If you have been monitoring my goodreads.com profile, you will have noticed that there are a couple of books that have been on the 'currently reading' list for more than a year: Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver and Halldor Laxness's Independent People. I haven't ruled out finishing them, but I'm not actively trying to read them now. I also started the novel version of Isaac Asimov's Nightfall more than a month ago and haven't finished it. Why haven't I finished reading these books?
I can pinpoint the answer for Quicksilver:
The year is 1713, and Enoch Root goes to visit Dr. Daniel Waterhouse and the institute he has founded: the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts. It's only page 16 of 916 and it's unbearably cute. I didn't make it past page 50.
Independent People came highly recommended. It just seems to require more attention than I can give to it. Basically all my reading gets done on airplanes and it's just not airplane reading material.
As for Nightfall, it is hilariously direct in the analogy between fictional astronomical conundrums and real-life counterparts. But it's only been a month and a half, so I might still pull through.
Anyone want to make a case for taking another crack at any/all of these books?
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Books I Still Haven't Finished
Friday, November 27, 2009
Best Books of the Decade
The AV Club has been running a series of "Best of the 00's" listicles. Given how slow my rate of book reading has been since I became an adult, I was rather pleased to see that I'd read 5 of the 20 books on the fiction list for "The best books of the ’00s." And since even better than a listicle is a ranked listicle, I thought I'd better order that subset of books:
1.) Never Let Me Go
I try to review the books I read at goodreads.com. Each book can be rated on a five star scale. None of the I've rated so far have reached 5 stars. Never Let Me Go is the fabled 5 star worthy book. It's incredibly difficult to talk about this book without giving away the plot; I'm not going to even try. It's very short. It's easy to read. But it's impossible to put away. I think that the works of art I appreciate the most are those that strive to be the simplest. It's why Spirited Away is my favorite Miyazaki film.
I read this book in one sitting from 8pm to 4 am or so. Then I crawled into bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about it.
2.) Middlesex & 3.) The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay
I really love The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay, but Middlesex may be a little better. Kavalier & Clay is a fantastic story set about the "Golden Age" of comic books -- before, during, and after World War II. It's the kind of book you wish you were talented enough to write, the kind of book the grown-up version of any book-obsessed kid would have to love. I was in the Canary Islands when I read it (the Canary Islands!), and I'd steal some time after lunch to go back to my hotel room to finish reading it. With its pulp influences, it's a great story.
Middlesex is a great story too: like Kavalier & Clay it's about family, adventure, and the making of Americans with a historical setting. But it's one that that seems so real and yet so unique that I could never have conceived of it as a kid. I had to read the book first.
4.) Gilead
I read this book while severely jet-lagged and I remember thinking it was very good, but I'm not sure I found it particularly original or unmissable.
5.) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Of the 2000s Harry Potter books, I'm not sure I'd pick this one as the best. Way better than The Order of the Phoenix, probably a little better than The Deathly Hallows. But I seem to have very fond memories of The Goblet of Fire. What do you guys think?
By the way, most of these I reviewed on goodreads and Eugene wrote a whole bunch on Never Let Me Go at his blog.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Clash of the Cyberpunk Titans
Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk classic Snow Crash was published in 1992. I read it in 1996 and thought it was awesome. William Gibson's Neuromancer was published in 1984. Would it be possible to read it in 2008 and still find it brilliant and groundbreaking? Unfortunately, no. It's hard to read it fresh when you've read and seen it many times already. If you've read Snow Crash or seen The Matrix; Cowboy Bebop; (the hilariously terrible) Hackers; Ghost in the Shell (especially Ghost in the Shell); or any number of other books and movies I've never seen or forgotten, then you've already seen some or all of Neuromancer.
That certainly doesn't make it a bad book to read, but the relentless ripping off of Neuromancer does give Snow Crash an edge in the clash of the cyberpunk titans. That's also all you really need to know if you want to read either of those books. For kicks, I'm going to break it down and match up the two books point by point.
Characters: Neuromancer features Case, a drug addict and hacker, and Molly, a badass street-samurai, who for reasons totally unfathomable, and in a scenario that screams fanboy wish-fulfillment, repeatedly has sex with Case. The protagonist of Snow Crash is the aptly but incongruously named Hiro Protagonist. He is also a hacker and his female sidekick is Y.T., a hilariously obnoxious 15-year old skateboard Kourier. They do not have sex -- which the author wryly comments on.
Case and Hiro are bland compared to Molly and Y.T. In the battle of the sidekicks, Molly is a lot more badass, but she's also basically masturbatory material and in an supremely annoying character development, the author lets the plot grind to a full stop so Case can go running after Molly to make sure her feelings haven't been hurt by the mean man and she can reveal that, in order to pay for the cybernetic modifications that made her the badass she is, she prostituted herself. Sigh. Since I've been on this science fiction reading kick, I've lost count of the number of times a female character has been portrayed as a literal or figurative whore. Oh, science fiction! You've given me so much and yet enraged me as a woman so often. Was is that Molly was too much of a badass that she required a sad/tragic past to make her seem more fallible? Or is there some sort of mandate that all female character in science fiction need to be literal sex objects? Y.T. isn't exactly perfect: she's rather postfeminist in the "Ally McBeal on the cover of Time magazine" vein, when I'm much more a fan of old, reliable feminism. Still, Snow Crash prevails.
