Yes, thank you Discourse, I know my topic is similar to all the other November book threads. But it’s 2017 now!
We’ll start with some heavy stuff. I just read The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, which is all about how government action (or inaction) brought about segregation of African Americans that persists to this day. Explicit racism may be gone thanks to civil rights legislation and the courts, but the legacy of that earlier discrimination remains.
Not an uplifting read, but I’m a firm believer in knowing history even if it’s distressing. If more people recognized this history, we might find more support for the kind of policies that can begin to undo the damage.
Prince of Thorns was… really hard to like at first. It got better when as it went, but you really shouldn’t open with a murdering rapist that’s “so evil even evil things fear him” as a protagonist.
I forget the details, but I do remember hating it when I started it, though I also recall it mostly turning around later somehow.
Thomas Covenant is a heaping sack of self-pitying shit. The protagonist of Lawrence’s trilogy is actually a great character who’s much less evil than he likes to let on.
Indeed - The book was yet another in the long line of internet faux rage that happens from time to time - hell, check out what the author has had to put on his website (minir spoilers, obviously) about it, since people claimed his book was “All men…all rape”, and there exactly two places, in the very beginning, where any kind of rape is taking place.
I just reread the offending passage, and you know what -you are right about that. That is exactly what happened. And that IS a hard sell.
What I was responding to, was what some of those reviews were saying about the rape-fest in the books, and I included you in that - I apologize for that.
It is a hard read, I agree - and I have been angry at books before because of things like this (Stephen Erikson, Forge of Darkness) so yeah, I can relate.
Oh, yeah, it’s not a “rape-fest” by any means, but when the rapist is your protagonist, it’s hard to give even half a fuck about him other than to wish him death.
It’s pretty good, though not the strongest of Clines’ books by any stretch. As with most of his novels, it is entirely plot-driven with some fun twists and turns in there, and because it’s a time-travel story with the predestination paradox being a “feature” of the story, there are a few nice sequences where the story kind of twists back on itself.
The narration on the audiobook (Ray Porter) is really good.
It answers the question “what if we hadn’t quite managed to abolish slavery?” and holy shit the industrialized modern versions of slavery, if you bring those ideas forward, are so much more horrific than I had ever let myself imagine. You think “yeah, slavery’s bad, I get it” but no… you don’t. Please read this book. It’s so good.
His Last Policeman trilogy was amazing as well, completely different. I’ve never read an end of the world noire before. Start with UA, above. If you dig that, then absolutely keep going here:
If all you want is to read it, and don’t care about owning it, check to see if your local library has a digital library. Digital loans are great. Grab books from the comfort of your home. Mine sends you to amazon to forward the book to your kindle.
If you are a slow reader, after it’s on your kindle, disconnect from wifi.
