33 posts tagged “books”
I read a lot of different things, books, magazines, newspapers, short stories, and web articles. I thought I'd try keeping track of what I read each week and each Monday post about what I read the prior week.
This week's books:
- Hell to Pay by George Pelecanos
I started reading Pelecanos because of his work on the phenomenal TV series The Wire. Pelecanos' books take place in D.C. neighborhoods very reminiscent of the Baltimore neighborhoods he wrote about for the wire, and deal with the same issues of race, crime, drug, and police work. Hell to Pay is the second in a series featuring detectives Derek Strange and Terry Quinn.
They're great reads, not too dense, but full of brilliant observation surrounded by quickly moving plots. I can't wait to read the next in the series, and the rest of Pelecanos' works.
- Imbibe! by David Wondrich (reading)
- Flight by Sherman Alexie (reading)
I didn't get around to many articles this week.
- 'The Uses of Adversity' by Malcolm Gladwell for The New Yorker
I try not to miss any of Gladwell's writing, he writes brilliantly through anecdotal evidence about a variety of topics. This piece covers the rags to riches story, that someone from a poor, minority background was once able to "end up on top, by starting at the bottom" versus todays version of sucess seens as "a matter of capitalizing n socioeconomic advantage, not compensating for disadvantage."
- 'The Oval Office Facebook Group' by Dr. Mark Drapeau for Science Progress
An insightful look about how government intranet sites based on popular social networking platforms like Facebook and Google Docs are changing the way our government shares information.
I read a lot of different things, books, magazines, newspapers, short stories, and web articles. I thought I'd try keeping track of what I read each week and each Monday post about what I read the prior week.
First up the books:
- Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (finished)
- Imbibe!
- Hell to Pay by George Pelecanos
Short Stories:
- The Stone-Hearted Queen by Kelly Barnhill
I finally started reading my way through the Jul/Aug issue of Weird Tales. My favorite story of the issue so far is Kelly Barnhill's 'The Stone-Hearted Queen'. It's a fantasy piece, which I've never been a fan of, but this one is different. It doesn't get caught up in the fact it is a fantasy piece and just tells the story. Barnhill is also a Minnesota author, so I intend to seek out more of her work.
- How I Got Here by Ramsy Shegadeh
This one came highly reccomened by Jeff VanderMeer. It's almost too weird, but proved interesting.
- All In by Peter Atwood
Meh.
Articles:
Michael Pollan, one of the smartest writers I've read, penned this powerful letter to the next president. In it he explains why food policy will be one of the most important issues of the next presidency. He manages to tie energy policy, foreign policy, and environmental policy to food policy in ways that make sense. This is the one must read from my list this week, even if you aren't going to be the next POTUS.
A great article about game design focused on Epic, the creators of Gears of War for the XBOX 360.
Restauranteur Joe Bastianch reconciles his passion for food with his new found desire to run the New York Marathon.
From McSweeney's Internet Tendency comes this funny and very accurate (hopefully) fictional account of a man, his Warcraft addiction, and his girlfriend.
I recently stumbled into a new (to me) corner of the fictionverse. The land of the New Weird, of the Slip Stream.
Some of you may already be reading New Weird fiction. A story from Clive Barker's The Books of Blood, "In The Hills, The Cities," is the lead off piece in the Vandermeer's anthology.a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world models as the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy. New Weird has a visceral, in-the-moment quality that often uses elements of surreal or transgressive horror for its tone, style, and effects — in combination with the stimulus of influence from New Wave writers or their proxies (including also such forebears as Mervyn Peake and the French/English Decadents). New Weird fictions are acutely aware of the modern world, even if in disguise, but not always overtly political. As part of this awareness of the modern world, New Weird relies for its visionary power on a "surrender to the weird" that isn't, for example, hermetically sealed in a haunted house on the moors or in a cave in Antarctica. The "surrender" (or "belief") of the writer can take many forms, some of them even involving the use of postmodern techniques that do not undermine the surface reality of the text.
The two books remind me a lot of another favorite author of mine, Don Delillo. Their writing styles are different, but the stories they're telling of humanity and its struggle with and for modernity are similar.
In Spook Country Gibson weaves together the stories of a rather large cast in brilliant manner. Their inevitable encounters in no way seems contrived, or forced. Furthermore each of them are complete persons, not mere filler in order to advance plot points.
This book is part techno-thriller, part spy adventure, with bits of martial artistry, art, media and rock and roll thrown in for good measure.
Spook Country is exciting from beginning to end, and proves there really is no more an exciting time than the present.