Plot: I was a little surprised to find out that Neuromancer is basically a heist movie: Case is recruited into a team to do a job. That said, it seems to be missing the element of a heist movie that I like the best -- the part where they show exactly how they plan and prepare to pull off the job. The plot in Snow Crash is a little more free form -- Hiro and Y.T. investigate a mysterious new drug, "Snow Crash" -- and, like other Neal Stephenson books, it has a beginning and a middle, but it doesn't quite have a ending. This one's a draw.
Setting and Tone: Both books feature dystopic futures where corporations have made an end-run around governments and where technology has allowed humans to interface with each other and with computers in an artificially created environment. This is where Snow Crash really starts to kick Neuromancer's ass. Stephenson takes the same premise and brings it to its logical conclusion -- creating whole corporate governments and instead of focusing on the nameless/faceless nature of corporate bureaucracy -- a trait, he instead assigns to the federal government -- he gives them brand identities. And aside from the purposefully mysterious Tessier-Ashpool group, places and corporations in Neuromancer serve only as backdrops to the overall feeling that the characters exist outside of any authority.
The differences aren't an academic matter of artistic choices but lie deeper. Put simply, Stephenson is one of us: he's a geek. And he uses Snow Crash to geek out about computers, linguistics, and Mesopotamian mythology -- topics which, coincidentally, I'm interested in too. Gibson's book, on the other hand, isn't really about computers; it's all 1960s counterculture, a cyber acid trip, manipulated human or machine consciousness. Cyberspace in Gibson's world is humans interacting with mainframes. Stephenson's Metaverse is a lot more familiar as the virtual reality version of today's internet -- 2008 probably looks more like Snow Crash than 1992 does. And it's built on code not hardware. Gibson's ambivalent and slightly wistful about the rapidly shifting technological landscape, while Stephenson's written the ultimate young man's book, running entirely on adrenaline.
Movie Aspirations: Unbelievably, neither book has yet been made into a terrible Hollywood movie. Yet. I thank whatever nerdy powers that be for having prevented a Snow Crash movie long enough that when the time comes the appropriate movie executive probably will not be saying, "Ooh, cyberpunk action movie. Can we get Keanu Reeves?" I hope. But still, somewhere, right at this moment, someone in Hollywood is pitching Y.T. as 'sassy' and I die a little more on the inside.
Random Thoughts: In Neuromancer, in order to distract the authorities while inflitrating the corporate headquarters of a media conglomerate, several people call in fake terrorist threats to the police from pay phones.
Near the end of Neuromancer, while Case is breaking in via cyberspace, he also needs to sneak in via the real world, so he spends time moving his computer around and looking for a place to plug it in -- it's like he's you or me at the airport.
Also, Bonn is a nuclear wasteland in Neuromancer.
Conclusions: It wasn't a fair fight, but I'm giving this one to Snow Crash. It's just more fun.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Free Sci-Fi/Fantasy E-Books
This may not be so interesting for those of you 1.) uninterested in science fiction or fantasy and/or 2.) living near a public library in the United States, but as part of some promotion (revamping their website or something or other), if you go and sign up at www.tor.com (they ask for very little, just a name, an email, zip code, and age), they'll send you a free e-book every week (for 12 weeks, I believe). It comes pdf and I've heard (on Slashdot, of course) no DRM. The first book is Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson, who is the author slated to finish off Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series.
Friday, January 12, 2007
Another Ivy League Education Gone to Waste
There's a small selection of English language books in the lounge at work, and I picked up The Rule of Four the other day. I recalled reading a -- mostly positive -- review of the book when it came out, describing it as a Da Vinci Code-ish novel (although I haven't read The Da Vinci Code), an academic mystery / suspense set at Princeton University, written by two Princeton grads as a way to keep in touch after graduation (which I thought totally dorky, but maybe a little cute).
You know those guys that you went to college with, who were maybe a little too articulate for their own good and who were super-excited to be at "X" institution and could enumerate the reasons why, but only in the most intellectually superficial way? (Yeah, douchebag, Schroedinger's cat is awesome.) Yeah, the book is written by those guys. I hate those guys. And while, clearly, people who I might not like if I knew them in person can write some really good stuff (for one, I'm pretty sure that Dave Eggers is the guy at the bar who won't shut up about 'how awesome would it be if we ...?'), these aren't those guys.
The book is clubby, pretentious, exceptionalist, shallow, and romantic about life and love in the self-absorbed way that must seem very profound and gratifying for a couple of Princeton guys with not many female friends, but that no one over the age of 24 should be. In short, everything I always assumed about Princeton students but never had proof of. Before. Also, the mystery isn't very interesting.