. I didn't go see the movie. Eventually, when I watched it on my TV at home, nothing really stood out to me. The second movie did get to me and I really enjoyed it.
Thus, the book. I found myself thinking a lot about the adaptation choices that Denis made in his (so far) two films. Most of these are quite interesting! Only a little of the complex webs between characters are lost, and sometimes for the better. I heard once that the book has so much inner narration that it would be “unadaptable” — but I think Denis proves otherwise. Reflecting on the two parts of Denis's film and my first read of the book, I think the adaptive choices made work.
I am impressed at how this book jumps from character to character seamlessly and in a way that does not cause confusion or consternation. There is an interweaving theme of ‘plans within plans within plans' and ‘feints within feints within feints' and the reader is aware and unaware of these at all times, often not overtly.
At an event recently, I asked an author (of a different book) about a choice they made to start a novel in such a way as to be confusing. The author explained that they wanted the reader to be confused. They went on to say that they didn't like the notion that writing had to be accessible to everyone or easy to read. I can't quote the person exactly because this has been a few weeks ago, but I've been thinking about their statements. I didn't agree in the moment, and after reading Dune I feel even more sure of my belief. Writers can create confusion and a sense of unknowing without making the reader frustrated and feeling stupid. This is something the author at the event—in my view—failed at. It's something Herbert demonstrates mastery at in Dune.
I started reading with some concern that the films would overwhelm my imaginings of characters and locations. I didn't have this problem, in fact I found myself thinking a little more about Lynch's Dune than Denis's (and even then, little, as I've only seen stills). My mental illustration of the Baron Harkonnen is remarkably different from that in Denis's film (I had a lot of trouble shaking Stellan's incredible accent, though). The one character/casting I had trouble dislodging was Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck. I resisted it at first, but in the end found that I really like the casting and enjoyed it even more as I continued reading.
Another friend asked me, early in my reading, if I found the book too philosophic. I hadn't encountered much of the philosophy in the book, yet. Or, I had but didn't detect it. In the far past I subjected myself to Ayn Rand's scribbles and thus often forget that philosophy doesn't have to be in-your-face monologuing for a hundred pages. Herbert weaves in a lot, sometimes in-your-face (“an old B-G axiom:..”), sometimes with subtlety. I found I enjoyed these little tidbits, and enjoyed sorting through the broader philosophical exploration of identity.
I will certainly read, at least, Dune Messiah, if only because the ending to this book is so abrupt. I almost feel it incomplete, as though there's a missing coda.
—Mild story details follow—
“No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero,” a character says. Throughout much of the book, Paul Atreides contends with visions and his overriding desire to prevent them. The book has ideas on identity, prophecy, and most of all self-fulfilling prophecy. The way Herbert weaves these together is splendid. There is a time jump that covers a lot of work, and I wish we'd gotten to experience some of what is in there. There are several key events that I think a reader could point to as a “moment of transformation” for a certain character, but I don't know that there is any one moment. I think we experience a gradual building of ethos and a look at the way in which the stories we tell others become the stories we tell ourselves, and how quickly these can cause us to betray ourselves.
I was not planning to read the other books in the series, but I feel compelled to at least read Messiah. As much as I enjoyed the book, especially the last few hundred pages, it comes to an abrupt stop that left me a little bumfuzzled.
An interesting conclusion to the Border Trilogy, with all the elements a reader would expect from Cormac. The laconic writing, the dialogue written with such care and truth, and the exquisite pain that underlies all of life.
What I like about Cormac's writing is that it understands that life's joys and pleasures are only found in adjacency to life's sorrow and pain.
Reading sci-fi from the 1960s can be strange. On the one hand, so many ideas of exploration, social commentary, and discovery are there and fun to see. It's interesting to see how ideas have passed through books, TV, movies, and culture broadly in the intervening 60 years. However, the ultimate cultural lens of the 60's remains, and so you have odd juxtapositions of exploration and discovery with rather unimaginative ideas of race/color, manifest destiny, etc.
