EDF book review, recommendations, etc - the mbillie edition

[Kimbell175113]

Nice reviews, Mr. Billie. A couple of these are books that I've been meaning to get around to for a while; I think I'll pick up <u>The Bell Jar</u> tonight and see what happens. Hope this thread keeps going and gets some more contributors (not that you don't read enough [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]).

and yeah, Pessl is totally hawt, imo

[ElSapo]

Blindness:

[ QUOTE ]
This is both a very dark and brutally cynical book and a sort of uplifting and human story.

[/ QUOTE ]

I would second this recommendation. This is an absolutely beautiful book, with solid message about how we treat our fellow humans. Saramago is a genius. This book mixes the darkest and most grim visualizations with uplifting and beautiful imagery as well.

Basically, this story goes to hell and back. It's amazing.

I also read The Double, which was also very good, a story about identity and what makes us who we are. Not quite as powerful, but maybe more relevant on a day-to-day basis.

Saramago is a fascinating writer because he really has something to say, and it comes out through these beautiful, fascinating and horiffic stories.

[invisibleleadsoup]

wow i'd give anything to be getting through a book a day!
nice work,keep up the recommendations.

i have blindness in the pile of books i have waiting to be read,looking forward to it.

[gumpzilla]

I've been trying to read a little more recently.

I've read a lot of Gene Wolfe in the past five weeks or so; the Book of the Short Sun and Latro in the Mist. That's actually five books. Short Sun is enjoyable, and is sort of the last series in the world started by New Sun and Long Sun. Short Sun feels to me like the weakest of those three. Long Sun manages to approach total science fiction without spiritual deus ex machina, but Short Sun doesn't really try to do that at all, which is a bit disappointing. New Sun didn't either, of course, but a) it wasn't trying to follow something else that had already set a tone of science, and b) the philosophical musings that make up so much of that book add a lot.

Latro in the Mist was kind of interesting, but is my least favorite series by Wolfe so far. It's a very serviceable read, but I think it's probably more fun if you have a very solid grounding in Greek mythology (and probably Greek language.) There's a lot I recognized, but I definitely managed to get confused sometimes, and I think the way everything wraps up, I feel like I'm missing some kind of allusion to mythic structure that would explain why it goes as it does.

Saturday by Ian McEwan. I liked this. It's nothing profound, but it does a surprisingly good job of capturing one unusually (but for the most part not implausibly) stressful day. Henry Perowne feels like a good man. When I heard about this book a while ago, it seemed like a lot of the reviews focused on Iraq and 9/11. There are certainly aspects of the book that are informed by these things but they don't really seem central at all.

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I've enjoyed what Irving I've read (this, The Cider House Rules, The Water Method Man). He really does a good job of setting a humorous, emotional tone without making you feel overly cheesy about it. He's also quite good, in my opinion, at making characters who are good without being saintly, which is always nice.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. This was okay. Strangely, I think the problem is that he does too good a job creating an atmosphere of utter futility, because about 80 pages in I started thinking "So these guys are well and throughly [censored]. That's too bad." This feeling was strong enough that it lead to a sort of emotional flatness while reading most of the book. Still, despite that, the ending really got to me.

I have a bunch of things that I've started reading but haven't fallen in love with enough yet to actually pound through:

Moral Minds by Marc Hauser. This is what I'm working on at the moment. Only 50 pages in, but from the first chapter, it appears the thrust of the book will be that humans possess a moral faculty that has properties similar to Chomsky's universal grammar, and that this is the basis of our moral judgments. Arguments and consequences to follow, I'm sure. I'm very intrigued by this premise, but this is my second attempt to get into this book and I still feel like Hauser's prose is bogging me down somehow, though I haven't put my finger on it yet.

The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson. Wherein the author argues that the expansion of the military-industrial complex is bad, un-American, and will lead to a Roman Empire style decline for the U.S.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. I've heard great things about this book, and I've read about the first 100 pages or so and it's quite good. It develops the history of the understanding of atoms/nuclei from the start of the 20th century on, examining a lot of the key players along the way, and then presumably gets into the bomb stuff.

EDIT: Also, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. From what I know of his argument (and having read about half of this), I think I agree with what he's trying to say, and I feel like I should read this book as part of my education. I find him stylistically dense and tough to slog through, though.

And I've thought about picking up Special Topics in Calamity Physics because, yes, Marisha Pessl appears to be smoking.



EDIT 2: Googling about, the glamour shot is definitely giving her a fair bit of help. But I bet she's still hotter than Gene Wolfe or Thomas Kuhn.

[slickpoppa]

Great thread mbillie. I was actually just thinking of starting a book thread because I was in need of recs, but I just ordered three books from this thread.

Here are some books I've read recently and brief reviews. I suck at reviewing books, but here I go anyway:

Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
This is one of the best books I've ever read. It takes place in 1980s Manhattan and the main character, Sherman McCoy, is a Wall Street bond trader and self-styled "master of the universe." The plot centers around an incident in which Sherman and his mistress hit and run a black teenager in the Bronx. When a witness comes forward saying that the teenager was hit by a white guy driving Mercedes, the class and racial overtones of the story generate a media circus. The real genius of this novel is the way in which Wolfe weaves together the stories of so many characters, ranging from Larry Kramer, the young prosecutor assigned to the case, to Reverend Bacon, the Al Sharpton clone who stokes the racial outrage of the NYC black community, to Peter Fallow, the perpetually drunk and freeloading journalist who breaks the story, and of course to Sherman himself. I love how Wolfe goes into great and humorous detail describing the often incredibly superficial and vain thoughts of not only Sherman, but of all the characters.
5/5

Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis
I read this after Bonfire of the Vanities because of its similar theme and style. It's a nonfiction account of Michael Lewis' experiences working as a bond trader/salesman at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. This book does a pretty good job of chronicling the evolution of finance and portraying life on Wall Street in the 1980s, but I was kind of disappointed given how many people had raved about it to me. I had heard that the book was supposed to be incredibly funny, but I found the humor to be too forced. Anyway, this is a decent book, but doesn't live up to the hype in my opinion.
3.5/5

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
This book was a fun read and different from most books. It's written from the perspective of a young autistic boy who's investigating the murder of his neighbor's dog. It's kind of hard to describe why I liked this book, other than that it's pretty funny and is written from a very interesting perspective.
4/5

I'll maybe review some of the following, all of which I recommend, if I have time:
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Disgrace by JM Coetzee
The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin

[shemp]

Re Saramago. I recommend him whenever I see these threads. I think "Balthusar and Blimunda" and "The History of the Seige of Lisbon" are masterpieces. And I like the rest to varying degrees (I've read all of his fiction which has been translated to English).

A handful of people have recommended "The Corrections" to me, so I'll probably read that next.