Just finished Kraken by China Mieville. Disappointing and shockingly (for a Mieville book) derivative Gaimanesque urban fantasy. After a promising start in which I could never envision the possibility of this writer boring me, the disappointments of The Iron Council and now Kraken have downgraded Mieville into something of a hit and miss author for me.
Finished Extension du domaine de la lutte, short but devastating. Will get back to Houellebecq some day, but not too soon.
Devices and Desires keeps treading between the interesting and the annoying, so I keep getting sidetracked: I’ve started a second assault on Pynchon, this time through Mason and Dixon and seems to be clicking: he’s actually telling a recognisable story, I like the language and get most of the alusions and references. I loved Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and M&D is definitely in its DNA.
Ah, Houellebecq, I loved Plateforme. I read a bit of the following book but couldn’t get into it.
Now it reminds me of Bakker (in Disciple of the Dog, which I’m going to finish in the next half hour).
Finished Disciple of the Dog, review here: http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/node/2007
I don’t think you can find a book like this one.
240 pages into Nineteeneighty, the fourth book in the Red Riding Quartet by David Peace. It’s been a long time since i’d read the second book and I devoured it so quickly that I didn’t quite manage to ever move it from my “to-read” shelf to the “read” shelf on good reads, so I’m uncertain as to when I actually DID read the book.
Months ago.
But this book is so intertwined to that one (more so than 1977 was to 1974) that its exclusion from the film adaptations seems…an odd choice. In this book, a new man who is from Internal Affairs (equiv thereof as there doesn’t appear to be any IA dept) is asked to head up a special commission on the Yorkshire Ripper, review the case and come up with any new suggestions. At this time he’s also dealing with a good personal friend who is under investigation for being corrupt, but this is being done as a political maneuver to get at our protagonist.
The writing style is still that stream of consciousness dark poetry that has been a hallmark of the series so far. It reads quick, but you have to pay attention as Peace will repeat psychological tics but only mention plot points once and it’s not until later that you realize that you may have missed something important.
Also, the brutality on display is not quite for the squeamish. Excellent book and I’m going to try to finish the final hundred or so pages tonight. If I can’t then definately tomorrow. I have the fourth and final book resting on my night stand, but I may break it up a bit and read Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi.
Has anyone done a survey on why so much YA literature is currently so dystopian?
Is this when I start quoting lyrics from “Subdivisions”?
Reading a self-published, Kindle only eBook, by Roy Dean, called “Year with the Master”. He’s a Brazilian jiu-jitsu, judo, aikido and aiki-jujutsu black belt and has some really good, objective insights into the purposes of different martial arts and their relative effectiveness.
yeah, but when i was growing up, i was seemingly the only person i knew who was reading dystopian literature (we, brave new world, 1984, etc) and horror literature aimed at kids (Bellaires) but now stuff like The Hunger Games crosses over.
Did 9/11 and the following decade fuck the country’s psyche that much where that kind of violent pessimism is now a feature instead of a bug?
I’m in the middle of Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire. His books have been good so far, but I get the impression he had endorsement deals for them. He mentions every brand and model of anything the characters purchase or use, to the point where it becomes crass. I really don’t care which IKEA products a character furnished her apartment with, how long they take to assemble, or how much they cost.
These plugs aren’t limited to Salander’s POV. These details would make sense given het quirks, but no- they all do it.
Posted from my model of phone without using Tapatalk.
Not sure what you mean by “crosses over,” here. Are you saying the Hunger Games crosses genres (Bellaires-style horror fiction with dystopian fiction), or crosses over into the mainstream?
I haven’t read The Hunger Games, but I assume it’s more Nineteen Eighty-Four than Brave New World?
sorry, crosses over here meant into the mainstream
It’s more Battle Royale than either.
I’ve not read anything by her before, but after reading about those two books I’m interested! Any chance of a non-small press release for the books? I love the idea of the small print run books, but I like my more affordable publisher print runs.
Well. I can’t guarantee it won’t happen, but in my experience small press books almost never see wider distribution or even a second print run. Especially books like Purple & Black, which are maybe novella length.
Every now and then there’s a collection or something - the bundle of the Bauchelain and Korbal Broach shorts by Steven Erikson, for example. But not often.
Just finished reading Temeraire, at the recommendation of someone here. Thanks, someone! This book was a great adventure story and just a lot of fun. Looking forward to more in this series…
I read “The City and The City”, and enjoyed it, so now I’m working my way through “Perdido Street Station”. I haven’t decided yet whether it is really good, or pretty good but skirting the line of ridiculous. Certainly not boring, though.
Geoff
wrapped the excellent Ninteeneighty last night and am now reading Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi’s YA dystopian follow up to The Wind-Up Girl.
