If you haven't already, I recommend reading:
February 14, 2004:
I have an entire stack of books from the library I never bothered to read. I can't help it-they're just junk. Nothing against the authors.
June 27, 2003
Glen David Gould's Carter Beats The Devil is a historical novel about the life of a stage magician named Charles Carter. It's good stuff. I hear one of his other books The Adventures of Cavalier and Clay is also well worth the effort. I stayed up all night reading it. An exhilarating mix of melancholy and wonder, with added appearancess by the Secret Service, and Warren G. Harding. Recommended reading.
I picked up Stephen King's Bag of Bones, and was disappointed. It just didn't do it for me; King was trying too hard. It's all ghost-y, but I just kept getting kicked back to reality. The book just didn't grab me, and it felt like King phoned this one in. Noonan, the protagonist, is a writer who has stockpiled several book manuscripts, then uses them up after he gets writer's block when his wife dies. Oh, yeah, then he ends up in haunted Maine. King cribs from his other, better novels several times, and parts of the novel feel influenced by magical realism in an undefined, hazy way. King's punch-you-in-the-face style has a hard time being subdued enough for a ghost story.
June 23, 2003:
Opened John Irving's The Cider House Rules, just to flip through it, and wow, it carried me all the way to the end. It reminds me quite a bit of Steinbeck's East of Eden, which I know is one of Jacob's favorites, if not his all-time favorite. There are a couple of shifts in perspective that I found hard to follow, or at least, that confused me momentarily. I'm not sure what we're supposed to think. The protagonist, Homer Wells, has a certain detachment that sometimes borders on sociopathic lack of affect, bringing to mind Camus' The Stranger.
June 22, 2003:
Have been flipping around in a copy of Chester Karrass' Give and Take. Lots of interesting anecdotes about negotiation, broken into tiny sections. I guess it's meant to be a bathroom reader for salesmen, or something. Like eating cotton candy-fun, but after a bit, you want something more substantial. Also looking at Buck Rodgers' The IBM Way, which I found insufferable and self-serving. I can see that there are ideas that have been adopted in many organizations, including my place of employment, but jeez. Hasn't aged well in places, either.
June 7, 2003:
Let's see, Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace Revisited wasn't as much fun as seeing him perform his act live. Other than that, eeh. I've flipped around a few things, not much of consequence.
Am also working on Mary Hunt's Debt-Proof Living, sequel to The Complete Cheapskate, which I enjoyed a lot.
March 12, 2003:
Been flipping around in a few books, haven't actually read a whole lot recently at home. I tend to read more while traveling for work, when I have bigger stretches of time to fill. I never finished reading Stephen King's Dreamcatcher or Black House. I did read From A Buick Eight while at Sam's getting my tires changed back in November. It's an homage to some of my favorite H.P. Lovecraft themes, and it's got a great payoff. Fantastic page-turner.
Recently I got a copy of Andy Looney's The Empty City, the inspiration for the game Icehouse. It's not terrible, but it is self-indulgent, and I understand why it's self-published. Something never quite gels about it. Maybe that was the point; the title refers to the emptiness of being a single person in a city where you have no connection to others.
March 30, 2002:
Well, I've finally gotten all my books back to the library. I am about halfway through a copy of Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses. It's a lot more depressing than I remember her other books, if I recall correctly. I bought this copy for a quarter, and I realized it has a subtle reek of cigarettes that has transferred to my hands. Help, I have tobaccy hands!
February 16, 2002:
Returned a bunch of library books, paid big time fines. Found a copy of Judd Winick's Pedro and Me, enjoyed it a lot. I'm a big fan of Winick's graphic novels about Barry Ween, Boy Genius, and he's not doing a terrible job on the Green Lantern comic, so that wasn't surprising. I'm reading Rebecca Ore's Outlaw School, which is amazing. It's a cross between Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Unlike the anime, the Ghost in the Shell manga has a little soul. Not much, but a little.
February 2, 2002:
Finished reading Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife. Very bizarre, and less satisfying than the first book, mainly due to the introduction of many, many supporting characters. Fortunately, some of them are killed, tightening the narrative toward the end.
January 5, 2002:
While on Jekyll Island, I bought a copy of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass. Wow, it is some heavy-duty good, wrapped up in cool, and tied with a bow of Victorian whimsy. I'm rereading it again right now, plus I have my recently-acquired stack of books. First up: T.H. White's The Once and Future King. I loved reading it years ago but never owned a copy until now. Hardback for fifty cents; would have been a bargain at ten times the price.
