Books, CAN YOU READ?! Options

[Dr Strum]

This thread is for discussion of books. Books you're reading, books you've read, books you're interested in, etc.
--Tom Clancy is lame--


But anyways. I'm currently reading Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It's interesting, but I'm having difficulty getting into it, partially because of school, and partially because the month before I started it, I had just finished the Dark Tower series.

[Rhiannon]

It was very sterile. Which is half a result of Huxley's writing style, half a result of the atmosphere he was trying to evoke for his dystopia. Did you notice how the language changed when he visited the "savages?"

I did notice that, at least unconsciously. It became a lot easier to read around that part.

Um. Maybe use spoiler tags and then I can figure out what [censored][censored] means and we can discuss it lol. I recommend giving Paradise Lost a go and then rereading Frankenstein, as Shelley drew heavily on Milton's masterpiece for Frankenstein.

OR YOU COULD JUST GO JUMP INTO THE OCEAN LIKE EVERYONE ELSE

I've been reading a lot. Here's a (warning, it is long) list of things I read this year because I don't remember if I read anything in 2015 that I didn't post about already, and opinions on them:

» Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... «

• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
  Wonderful. Very imaginative, sometimes horrifyingly so. Did I really get it? Probably not, but I've decided that I don't care about anything that didn't reach me personally.
• Children of the Flames by Lucette Matalon Lagnado & Sheila Cohn Dekel
  I think this was one of my brother's books that he abandoned. It was alright, pretty interesting, though I'm not really into nonfiction.
• Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
  SOOOO OOOOLDE. I mostly did not like this because it spent an extreme amount of time being very matter of fact and repetitive about what the guy did the whole time. The parts where he was more introspective about religious/spiritual stuff were nice though, and I loved seeing him try to explain God and his beliefs to Friday. He never did come up with a good response to the problem of evil and that greatly amused me because I am a mean-spirited person.
• Foe by J.M. Coetzee
  Seemed like the right thing to read right after Robinson Crusoe since it plays with the story. But I wasn't that fond of this, either, despite having a high opinion of other Coetzee things I've read. It mostly just seemed like a story about a lady who was absolutely bonkers, with references and twists to the story that were amusing but you'd never get if you hadn't read Robinson Crusoe previously.
• Killing Hitler by Roger Moorhouse
  I thought this was pretty interesting. It was a bit long-winded sometimes with the blabbing about history and stuff that wasn't always actually relevant to the assassination attempts, but when it actually got down to talking about them it was much more interesting. Hitler was such bullshit, not dying to all these assassination attempts because something going not quite as planned EVERY SINGLE TIME.
• In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté
  A good news book about addictions (not necessarily just drug addictions, either). I like that it was like, "take a look at this science, and also question this other science because of this extremely obvious issue" and it was generally very compassionate about people who struggle with addictions. This guy also totally has like, the same idea of legality and criminalization and stuff about even really hard drugs that I do. At least from a public health/safety standpoint. I don't remember him ever saying anything about reducing drug-related crime though. Anyway, strongly recommend this to anyone who has any interest in the subject.
• When I am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple by various people
  Most of these stories and poems were kind of eh, but there were a handful I liked. Jenny Joseph's Warning was really nice and is basically how I feel about getting old. You get to do whatever the heck you want to when you get old! That's awesome! Joanne Seltzer's A Place for Mother was pretty depressing and honest. And then there was Mary Anne Ashley's Gracefully Afraid which actually made me cry. I think I see myself in the protagonist's friend way too much. Like, aren't I going to end up like her in the end? It was just really upsetting.
• Pax by Sara Pennypacker
  I got this on a whim because I liked the cover art a lot. It's pretty anti-war, which is cool. But something about the whole thing seemed a bit shallow. Although, the first few chapters made me want to cry because for some reason I have problems with people leaving their pets on purpose, and also their pets just waiting there for the person to come back... The ending didn't feel right to me, either, but I guess overall it was an enjoyable read and I would certainly make 3-5th graders read it.
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  Asaph yelled at me to read it ASAP when he found out I hadn't done it yet. For most of the book I was kind of sad that Holden wanted to react to everything with so much anger and rejection. Like, "this person sucks" "these guys are all assholes" "YOU'RE A GREAT BIG PHONY." Maybe that would have resonated with me more when I was an angrier person, but that's not who I am anymore. The last few chapters were really nice, though. Just very "everything is wrong and messed up but maybe just for this moment, things are okay, and that's enough for now."
• The Familiar volume 1 by Mark Z. Danielewski
  This took me forever to read and it was a great effort. I basically hated everything in this except the stuff involving Xanther's family. I really wanted to see what kind of crazy epic story he had in mind for this, but... I'm not going to make myself spend that much time reading something when I enjoy so little of it. :/
