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This has gotten a ways out of date.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut. Having already said what I have to say about Kurt Vonnegut, and since I can't say anything that's in his books any better than he has already said it, I am merely going to quote one of my favorite paragraphs from each one.
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut.
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. This was kind of a let-down, actually. After I got all worked up about the movie, the book turns out to have hardly any more meat to it. Pretty much like The Princess Bride.
Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs. The irony here is that before I bought this, I stood in the Target for a while and read the first few pages of Me Talk Pretty One Day. I put it back because I decided I didn't really feel like reading a bunch of neurotic self-obsession about being gay. What's the point, when I already have neurotic self-obsession on tap, and don't happen to be gay? But what's this next to it, Augusten Burroughs? Doh.
I did read the whole thing, and I liked a couple of the stories, but I'd have to say there's better things to spend your time reading.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I liked this. I'm not sure how different it would have been if somebody hadn't told me the premise before I read it, which is that these kids were purposefully cloned and raised so that their organs can be harvested once they reach adulthood. (And now I have spoiled it for you too, if you haven't read it yet.)
So this is tragic and sad and all, but upon reflection I don't have any real reason why it should be. You and I are just as certain to die one day, but apart from that, we know almost nothing about what to plan for. At least I don't. Maybe I will want to retire at 65 and live off savings, or maybe I already have cancer and will die in a year, or maybe I will have a car crash tomorrow. No matter which comes true, I will have made a lot of wrong decisions, because I had to hedge against all three. Imagine never having to worry about what you want to be when you grow up. Never saving any money for fear of the unknown. And most of all, knowing from the very beginning what the purpose of your life was. Knowing approximately when you will get a notice like a jury summons in the mail, at which point you will die so that others can live. They can worry about whether their lives have any meaning, but you have your answer. I think I would be ok with this, actually.
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.
She had to stop and think.
"The trouble with the world was," she continued hesitatingly, "that people were still superstitious instead of scientific. He said if everybody would study science more, there wouldn't be all the trouble there was."
"He said science was going to discover the basic secret of life someday," the bartender put in. He scratched his head and frowned. "Didn't I read in the paper the other day where they'd finally found out what it was?"
"I missed that," I murmured.
"I saw that," said Sandra. "About two days ago."
"That's right," said the bartender.
"What is the secret of life?" I asked.
"I forget," said Sandra.
"Protein," the bartender declared. "They found out something about protein."
"Yeah," said Sandra. "That's it."
Imagine you are on a dodgy canyon hike in Death Valley. You are trying to follow the directions from the book, but you're probably not in the right place, because you've gotten confused and gone up a couple of blind alleys, turned around, and anyway it's all just rocks and dirt. So you keep going higher, and you have been walking quite a long time, and soon it will be getting dark, and you aren't going to find the waterfall that is supposed to be up here somewhere. So you stop and look back at how you came and say, whereever this is, it's a very hard place to get to, and it's not especially pretty, so maybe there have been no people here in a long time, and that's something. Maybe I'm the first person to ever stand in this exact spot. Then you look down and see somebody's initials carved into a rock, and a pile of cigarette butts.
That is how I feel when I read Kurt Vonnegut books.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I usually pass on things that look like Oprah books to me, unless somebody I know likes them, and the somebody I know was Beth. I would rate this as worth reading, probably not life changing. I might have liked it better if I had not taken such a dislike to the narrator after his abhorrent treatment of his childhood friend, the eponymous kite runner. Some things are unforgivable, and I don't buy the later atonement-for-sins, either. Doing something bad and later getting beaten up doesn't mean there is justice in the world, it means that lots of bad things happen and most everybody gets a share.
The Kite Runner was followed closely by A Thousand Splendid Suns, also by Khaled Hosseini. I liked this one better. More than anything else, it reminds me of The Poisonwood Bible, being the story of several women whose lives were ruined by a horrid man, in an unfamiliar place where social customs are such that there isn't really anything they can do about it. Amazon can back me up here; it tells me that as many as 3% of the people who viewed The Poisonwood Bible went on to purchase A Thousand Splendid Suns.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. This is from Beth's Book Club, which I have been assured will not be the same as Oprah's Book Club. It is a recent entry in the post-nuclear-apocalypse genre of Alas, Babylon or A Canticle for Leibowitz. Style took some getting used to. Choppy sentence fragments with no verbs. Everything so anonymous that you have to go back five paragraphs to find the antecedent for a pronoun. No chapter breaks, which makes the dead world seem that much more oppressive.
This paragraph may or may not have anything to do with the one that came before, or the one that comes after. Because the dying protagonist remembers things at random, I guess. Time to cough up some blood.
I would have liked for something to eventually happen, though. It is more like a picture that takes 300 pages to describe, than an actual narrative.
Lamb by Christopher Moore. Meh. I liked Good Omens better. I think that if you are going to construct so many chapters out of the hilarity of subjects such as Jesus's friend's fascination with prostitutes (because why not, when your best friend can heal your afflictions and forgive your sins at will), then it is best if you let the story end on a light note, rather than in histrionics, murder, and suicide.
Limited time offer! If you are in my area and want this book, say so, because it's now in the free stuff box.
Harry Potter and the Deathy Hallows, by J.K. Rowling, as if you don't know. I am disappointed by the ending. I might feel the need to elaborate later, but I won't do it for a couple of weeks, at which point I will claim that anybody that really wants to has finished reading it for themselves.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. Seemed like the thing to read on the 13 hour flight back from Dublin. I wouldn't say it was fun exactly, but I got some Irish history out of it, and of course I got to say "Hey I was just there" about every place he goes. I don't ever much get into the brooding titanic internal struggle over one's personal relationship with God and Evil. I am more impressed by problems that don't go away when you stop thinking about them.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace, "essays and arguments." I liked some of them and got bored with others, about which I have blathered at length.
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. I did like this a lot. The premise, of one half of a couple bouncing randomly forwards and backwards in time while the other half progresses in the ordinary way, never becomes a gimmick. And she does not cheat around the unpleasant consequences which follow, "logically" enough, if you have once accepted the time travelling bit.
11 Nov 2007 23:55 PT - persistent link - trackback - 1 comment