What Are You Reading??

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

Puzzling, yet possibly an even better book than Cloud Atlas. Like Cloud Atlas it is presented as a series of connected novellas. Whereas in Cloud Atlas the novellas were very loosely connected (yet somehow flowed), the sections of The Bone Clocks often connect back to the same people (separated by decades). The stories are more grounded in mundane, lived lives, but feature a deeply mysterious hidden conflict that threatens lives. There is perhaps less lively beauty in this book, and more earthly humanity (alongside, as it is, a nebulous, warring spirit world). As with Cloud Atlas, I am not sure what the end means, but starting at the beginning and making your way there is probably worth it.

The last time I read fiction was 4 years ago in China. Really, I don't like it. Or movies: I prefer news/docos.
But reading? An oldie but a goodie is Becoming a Language Teacher, E. Horwitz, (2008) Pearson Education. Boston.

Horwitz, the designer of the BALLI, is hugely experienced as a second language teacher, I realised how popular this book was when I couldn't borrow it from my university library! Its got all the serious beginner needs, as well as being pedagogically sound. The glossary is excellent.

These days there is not much difference between news/docos and fiction.

James Dashner's Maze Runner sequels, Scorch Trials and Death Cure.

I saw The Maze Runner movie and decided it was pretty cool. The movie, like the books, is very much about running and jumping and finding a way out of tight spots, but the movie I watched was a crappy cam version and I'd like to see a clear screen version before making a review. I went on to read the books instead.

They're very fast reads. Apparently the first book, Maze Runner, starts slow, but it speeds up quickly later. The other books sprint from the beginning. In the stories, the world has fallen apart, burnt by climate change and massive and sudden solar activity, but also ravaged by a custom virus that escaped a lab when infrastructure fell apart and burned. The story follows a bunch of kids who are immune and who learn only piece by piece that they are being studied to find out how their brains work. But they can't trust even that information - it might be just another test.

 

Also about finished with Already Dead by Charlie Huston, a Joe Pitt Casebook. Pulp-noir, vampire-zombie, who could ask for less? I could. You can't put zombies and vampires in the same story, they cancel each other out. For that very reason, I almost put the book down. Already Dead however does get away with, mostly by being a hard-bitten detective story about a detective who bites hard, with zombies as incidental. The vampires, or Vampyrs as the book will have it, and how they run New York, is the main story.

 

Wen through Stephen King's Dark Tower series last year.  Was incredible, I say true.  Then my Chinese wife started watching Under the Dome.  It's an ok series, but it got me interested in the book.  First trip out of my tier 88 paradise I picked it up.  A 1200 page doorstop, I was so addicted I read half of it in just about one sitting.

Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey

More pulp-noir, this time in Hollywood, featuring a human who eleven years ago was set to Hell by his magicians' circle. Being the only human in Hell, he learned how much his old magic was worth. Now he's back, and he wants revenge. A lot.

 

Wen through Stephen King's Dark Tower series last year.  Was incredible, I say true. 

I still get a little angry when I think about the last three books. They were just awful. I keep hoping he'll rewrite them, but my understanding is that, at least for now, he's decided against it.

11 Terrible Examples Of Bad Sex Scenes In Novels

And one double negative.

The A Land Fit for Heroes trilogy by Richard K Morgan. Morgan started out with scifi, and Takeshi Kovacs. Now, with fantasy (!?!) he writes about Ringil Eskiath, a mighty homosexual warrior who isn't dead yet despite pointy end involvement in many duels, wars, and trysts with capricious, powerful gods. In The Steel Remains Ringil was living on his legend as the years-ago hero of Gallows Gap when he's asked by family to search out the whereabouts of a relative sold into debtors slavery. In The Cold Commands he is busy killing off slavers when he catches the plague and the attention of an old god. In the Dark Defiles I don't know what happens because I haven't started it yet.

The worlds of this trilogy are interesting. They're ridden with splendidly horrendous politics and staffed by species various, including various races of aliens, some of whom are little more than memory. Gil specifically is joined by Egar, a Majak warrior, and Archeth, a lady at court, and also a Kiriath-human hybrid who fights with knives. So, swords and sorcery it is, plus a dash of scifi and a sprinkle of dudebro. The trilogy is not unlike the ...of Thorns books by Mark Lawrence, but definietly different from them too - wider in scope, I think.

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. Great book about Scientology by a highly regarded journalist. Prior to reading this I thought Scientology was bad but was ambivalent about Tom Cruise being a Scientologist…now I still think Scientology is bad and strongly disapprove of Tom Cruise having benefitted from Scientology slave labour. Probably the biggest revelation from the book was about how insane L Ron Hubbard was and his predilection for going to sea to avoid process servers.

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

Miserable Christians in space! The author, who is also the author of The Crimson Petal and the White, which I also have and may consider, has said now that his wife has died, this is his last book. I wonder what that means. With The Book of Strange New Things it's apparent from the first chapters that, even with a miserable, prissy, supremely earnest main character, the writing is pristine.

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi

Not sure what I was expecting. A few chapters in, I was thinking this is some Mae West kind of deal - that era-ish, that kind of heroine. Then it turns out this Mae West is "Boy", she's going to get married, and she's going to be wicked stepmother to a girl called "Snow", and I haven't even met "Bird" yet. Killer opening line though:

"Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy."

The Peripheral by William Gibson

Very puzzling at the beginning. Gibson has eschewed many a definite article and indeed quite large chunks of some sentences, and he isn't taking time out to explain references, which, given that the world in question is a future somewhat further on than our own, initially obscures more than illuminates. People have "phones" for instance, and they call them "phones", but they're a few incarnations further on than our own kind of "phone" and they do different things. This world is populated by other kinds of daily technology too, and habits of people, world conditions and environments, that throw one off the scent of what the damn story might actually be! But this is William Gibson, so I shall persist. And I shall be rewarded.

Fooled by Randomness - Nicholas Taleb

An amusing writer waxing on the theory and implications of randomness.


Damn it's good to be on break - haven't read anything for fun in a few months....

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz

Although a work of fiction, the novel is set in New Jersey where Díaz was raised and deals explicitly with his ancestral homeland's experience under dictator Rafael Trujillo. The book chronicles both the life of Oscar De Leòn, an overweight Dominican boy growing up obsessed with science fiction and fantasy novels and with falling in love, as well as the curse that has plagued his family for generations.   -wikipedia.