EDF book review, recommendations, etc - the mbillie edition

mbillie1 · #1 11-07-2007, 06:56 PM

As some of you may know, at my current job I have a lot of free time. For the last fifteen work days, I've read a different book each day (or averaged a book a day) and have read 15 books, all of which I was surprisingly pleased with. Here are the reviews and recommendations. I'm going to group these by author where appropriate, it just seems like it makes more sense.

Haruki Murakami
books read: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, Dance Dance Dance, South of the Border, West of the Sun

Murakami is a strange writer. He provides a mixture of pop-culture with dark, almost mystical (and occasionally erotic) storylines. Things happen that couldn't happen in real life, and then other things happen that wouldn't happen in real life. He's very readable despite the length of some of his books. I've come to like his writing very much. Briefly, the four of his books I read.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: this is the easiest of his books to get into, in my opinion. It has a very engaging plot right from the first few chapters. A nice litmus test to see if you might like his writing is to read the first fifty or sixty pages of this book. If you're interested, you'll probably like at least the four books I listed above. The story is complex but flows fairly easily. Not everything is resolved nicely and neatly, which sort of bugged me, but still a worthwhile book. It's a bit on the long side, the longest of the four I'm recommending, but it's the one I read first and it really got me into him.

Kafka on the Shore: this is in my opinion probably the "best" of the four books. The story is very smooth, powerful and the fantastic/dreamlike/unreal elements flow together with the rest of the plot. A little more on the serene side, although not without its erotic/gorey bits. When I re-read these at some point, this will be the one I start with. An excellent book.

Dance Dance Dance: probably the least interesting of the four, but still rather interesting. A hotel, sometimes the elevator takes you to another world with a sheepman (sounds corny but actually works very well), a bit more conspiracy-ish (although there's no tacit conspiracy) and a little darker than the other books. Still thoroughly enjoyed it.

South of the Border, West of the Sun: my personal favorite of the four, also the shortest for those of you who don't want to jump into a very long book right away. It has little or none of the mysticism/dreamlike stuff that is sort of characteristic of Murakami and for that reason may not be a terrific introduction to his writing, but I think it's very personal (or at any rate I found that I could relate to it myself personally at least) and the most beautifully written of the four. More directly about a girl (three women actually) than the others, not a love story though. If you have read and enjoyed anything else of his, this one is a must-read. Hard to compare him to other writers, at least that I've read, because he's very different from the usual stuff I read, but I have really come to like his writing. I'll be getting some more of his books shortly.

Jose Saramago
books read: Blindness, Seeing

Saramago is a Pulitzer prize winner. Again a different sort of writer. The most noticeable thing is that he doesn't use quotation marks at all. All of the conversations/dialog in his books is like just inserted into the sentences. You can tell when a different character is speaking because he will capitalize the first letter of the first word of that character's sentence. It's confusing at first, until you realize what's going on. However he is a spectacular writer. I'm going to the bookstore tonight to grab some more of his books actually. He is sometimes credited with being the greatest living fiction writer today, and I would not dispute that. These are really excellent, profound and moving works.

Blindness: one by one, the residents of a city go blind, "white blindness" it's called, where you only see a shade of milky white (instead of the darkness associated with normal blindness). Society descends into chaos and disarray. One woman keeps her sight, the wife of the optometrist who treated the first man to have come down with the blindness. This is both a very dark and brutally cynical book and a sort of uplifting and human story. I'd compare this with Kafka's "The Trial" in mood at times, although the writing is not really anything like Kafka's. It's terrific.

Seeing: not exactly a sequel, but it does refer to some of what happens in Blindness, so I'd recommend reading them in order. A critique of the failings of democracy, sort of, a bit of a modern 1984 feel at times. Not as good as Blindness, but still terrific. Saramago is brilliant, I can't wait to read more of his work.

Gino Segre
book read: Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics

Faust in Copenhagen: the only book of Segre's that I've read. A nonfiction account of the meetings of physicists that ultimately developed Quantum Mechanics as we know it. It gets into both the scientific and personal human sides of their lives. I'm not elaborating much on it but it's really an excellent read, especially if you're like me in that you're interested in advanced physics but are not a theoretical physicist [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] This makes great down-time reading as it's fairly light and very easy to follow.

OK I know I said 15 books but I just remembered I have to meet my father for dinner in about twenty minutes, so I'll come do the other 7 books when I get back later on tonight.

Also, to whoever recommended Special Topics in Calamity Physics in the other thread, I was actually looking at that the other day in the book store and almost bought it, now I will definitely pick it up, thanks for the rec!

mark

Kimbell175113 · #2 11-07-2007, 10:45 PM

[ QUOTE ]

Also, to whoever recommended Special Topics in Calamity Physics in the other thread, I was actually looking at that the other day in the book store and almost bought it, now I will definitely pick it up, thanks for the rec!