Silverberg here plays with the idea of manifest destiny by drawing humans in contact with a similar species of alien that hold the same belief. The manifestations of xenophobia that our protagonists have presents primarily as color-based racism (referring the aliens by their color, “bluefaces” “greenfaces”) which made me cringe. The stratification of color-based division in the aliens (Norglans) and the presentation of what the colors mean is deeply rooted in color-based race systems in the United States, which feels a bit unimaginative. One could say that this is a commentary on our historical race system - but there is no thoughtful commentary to be had. If anything, the author vaguely reinforces old tropes and stereotypes by having the characters remark on the apparent physical differences of the aliens and remark on specialized breeding to purpose. Now, perhaps this is well and good for this alien society — but writing in the 1960s, it felt a little trite.
Additionally, there is a similarity to the other ‘old' sci-fi I read last year - The Star Fox, by Paol Anderson. That is, a book about Manly Men doing Manly Things. Manly Learned Men (the sociologist), Manly Religious Men (the linguist), Manly Pilot/Military Stand In Men (the pilots), Manly Diplomats (the diplomat), Manly Rulers (the technarch). There isn't much difference between the characters - they are Manly Men with Big Hands, all standing “a little over six feet tall” with “rock-hard” faces. There are, in fact, no women at all in this book. Only two women are ever mentioned, the two ex-wives of our main character, the Sociologist. Women get a passing glance at existence when our characters appear stranded and one bloke says “it wouldn't be so bad with some women, but 9 men?”
As a point of order, our Sociologist practices some pretty surface level sociology. Clearly, he has taken a 1960's era appropriate sociology undergraduate course. I don't think he's done much more.
The actual prose is good, certainly nothing to complain about; dated a bit. The plot is simplistic and is “resolved” if it can be called such by a deux ex machina the size of the Andromeda galaxy. The climax results in all of the Manly Men engaging in some Manly Moping until the book comes to a close, with the Manliest of Men doing his Manly Best to hold back a sob in front of our protagonist. God forbid a man shed tears, though it must be said they could be shed for better reasons.
Natalie lives in an ordinary world, but as it passes through the filter of her eyes and is processed by her brain, she interprets the world as either painfully banal or frighteningly strange. The ramblings of her imagination sputter along throughout the book, interrupting moments and pulling the reader along by a rough hand on digressions of fancy. What's the point? Who knows, certainly not Natalie.
The plot is more or less three loosely connected events or transitions, having little to do with one another but at times passingly referenced. Natalie is so internal and her thoughts so tangential that at times it isn't clear what is reality and what is not — but never so opaque that you lose a thread completely. Jackson is not writing Natalie as a narrator, rather a narrator observes Natalie and that at least keeps some ground under our feet.
Still, I found myself struggling to hang on. The first half of the book is rather boring. I felt similarly with “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” — and thought, if I just hang on, there will be some moment that changes everything. I wondered to myself, “this is a book that'd probably be better on a reread, events would take on a different meaning after the inevitable conclusion.” Yet, I'm skeptical that this is true.
What ultimately kept me reading is Jackson's prose, which is quite good even when it says nothing and communicates no plot at all. Often there are writerly jokes that will give the literary snob a good chuckle, and these were good enough to keep me reading, though it was a labor.
Wow! I picked this up from my local library following a Small Press book club discussion of “At the Edge of the Woods” by Kathryn Bromwich. That book features blurbs comparing it to Shirley Jackson, an author I've never read. Members of the book club who had were nonplussed with the comparison and spoke highly of this and another book, Hangsaman also by Jackson.
I checked both out from the library and read this first as it was shorter and I'd heard about this one before. I am surprised at how gripping it was! I was frequently questioning what was going on, what had happened, trying to figure out the backstory. It was enjoyable when I did find out. The back third of the story is pretty different and I feel like I will need to sit with it for a while before coming to a full conclusion. I finished the book about 5 minutes ago and thus have not had time to cook on it. I had fun reading this!