Interlude: Meh.

I've started and stopped reading three books since the end of the Oppenheimer one and nothing is really striking my fancy.

Thankfully I'm well ahead even without having been as dedicated to reading as I like

Books 16: The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer

I wrapped this several days ago and frankly there isn't much worth discussing here.

The book is fascinating and Oppenheimer got screwed, but this book spends much of its time setting up villains and praising Oppenheimer that you'd get the impression that he was a perfect little lamb while Teller was a fame thieving jerk.

You'd be better off watching the PBS Nova special The Trials of Oppenheimer than you would reading this book.

I saw it described as a Hagiography and that is the perfect terminology for this tome.

Book 15: A Pretty Face

Rafeal Reig has just put himself on my radar, and it's thanks to a suggestion by Jessa Crispin over at the NPR Book section. This is a very, very quick read (which somehow still took me nearly a week) that deals with a ghost who looks back on her life while also looking to see who murered her. But this isn't really a genre book by any means. This isn't about a crackling plot or last minute twists to keep you into the night.

It's really more about the life we live and the memories we leave behind. And as a ghost, would we have the ability to look back without romantcizing the elements which we've been familiar with.

The last two "chapters" (there are breaks, but not numbered chapters per se) are some incredible writing, which even in (the occasonally sloppy) translation struck true.

Any attempt to say much more would be a disservice to the book and to any potential readers.

The link above includes a good excerpt which should give you a good idea if you'd like to read the rest of it.

Interlude: Good Reads

I keep forgetting I have a profile on this site, so I update it fairly rarely. I was hoping that intertwining this project with that website would lead to adequate enough reminders but that doesn't seem to be the case unfortunately.

Regardless, I just thought I'd share my profile should anyone want to "friend" me.

Book 14: Apocalypse Movies

Just as I suspected. Well done, but shallow overview of the genre. It succeeded in making me add Kevin Costner's The Postman to my Netflix queue after making a somewhat passionate argument for it.

Interlude: stumbling toward prolifancy

Three back to back yet shallow posts. Amazing.

I am trying an experiment to purchase less books. I have a bit of an issue with buying something because it looks really interesting, then when I am available to devote my full interest to the book, my capricious nature has tended to move on.

I'm trying to avoid this rather expensive habit so I am not purchasing any books for the next two weeks, which means that I will have to make do with the many, many unread books I have until then.

I'm probably going to wrap Apocalypse Movies tonight, and was thinking of moving on to A Pretty Face, a surreal book from Spain about a woman trying to solve her own murder with the help of a mad scientist.

New Book: Apocalypse Movies

I've been a fan of Kim Newman for a while, having chanced across his Anno Dracula series in the 90's and have become aware of his excellent film writing in the past decade or so since I started to pick up Video Watchdog fairly regularly.

Apocalypse Movies is so far a largely shallow examination of films which deal with radical alterations to society. The chapters are broken down by thematic elements and some films will make repeated appearances due to their nature.

So far, there's nothing really mind blowing to me, no great original insights, but the writing is fast and breezy and it's an enjoyable way to spend a train ride.

If you're interested, yet unfamiliar, then this book may be an enjoyable read, however, my criteria with regards to film books being "good" or not is "Does the book make me add movies to my Netflix Queue?" This may not be fair criteria for this book as this is territory I have managed to cover on my own.

Book 13: All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By

This is a disarming and affecting novel, for completely different reasons than the last book I wrote about here.

I feel that any attempts to discussing All Heads Turn in any capacity would be to do a disservice to the novel as I am unable to really put my thoughts together in any coherent way.

So in an entirely lazy cop out, I will post a link to David J Schow discussing the book.

interlude: Trying to impress people

is the number one reason given as to why people lie about books they've read according to a report released recently in the UK.

My own number one reason is typically to get the other person to shut up about it. Of course I do this to say I haven't read books which I plainly have. This is really helpful if you find yourself in a discussion with someone who has a strong opinion which greatly differs from your own.

Anyway, from the article linked:

The study, carried out on the World Book Day website in January and February, surveyed 1,342 members of the public.

Those who lied have claimed to have read:

1. 1984 - George Orwell (42 percent) - This certainly explains all of the rather embarrassing attempts to link George W. Bush to this book I had seen on internet forums for the past 8 years.

2. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (31) - I tried to read this, but it didn't grab me. I think I made it a few dozen pages in before giving up. This was an attempt to read more Russian literature in an attempt to familiarize myself with cannon. If the internet had existed, I'm certain I'd have found wikipedia's entries to be more enlightening.