• Legend of the Galactic Heroes volume 1 by Yoshiki Tanaka
  The anime these novels were based off of was like, one of my most favourite ones ever, so I was super excited when it was announced that they'd be translating the novels. Even with my misgivings about translated Japanese novels (I've had too many bad experiences with them), it didn't bother me here. The writing was very straight up and maybe even almost "dry" but that's exactly what I'd expected from it, and I bet that's how it was in the original Japanese anyway. It was really nice to get a bit more into the characters' inner thoughts and some of the details that never made it into the anime. I'd recommend this to anyone who wants military space opera that has a lot of thought-provoking things regarding political systems.
• Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls by David Sedaris
  I actually picked this out for my mother (who is all about diabetes) because I had no idea what it was about but I'd seen a lot of people carrying it around in college... but it turns out it doesn't have anything to do with diabetes and is instead hilarious and meant for people like me, who want to hear stories about older gay men and shenanigans that happen when they travel to different countries. And any of the other stuff in these short stories that I don't remember. Will read more stuff by him in the future, because this was very amusing to me.
• Candide by Voltaire
  My brother gave/left this to me, and though I remember him not being too enthusiastic about it in general, I actually liked it quite a bit. It was rather amusing, and I can definitely see why Oscar Wilde was always talking about Voltaire being a pretty cool dude.
• Morphine by Mikhail Bulgakov
  Another book that was my brother's that just got left with me. It was good for its length, I guess. Not really my thing, though.
• Children and the Tundra THE HAGGIS-ON-WHEY WORLD OF UNBELIEVABLE BRILLIANCE
  IT'S ACTUALLY REAL IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED. I preordered this book like six years ago and then it just stopped existing and then one day, it was out. Wow. Unfortunately it wasn't as geniously humorous as the other HOW books, but I liked the advertisements about Australians, at least. And the fact that this series is not deader than dead. Thank you Dave Eggers and your brother whose name escapes me.
• Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso
  The most disappointing thing I've read by Sarah Manguso (even though I looove her). I really do get the desire to record/remember everything, all the details of your life, but this just didn't strike me in the humorous or emotional ways that all of her other writings have. Maybe because as much as I understand her obsessive desire to record absolutely everything, I periodically set my diaries on fire or tear them up into unreadable pieces because I hate myself and don't want my past to even exist. At least she's still writing.
• A Very Bad Wizard by Tamler Sommers
  This was kind of interesting. It's interviews with random researchery/sciencey people about morality-related things. Unfortunately one of the interviews was about something that was practically fraudulent, and a lot of the later interviews just weren't terribly interesting to me, and it seemed some of the people the author was interviewing weren't exactly able to justify the things they were claiming. Plus, I already know how bonobos work from vulgar German songs. The first interview about how absolute free will doesn't exist was real nice, though, very convincing.
• In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien
  I read this in notCanada. And guess where that is? In the Lake of the Woods County! Aren't I so cool? This book was a nice, almost melancholy book that had surges of anger in it. Mostly the melancholy was there, and I liked that it just gave you a lot of half-details so you got to think about the rest yourself. It was really great at capturing the tension between the main character and his wife in the most arbitrary conversations, too.
• Where is it Coming From? by the students of the Boggs School, Detroit
  ... and illustrated by Dave Eggers! I only just got this today but it's basically a kid's book. Only it's really bizarre. Most of the stories are very short, and some of them are just random or take such sudden, unexpected turns that I can't not be amused or almost horrified. These 6-10 year olds, man. They're good news. Also, Dave Eggers' art is weird in a good way and worked wonderfully with the stories themselves.

Phew. Okay. So. That's what I've finished. Right now I'm reading The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino because you know what? This guy's a genius. I've only read a single story in it but it was already super imaginative and honestly kind of sad at times. ... Maybe amusing too. I've read about half of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and I've also finally started reading Chapterhouse: Dune by Frank Herbert. Going through that last one slowly, cautiously, in fact, because Heretics of Dune was just wtf every single page.

I'm also reading Mein Kampf which is enraging because at first Hitler seemed to make so much sense and be such a normal person, but then suddenly he'll go off on tirades against Jews for completely shallow reasons and with the most wild logic jumps ever (and he basically believes they're trying to destroy the world???) and also anyone who isn't a raging nationalist like him. Whenever I finish a chapter of this it's like. Holy crap. I need to take a breather. And despite how much I hate the things he's saying, the translator of the English version is kind of an asshole who needs to stop being such a biased pansy and leave out comments like "OH BUT THIS WAS A COMMON THING TO REFERENCE HITLER PROBABLY NEVER READ THIS LOL HE WAS TOO MUCH OF AN IDIOT TO ACTUALLY EXPERIENCE THINGS." Just fucking say it was common to reference in Germany at that time period and be done with it. Ugh.