|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
0743431707
| 9780743431705
| 0743431707
| 3.74
| 16,699
| 1965
| Feb 26, 2002
|
it was amazing
|
THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2024 reads, #56. I got behind on my “beach and airport” summer reads this year, because of volunteering to be a judge in a bunch of romance literary contests (which counts as marketing work for my freelance career as a book editor precisely of romance novels and other genres, which is why I’m always glad to do it); so I’m squeezing in a few more here in the waning days of September before moving on to the denser (both intellectually and in page count) books of each autumn, winter and early spring. As long-time friends know, I’m doing duel completist reads these days of both Ian Fleming and John Le Carre as part of each year’s summer reading (earlier this summer, for example, I did what I think is a rather nice write-up of the 1956 James Bond novel Diamonds Are Forever), because they’re such two natural opposite sides of a coin when it comes to metaphorically important genre literature in the Mid-Century Modernist years; both were writing at roughly the same time (although Fleming died long before Le Carre did), both were writing stories about the special branches of Britain’s Military Intelligence department (specifically MI-6, although given fictional names in the various books), and both were former members of special branches themselves during World War Two, which is where the impetus for writing about the subject came from for both. But Fleming wrote rah-rah stories about the derring-do of the unstoppable British forces even in a post-Empire, “Little England” UK, using the always suave yet deadly Bond to serve as the smartest person in the room in a new “jet age” of international treachery and Soviet menace; while Le Carre was interested in the exact opposite, examining the perpetually bumbling British government of the post-war years to paint a damning portrait of a nation in decline, everything made worse by the Fleming-type rah-rahers who used the increasingly aging events of World War Two to try to artificially prop up the old “stiff upper lip” of an empire (oops, I mean Commonwealth) on which the sun never sets. After a couple of warm-ups to start his career, written when young and not yet a full-time author, Le Carre really hit his doom-and-gloom stride with the novel right before today’s, 1963’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (my review), where he thought that he had adequately made the point that a post-war British intelligence complex really didn’t know what it was doing anymore, relying on less resources in a more complex world to solve mysteries over the heads of these aging pipe-smoking eggheads, who were increasingly having to rely on first-hand intel from their big rich beefy cousins over in America’s CIA. So Le Carre was aggravated and disappointed, then, to see a strong part of the British public interpret Cold as exactly the kind of Bond-like rah-rah propaganda for a forever ascendent British as Fleming’s books were; and he decided at that point to write a next novel that not a single person would ever be able to incorrectly interpret again. That led to today’s book, 1965 The Looking Glass War, and he’s not kidding around; virtually every single character in this book is some kind of moral coward or conniving sociopath or doddering pensioner, ironically making the world a much worser place while they think they’re making it better, using endless nostalgia for the war to sink into a worse and worse bureaucracy that results in more and more screwups for the entire British intelligence community. And in this, Le Carre picked a surprising yet excellent (nay, almost perfect) setting for such an unmistakably pessimistic story, which is another one of these Military Intelligence units similar to MI-6 but that is about to finally get shut down for good twenty years after the end of the war, which is when the department was created in the first place. This is something I got interested in several years ago, when first starting the Bond books, why there’s a modern MI-5 and MI-6 that everyone knows about (roughly congruent with the US’s FBI and CIA), but seemingly no other numbers; and it’s because all those Military Intelligence units were started during the two world wars, most of them with these really hyperspecific duties (MI-9, for example, did nothing but debrief escaped prisoners of war), which saw them rapidly get closed in the decade after the war ended, until all that was left was department 5, now handling all domestic threats to Britain, and department 6, now handling all foreign threats. (And in fact, neither department officially calls themselves MI-5 or -6 anymore, but simply acknowledges that a large portion of the public still do, precisely because of things like the Bond novels and subsequent movies.) Le Carre never mentions which MI number the one at the heart of our book is, but it’s quite obviously one of the ones way down on the importance ladder; here in 1965, twenty years after the war, they’re down to a handful of employees in a single decrepit building that everyone has forgotten about, full of aging intellectuals who think the way they did it against the Nazis is still the way to do it now, where the British government clearly thinks it’s best to just let these old fogies retire in a few years without a fuss and then quietly close down the department for good. So when some blurry dark photos come in one day from a forgotten old war resource supposedly showing a warehouse of Russian missiles accidentally spotted in East Germany, the desperate employees of MI-22 or whatever number they are decide to take this as seriously as possible as quickly as possible, despite the numerous red flags that come up over whether any of this information is true or can be trusted. That leads to an ever-cascading series of disasters, each worse than the last, including sending a career desk jockey out into the field for the very first time with no training, partnering him with an aging Polish defector they haven’t worked with since the war, and insisting on using the bulky and finicky suitcase-sized wireless transmitters all these aging administrators had become experts at during the 1940s, too old now to understand the latest generation of better, smaller, more reliable tech, and their department not important enough anymore to be able to successfully requisition it anyway. Le Carre, true to his word, makes his point so obvious here that there’s absolutely