December 1, 2001:
Reading Andrew Tobias' The Only Other Investment Guide You'll Ever Need. He makes investment vehicles easy to understand, and has a delightful undercurrent of humor that makes it a page-turner. Sample: one of the tables in the book is labeled: "A Table That Looks Boring But Is Actually Most Revealing." The mutual fund information is out of date, since mutual funds have increased eightfold since then, and much has happened, even in the last year. (Can ya give me Hallelujah, fellow holders of large-cap funds?) Anyway, if you find it at your local library, it's worth reading.
November 21, 2001:
Revisited The Sheepskin Psychosis and Innumeracy. I owe my life to The Sheepskin Psychosis; it helped console me when I wasn't liking college.
November 20, 2001:
Zipped through Kurt Vonnegut's Bluebeard again, and browsed through Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. I wish the author had trimmed it down a little. He gets goofy in a couple spots, but overall, I think the arguments hold water.
November 19, 2001:
In honor of the impending motherhood of Laura Cunningham and Julie Ratner, I reread Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions. There's only one thing I like better than being a borderline alcoholic: reading about alcoholics and their path to sobriety. Lamott's journal entries about being a sober single mother with her infant son awaken visceral responses: 'Awww, that's cute,' 'Ew, that's gross,' or 'Oh!, that's neat.' The best passages evoke all three feelings at once, and are fun to read aloud.
November 17, 2001:
Finished Wizard's First Rule. I was compelled to keep reading by the cynicism and failed genius. Three hundred pages could have been cut so easily, mostly involving scenes of torture. I hope the author gets the therapy he needs, since he obviously hates and fears women.
November 16, 2001:
Digesting Terry Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule. Not done yet; it's monstrously large. It's a shame, because Goodkind does an excellent job at setting a theme, producing interesting, rounded characters, and maintaining the reader's interest, but the book turns to fantasy-horror in the last few hundred pages. I am forced to ask, "Who is reading and enjoying depictions of sadistic sex, cannibalism, torture, and ritual sacrifice?" Oh, yeah, and there are weird sex/torture combinations, thankfully not too explicit or long. The characters have a complicated system of absolute checks and balances that are partially set up along gender lines, preserved by bad mojo and infanticide. This book won't win fantasy any converts, but reading selected passages aloud could start book-bannings and book-burnings.
Yesterday, I read John Wyndham's "Re-Birth!", which could have been better. It was no Day of the Triffids or Village of the Damned, is all I'm saying. The first half is better than the second.
I also found time to zip through Kevin Anderson's Gamearth, which I found illogical, pedestrian, and irritating. I know I read the first book in the trilogy a few years ago, but this sequel made even less sense. The central conceit, that a role-playing-game takes on an independent existence, isn't prima facie a terrible idea, but I've read several attempts to make the idea work, and they all failed. It is never clear how much of the game's action is being produced by the players, and how much is being intuited by them, or created by them, or existing separately from them, and that makes the characters' motivations (Melanie, preserver of the game and David, manic-depressive destroyer of the game) difficult to understand. When a Gamearth section ends after describing the characters' actions and conversations about how to solve quests and save the world of Gamearth, and the reader is returned to the 'real world' characters, although Melanie, David and the rest appear to have completed a session, it's never clear how much they know about what their characters are thinking or saying. The conclusion of this book in the series ends with an absurd deus ex machina that no RPG session would ever let players commit. I have no reason to keep this book; I'll never reread it.
October 10, 2001:
I bought a book by Jim Munroe called Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask, which was enjoyable. A guy named Ryan leads a normal, shy existence, except he can also turn himself into a housefly. He finds a girlfriend, and things get complicated. I'm not sure whether to describe the book as a coming-of-age story, or a romance, or a postmodernist, Gen-X romp, but the novel is all three at various points. I'm still excited with that tingle I get from reading interesting books for the first time. I don't know if it will hold up to repeated readings, but I'm going to find out.
September 29, 2001:
Weird-I had forgotten about the plane-crashes-into-building scene at the end of Stephen King's novella "The Running Man" (all political and social commentary was edited out for the movie).
I flipped through a copy of Black House, the new Stephen King novel. I wasn't impressed very much, but I also haven't really read it yet.
I am rereading The Poisonwood Bible. Man, that's good stuff. Thanks, mom!
There's also content in the anime section, or you could head back to main.