Chris Rose is a columnist for the Times-Picayune. His book 1 Dead in Attic is a collection of his post-Katrina columns.
The city he describes in this book is a battered, broken city, but we all knew that. What Rose wants his readers to know is that the city is getting better, but it still hurts. The destruction wasn't just in the Lower Ninth Ward as it appears in the media, but everywhere. Some parts of the city fared better than others, but nothing went unharmed. That includes its people.
Chief among those scarred by Katrina is Rose himself. While this book is a chronicle of a ruined city crawling back to life it is also the story of one man's descent into depression.
The book begins bleakly--The title is taken from graffiti scrawled on the wall of a house Rose drove past nearly everyday for a year--and never really lets up. There are bright moments, and Rose definitely wants his reader to experience these moments, but he also wishes that what happened (is happening) not be forgotten.
I do know what it means to miss New Orleans. I never lived there, but I grew up in South Louisiana, and visited the city fairly often. I do miss it, even more so after reading this powerful book.
I've finished two books since my last update. Ann Patchett's Run and The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.
The rest of the book takes place in the hours that evening and the following morning weaving together the two families in secret and wonderful ways.
This is a story of family most of all. Their secrets, their desires, their closeness are all captured here, skillfully so.
The book reads like a fairytale and in fact resolves like one, a little to neatly, but Patchett is a wonderful writer, and as such I didn't mind her fairytale at all. Rather I was transfixed by it.
It is a masterwork of nonfiction first and foremost. Pollan's prose is highly readable, not at all dry or boring. He brings the people he meets and the places he goes to life as well as the top fiction writers.
The subject matter is as powerful if not more so. Pollan's attempt with this book is to follow four types of meals from beginning to end: Industrial, Industrial-Organic, Organic and Hunted/Gathered. What we are presented with is an unabashed look at food in America and the secret lives and cost we don't see by simply looking at our plates.
This is required reading for anyone who eats food in America.
The city referred to in the title is Ambergris, and rather than tell the story of Ambergris in a traditional novel format, Vandermeer has instead pieced together short stories, biographies, history papers, and letters to weave an image of this terrifying city and its inhabitants.
Vandermeer wrote each piece, but many different voices tell the story of Ambergris. Usually I'm turned off by the collection of stories as novel format, but Saints and Madmen, would not work as well if presented as a traditional long novel. Instead what you have is a sort of found guidebook to a city you've never heard of, that you read anyway.
The pieces here reference one another, sometimes contradict one another, but always add a layer to the city's realness. The slow reveal pays off big time. The city is still alive in my mind days after finishing the book.
Vandermeer is a rising star, and this intriguing book left me eager to see what he does next.
What he does know about is crippling accidents, and that plays a very large role in Duma Key. Edgar Freemantle was a successful builder before a crane accident crushed his body, took his right arm, and resulted in his divorce. Edgar moves to the Florida Keys for some geographical therapy, and discovers a formerly hidden artistic ability.
Duma is about the power of art to uncover truth. Because this is a Stephen King story, that truth concerns dead twins, giant frogs, and a Florida Island's dark history.
While I enjoyed Lisey's Story a lot more than Duma Key the new book does speak to King's further development as a writer. He no longer writes pure "horror" in my opinion, but instead uses horror as the backdrop against which his characters live their lives.
No King's not writing literary fiction, but with the exception of the horrible Cell, King is writing deeper, fully realized works.
For me it was a compelling read, though I usually devour King at a rapid pace anyway. The story unfolds perfectly, ramping up the creepy factor with each new chapter. The ending fell a little flat, almost too easy, but other than that it's a new spin on classic King that's worth reading.
Reading is something else, an engagement of the imagination with life experience. It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious. Reading is not about product.
New York Times, February 20, 2008, Book Lust.
This piece ostensibly calls Steve Jobs out for his wrongheaded remarks about the state of reading in America, but what I really liked are the ideas about books, like the one above, found in the piece.
When I'm actively working on my own writing, as I am currently, I read books in a slightly different manner than normal. I read not only for the story, but to study the craft. I did this while reading Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union and came away thinking I should give up writing entirely. My skills will probably never match those of Chabon.
His use of simile alone in this novel blew me away. His command of the English language is among the best I've read. His prose style is somehow simple and complex. Meaty sentences full of crystal-clear detail abound here.
The story is pretty damn good too. Chabon has taken a classic pulp-character, a down on his luck police detective, and an essentially pulp story and turned it into a literary feat of character driven fiction.
Amazing!