While not in the same universe, this is in the same post-oil milieu. The title refers to kids who live along the Gulf coast (now greatly expanded thanks to global warming) who eek out sustenance living by scavaging valuable portions of old oil rigs. The protagonist of the story is Nailer, a young boy in his early or pre-teens who does what’s called “light crew” which means that he scurries along the guts of the ships and tears out valuable components which are then resold. Nailer is good at this because he is small and can scurry along duct work which others may not be able to reach, but his future is in doubt as he grows into a teen, he won’t be small enough to work “light crew” however he is not well off enough to get the food needed to bulk up to become an adult scavenger worker (known as “heavy crew”) who deals with larger and larger pieces for salvage (like sheets of steel ripped from the chassis of the ships).
This changes when a huge storm washes an expensive boat aground near by carrying a girl who is barely alive, and plainly rich; each of her fingers has a ring which is worth more than a year’s worth of profits to the scavengers. The girl is from a rich family and she convinces the protagonist to help her get to Orleans, where she can contact her family.
It’s probably a cliche at this point to discuss the level of violence in what is marketed at a book for teens, but as this is one of my first forays into the modern genre (the first being The Wee Free Men by Pratchett) it’s still somewhat shocking to me. Pre-teens are routinely injured, one’s fate is said to be better as a prostitute as they have no other use, a kid kills an adult, and kids casually discuss murdering one another for an increased percentage. I’m trying to think of an example from my youth, but Lord of the Flies even maintained a civil distance in the minds of the protagonists (at least at first).
Beyond the dystopian angle, there is a huge aspect of poverty porn here as everyone lives in lean-to shacks and ekes out the barest of survival. In addition to the societal collapse, there is, in this location at least, a bit of an economic collapse and all of the social issues that go along with that; violence, nihilistic self destruction, destruction of family units, deaths due to hunger or disease.
The only external ruling body is that of the rich, who buy the salvage from the crews, the interal ruling body seems to be a bit more complex with crew bosses who oversee specific aspects of the crews, but who have bought in to their position, in what sounds like a complex investment relationship. If a crew boss cannot maintain quota, they are replaced but the replacement sounds like their overseers offer their position up for sale, which means that any person who can afford it buys into it thus getting a percentage of the salvage.
The book reads very quickly. I started it last night before falling asleep last night and am currently 182 pages into the 323 page book. I’ll finish this tonight then will either read the comedic Pictures From an Institution, Nineteeneightyfour (the final Red Riding book) or something from the Kindle.
So far, I am actually finding Ship Breaker to be a stronger book than The Wind-Up Girl.
I finished Stephen King’s The Stand in about eight days about a Month ago and have been reading the free classic stories (the expired copyright stuff) on my Kindle ever since.
I just finished Tarzan of the Apes, a story I’ve never read and only knew from some old black and white TV show I saw a couple times as a kid. Except for the retarded ending this is probably the best adventure story I’ve ever read. For the most part it reads amazingly well for being 100 years old, and I’d recommend it to anyone who is a fan of 100-year-old turn-of-century adventure stories from, or the likes of Robert E. Howard’s Conan.
I’ve also read several HP Lovecraft short stories, after toying around with buying his stories for the last couple years. I never bought any of his stuff because I’ve always heard it described as stilted and byzantine, with shallow one-dimensional characters and so overly implausible that it would be impossible to suspend belief enough to enjoy them.
Well, thanks to my Kindle I am able to read a lot of his stuff for free, so I read: The Rats in the Walls, Reanimator, The Dunwitch Horror among other things. Turns out I love this stuff, in much the same way I used to love the old black and white Twilight Zone. Although the science of it all falls apart too easily in the science-heavy stories, and many of the plot contrivances dealing with issues like evolution could be shot down by any modern seventh grader, this stuff holds up for me very well.
I haven’t delved into classics like Mountains of Madness yet, or any of the blatant Cthulu mythos stuff because I want to ease into it, to sort of get a feel for his universe before I pull back the curtain and see what it’s all about in the spoilery stories I’ve been warned against.
I also started a free ebook (it was free through some publisher promo) called Fallen Angels by Niven, Pournelle and Flynn, but quickly stopped reading at chapter two. The story (as of chapter 2) is about a rescue mission that takes place in a mid-ice age earth in the near future. Society is persecuting fans of science, and by extension science fiction stories, because they don’t like certain off-world humans living on space stations orbiting earth. So basically earth is turning anti-tech. Anyway, some of the space people crash on earth and need to be rescued, who better for the job than a bunch of cosplay science fiction convention nerds, right? yea… Fuck that shit.
It happens more often than you think. A fair bit of the time, you’ll see a hardback from a small press do well and get picked up by a major for a mass market release, or a lesser work from a name author get jumped on. Doug Clegg, to name one best-selling example, has gone this route a couple of times.
The latter, which I’ve enjoyed, is what I hope for, but then with the unique printing way I read about Purple and Black (the letters are printed in those colors) it probably doesn’t have a chance. Come on Subterranean Press - Get up on some eBookstore so I can enjoy these!