3. Ulysses - James Joyce (25) - Never read it. Tried to but found it far more self indulgent than my patience allowed.

4. The Bible (24) - Have read it. Was Catholic struggling with a bit of a faith crisis. Instead I realized that I like rite and mysticism, but find the hierarchy to be a bit bland and not really in line with my own morals. I'd have been a GREAT Episcopalian, but my attempts to join that church were not really met with any degree of success.

5. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (16) - Read a great summary of it once.

6. A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking (15) - Read it. Didn't understand enough of it to have made it worth my while. Probably didn't help that I was in middle school.

7. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (14) - Magical Realism? Pass.

8. In Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust (9) - Zero interest in slogging through a great brilliant epic that few others have gone through just to get some kind of literary achievement badge. I can read many smaller classics in that time frame.

9. Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama (6) - Never read. Not really driven to do so either.

10. The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins (6)- Never read. Find Dawkins to be a bit of a prat. Certainly better than Hitchens, but still, no interest.

New Book: All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By

I'm about 200 pages into this and I think I'm finally starting to grasp what the book is about.

In 1942, during a cadet wedding at a military school in the American South, a silent chapel bell rings and the groom seemingly goes spontaneously mad. Using his ceremonial sword to kill his bride-to-be, his father and if not for the intervention of his brother, he'd his whole family before he kills himself.

Miles away, a young black child is hit with a force that shreds his clothes and causes him unbearable pain which quickly kills him, but no physical wounds.

The book cuts away to a few years later in Africa, where a British soldier visiting a missionary hospital hears a remarkable tale about vengeance against the white man by an ancient white jungle goddess, the basis for Haggard's She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed from the classic adventure book She.

At this point I was tempted to stop the book because while I have a familiarity with She, I hadn't read it and I was quite concerned that this book was attempting to build itself as an unofficial sequel and while the book has taken more of a Southern Gothic bent than rip roaring adventure book, I'm still a bit concerned that my own ignorance may be preventing me from following what the author is doing.

Interlude: Nothing Better than Free Books

I'd like to give a thank you to Alison for snagging me a copy of the next Stieg Larsson book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, months before it comes out in the US.

Bloomberg recently ran an interesting article on the recent popularity of Swedish Crime fiction.

New Book: Up for Grabs

I had started on Tim Scott's light hearted science fiction book Outrageous Fortune this morning but I don't know if I'm in the mood for it. I had started it because I needed to completely cleanse my mind from Throat Sprockets dark and oppressive hold on me (I was up until 3 AM re-reading sequences to make certain I really grasped what was going on and I was then up a further half hour just thinking about the whole).

The book so far is ephemeral, having the weight and consistency of chocolate mousse. It may be a mind cleanser, but I don't know if it's something I am really in the mood to read.

Perhaps something from Wodehouse would be more my speed currently.

Book 12: Throat Sprockets

I was not planning on having this book affect me as much as it did. I picked it up because I really just wanted something breezy that I could knock out and forget. This was not that book.

The book is about obsession and how media can change your life. It's also about our culture's need for violence and despair to power our lives.

A married advertising man eats his lunch in a run down porn theater, which used to be a movie palace. There he catches a film, Throat Sprockets, which grainy, edited, cut together with the narrative spliced apart focuses on women's necks. Seeing this film, the narrator is changed. First in his sexual desires, then in subtler ways which change him to the point where his wife leaves him. He develops new philosophies on life and he begins to think about the movie more until the hunt for the film becomes his only desire in life.

He captures another showing here, incomplete. Another chance showing elsewhere under a different name reveals different cuts, different scenes.

The hunt for the whole leads him to black market dupe culture (which is an almost unbelievable thing to think about now in the age of torrents) and importing video, where the author's knowledge of home video and film marketing really come to the forefront.

It seems that the film hasn't touched just him alone, and an entire near vampiric subculture has sprung to the mainstream where it leaves the world irrevocably changed in a really surprising coda.

I don't really want to say too much, but FIND THIS BOOK, READ THIS BOOK. You can find it for less than $10 at Amazon and Alibris.

interlude: by complete coincidence,

I was thinking about Flannery O'Connor and it turns out that there is a new biography on her.

I really must read Wise Blood. All of my familiarity with her is through her short fiction, which feels as though it may be a disservice as she only has two.