[/ QUOTE ]
Awesome! hope you like it. Guess I'll write a bit of a review here for teh others

Special Topics in Calamity Physics: Marisha Pessl's first novel, released last year, commonly described as a Nabokovian high school murder mystery. A hyper-literate girl and her father come to a new town for her senior year of HS, she falls in with an eclectic, exclusive group of kids that constantly hang out with one of the teachers. This teacher is funny, mysterious, and awesome; soon she turns up dead and the crazy [censored] starts. The story is actually quite simple, but it's stretched out to 500 pages of elaborate similes, cute illustrations, academic references both real and fake (but always hilarious), and some of my favorite first-person narration I've ever read. I understand that some will find it pretentious or off-putting, but I didn't at all. At any rate, I recommend it highly.

Also, funnily enough, I noticed a couple errors and typos in the book (not a lot but more than one would expect), and I don't think it was the author intentionally trying to level us. Hopefully this'll be fixed in future printings.

Subfallen · #3 11-18-2007, 03:39 PM

[ QUOTE ]

Special Topics in Calamity Physics: Marisha Pessl's first novel...a Nabokovian high school murder mystery.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm going to have to go ahead and...um...disagree with you on that one.

Most of the time Special Topics seems just an elaborate excuse to deploy a lifetime's store of simile and metaphor. (Which Pessl undoubtedly accumulated on yellow legal pad.) Her prose is jarringly active; her characters are in constant paroxysm, over-acting even for caricatures. Nabokov knew that life mostly happens to us, while Pessl brings "self-determination" explicitly out of the subtext and into mawkish lectures delivered by both Dad and Blue.

Now perhaps all the "grand themes" from "the Western canon" would be bearable if either author or character actually understood them. But Blue takes art like a shortcut to a superiority complex, demeaning and dehumanizing an endless series of minor characters who serve little purpose except as targets for her wit. Never mind that art and science's greatest heights have been scaled to redeem the common man---Pessl just sees new perches from which to spit on him.

Of course, like all insecure "visionaries" who desperately need the world to notice their grand posturing (Kierkegaard, 1843), both Dad and Blue really long for the admiration of the wretched masses. Captive audiences, esoteric awards, valedictorian honors, clique membership: these are the top values for our heroes.

Most disastrously, the tone and style of Blue's dialogue (dry, manufactured) exactly contrapose her internal monologue (overwrought, quirky). In a first-person narrative, this is unforgivable. Nothing here, nothing, "cries truth from the blood" (Nietzsche, 1883). Special Topics in Calamity Physics is just-readable fluff with a horizontal plot line,

Final Rating: 2.5/5 Stars

And just to emphasize how inapt the Nabokov comparison really is...

Pessl: "As I read the startling details about Catherine Baker's life...I started sprinting like an Errand Boy all the way back to that conversation with her, when I was alone at her house, retrieving her every word, expression and gesture, and when I dumped that splintered cargo at my feet (something 'night,' police officer, The Gone), I turned around and sprinted for more." (Special Topics)

Nabokov: "A breeze from wonderland had begun to affect my thoughts, and now they seemed couched in italics, as if the surface reflecting them were wrinkled by the phantasm of that breeze. Time and again my consciousness folded the wrong way, my shuffling body entered the sphere of sleep, shuffled out again, and once or twice I caught myself drifting into a melancholy snore. Mists of tenderness enfolded mountains of longing." (Lolita)

Subfallen · #4 11-18-2007, 03:51 PM

Oh, and:

Being and Time. Martin Heidegger (trans. Macquarrie & Robinson)

Unreadable, first 300 pages are surreally trite throw-away,

Final Rating: 0/5 Stars

Kimbell175113 · #5 11-18-2007, 04:01 PM

Well, you edited it out in your [quote], but I said "commonly described as a Nabokovian..." and that is inarguable since every reviewer mentions it. A lot of them disagree for the same reasons you do, but I don't think you can fault for me for throwing the word in there when every other mention of Special Topics does as well.

Subfallen · #6 11-18-2007, 04:14 PM

Oh, my bad, I hadn't read any other reviews of the book.

Kimbell175113 · #7 11-18-2007, 04:18 PM

As for your broader criticism, I think my main explanation (or excuse) is that the book is about, and narrated by, a sixteen-year-old. Of course she doesn't understand the grand themes, of course she wants to be in the cool cliques, of course she has a superiority complex. But I never got the feeling that the book is telling us that she is correct. In my mind, the Final Exam at the end is the book's final and clearest way of pulling away from Blue, of analyzing her faults, and those of all the characters. It appears as though I got a different sense from a lot of the book than you did, though.

mbillie1 · #8 11-18-2007, 06:40 PM

[ QUOTE ]
Oh, and:

Being and Time. Martin Heidegger (trans. Macquarrie & Robinson)

Unreadable, first 300 pages are surreally trite throw-away,

Final Rating: 0/5 Stars

[/ QUOTE ]

this is awesome [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] lol

Subfallen · #9 11-09-2007, 05:19 AM

Thanks for writing these up mbillie. Unfortunately at the moment I am 200 pages into Sein und Zeit (Macquarrie & Robinson translation), so it will be a few days before I can indulge in one of your recommendations. Heidegger apparently didn't approve of, say, READABLE writing. Here's a sample:

"The character of understanding as projection is constitutive for Being-in-the-world with regard to the disclosedness of its existentially constitutive state-of-Being by which the factical potentiality-for-Being gets its leeway."

mbillie1 · #10 11-09-2007, 10:53 AM

Ok, after much delay, here are the rest.

Ernest Hemingway
books read: For Whom the Bell Tolls, In Our Time
Hemingway is sort of a fashionable writer to dislike lately, which I think is ridiculous. Easily one of the best American writers of the 20th century (if not the best), helped develop an entire new feel and style of writing.

For Whom the Bell Tolls: If you haven't read this, you should seriously consider it. This is one of my top 5 all time favorite books. A fantastic story, gritty and tough but idealistic and human all at once. Robert Jordan, in Spain during the Spanish civil war, is fighting against the fascists. He's there to blow up a bridge, and the book centers around this storyline. This is easily one of the iconic American novels of all time. Read it.

In Our Time: this put Hemingway on the map. It's a collection of related short stories, sort of like Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles in that some of the characters are the same, some different, they're thematically related, etc. It's short and easy to get through. Not his best work in my opinion, but still worth reading.

Sylvia Plath
book read: The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar: wow. This was stunning, an instant favorite. This is the very thinly veiled autobiographical story of the life of Sylvia Plath, complete with attempted suicides, her internship at a magazine in NYC, etc. This is one of the finest written novels I've ever read. It's beautiful, sad, cold, almost like Kafka and Camus, but more readable. I love Plath's poetry, so I wasn't sure how I'd feel about a novel she had written, but this is utterly fantastic. It chronicles the breakdown of Esther Greenwood, how she eventually feels like her life is covered by a bell jar that's between the rest of the world and herself. Almost every edition of The Bell Jar also includes the otherwise unpublished poem "Mad Girl's Love Song," which is also excellent. This is a must-read.

J.D. Salinger
book read: The Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye: somehow my highschool managed to let me graduate without having read this. I'll assume most of you have read this, but briefly for those that haven't: a classic sort of coming-of-age story about a kid who spends a runaway weekend in New York City. Also a beautiful and touching sort of sibling story, his little sister is one of the most adorable characters I can remember. I loved it.

Tim Weiner
book read: Legacy of Ashes (history of the CIA)

Legacy of Ashes: one of the only 2 non-fiction books in here. This was stunning to read. Based entirely on recently declassified CIA documents and personal interviews the author conducted with CIA directors and other personel, this is just a chilling look at what really happens in the world. Secret prisons in the 50s and 60s, LSD and mind control tested on detainees, RFK ordering the CIA to use the mob to assassinate Castro, botched operations in countless wars/conflicts since the inception of the agency... when you finish reading this you're torn between wanting to do everything you can to ensure that the CIA is permanently disbanded, and wanting to go and join the CIA so there will be one more halfway intelligent person working there. Chilling, and probably a must-read for anyone who wants to know what's going on in the world. Terrifying and eye-opening.

Goethe
book read: Faust

Faust: well... everyone's read Faust, right?? This is an excellent play, a bit hard to read but wonderful. Not an enormous amount to say about it I guess, other than it's a classic and massively influential on European writing even today.

Marisha Pessl
book read: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Special Topics in Calamity Physics: I read this yesterday and loved it, couldn't put it down all day. Aside from being apparently quite beautiful, Pessl has a quirky and fun style that plays with references to older works, a keen awareness of the personalities of intellectuals and pretentious windbags (like me ldo) and an ability to weave a very complicated storyline together seamlessly. One of the New York Times' "10 Best Books of the Year," and I'd agree. Thanks to Kimbell for the recommendation! I thoroughly enjoyed it. Very funny, captivating, moving and surprisingly a page-turner, despite being relatively dense and not written for the "Da Vinci Code" crowd at all. An intelligent book that appeals on a number of levels and still provides a thrilling read. Spectacular.

David Sedaris
book read: Me Talk Pretty One Day

Me Talk Pretty One Day: ok, I've heard people call books funny before. Even "laugh out loud" funny. And usually that doesn't mean anything, so when my girlfriend and her family told me that this book was hilarious, I was naturally quite skeptical. When the reviews said it was gut-busting, side-splittingly funny, I remained dubious. Let me tell you, this is the [censored] funniest book I have ever read. It seriously had me bursting out laughing at work, at home, wherever I was reading it. A sort of strange pseudo-memoirs almost from the sibling of Amy Sedaris (she did "Strangers With Candy" and some other stuff), hilariously written... just a thoroughly pleasurable read. Don't sneak it into Church or anything though... people will know you're doing something funny, because you will seriously burst out laughing at least a few times when reading this. Definitely recommended across the board, regardless of your taste in literature. Puts a giant smile on your face.