no way to misinterpret it; every person we see in this book, from the first page to the last, is incompetent or corrupt or a combination of the two, which brilliantly adds up one small fuck-up at a time in a snowball effect until suddenly they have an international incident on their hands by the book’s climax. This is officially called one of the “George Smiley” novels, named for Le Carre’s most enduring character, one of these aging war-veteran eggheads who’s described in the books as a squat little balding fat man with coke-bottle glasses and a wife who openly cheats on him. But as fans of these books know, some of the nine “Smiley novels” feature little more than a cameo from him, like is the case with this one, where he shows up for only two scenes out of the entire book. Still, though, it’s legitimate to call them Smiley novels, because those two scenes are really key ones for the book’s overall plot, in that Smiley actually works for the main MI-6 (which Le Carre fictionalizes in these books as “the Circus,” named because their headquarters is located in the Cambridge Circus neighborhood of London). When word gets out that this almost shuttered MI-22 or whatever is suddenly requesting cars, weapons, twenty-year-old wireless transmitters, safe houses and plane tickets, it’s Smiley’s job to figure out what’s going on; and when he realizes what a fuck-up this MI-22 is going to make of the entire thing, it’s Smiley’s job to figure out what MI-6 should do about it. That’s what really ties together all of these Cold War Le Carre novels; Smiley may understand that the system is crumbling around him, resigned to just put up with it for the few years he has left until retiring, dying or both, but he’s still ultimately good at what he does, which gives these books their clever a-ha moments that make them more entertaining than their otherwise relentlessly bleak tones would. That would reach its apex about a decade later, with the novel that’s looking more and more likely will be the one out of all of them that people will remember about Le Carre, 1974’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; but before that, we have 1968’s A Small Town in Germany, a thriller about the rise of neo-Nazis in West Germany’s new capital, Bonn (and the first book of Le Carre’s career to not feature Smiley at all). See you next summer for that one! John Le Carre books being reviewed for this series: Call for the Dead (1961) | The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1963) | The Looking Glass War (1965) | A Small Town in Germany (1968) | The Naive and Sentimental Lover (1971) | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) | The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) | Smiley’s People (1979) | The Little Drummer Girl (1983) | A Perfect Spy (1986) | The Russia House (1989) | The Secret Pilgrim (1990) | The Night Manager (1993) | Our Game (1995) | The Tailor of Panama (1996) | Single & Single (1999) | The Constant Gardener (2001) | Absolute Friends (2003) | The Mission Song (2006) | A Most Wanted Man (2008) | Our Kind of Traitor (2010) | A Delicate Truth (2013) | A Legacy of Spies (2017) | Agent Running in the Field (2019) | Silverview (2021) ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Sep 28, 2024
not set
|
Sep 28, 2024
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
4.08
| 34,880
| Jan 27, 1956
| Mar 08, 2001
|
it was ok
|
2024 reads, #51. This early novel by Arthur C. Clarke was recently featured at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor; and it sounded interesting e
2024 reads, #51. This early novel by Arthur C. Clarke was recently featured at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor; and it sounded interesting enough that I decided to take a chance on it, despite my checkered results of trying to read Clarke in the past. (I’ve read all four of the “Space Odyssey” books, all four of the “Rama” books Clarke had a hand in, and Childhood’s End, but found all nine books lacking in one way or another as good literature.) And alas, that turned out to be the case here too, a book that suffers the exact same problem I found most troubling in these other books too, which is that Clarke struggled profoundly during his career as a fiction author with the basic mechanics of the three-act plot, and thus tended to turn in novels where the first act takes up almost the entirety of the full book, there is no second act at all, and the third act is just blurted out as this gigantic infodump in the last chapter as fast as he could possibly move his fingers over his typewriter. In this case, that’s in service of an admittedly fascinating Gene Wolfe-like “space fantasy” concept; namely, it’s one billion years in the future, Earth has just one single domed city left on the planet’s surface (one so sophisticated that it can literally run, repair and upgrade itself), the people who are still around know that humanity once went out and colonized the Milky Way galaxy a billion years ago, and now humans don’t and no one understands (or particularly cares anymore) why, other than vague myths about “invaders” who may or may not have destroyed the Earth’s surface, and who may or may not have agreed to let a single enclosed city of humans still exist as long as they promised never to return to space again. To be honest, the main reason this got my attention is because Tor mentioned that it’s a novel about an AI bot who gains sentience and then promptly goes psychotically insane; but unfortunately, while Clarke does mention this insane AI for a couple of paragraphs in his chapter-long expository monologue at the end of the book about what exactly happened to the human race a billion years ago to land them in the situation they’re now in, the insane AI doesn’t actually have anything to do with the main plot, just another of the dozens of interesting concepts that Clarke just randomly threw into this book willy-nilly with no particular rhyme or reason (cloned babies! Living sidewalks! A computer the size of a city! Robots that can walk up and down stairs!), a guy big on ideas but (I’m coming to realize) woefully short on actual writing skills. Between this and my disappointed reads in recent years of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, it kind of makes me wish I had been a young writer in the 1950s myself, when science-fiction authors could apparently become world-famous just by crapping out whatever barely readable nonsense they wanted, merely because the genre was so new and there weren’t any better books around to unfavorably compare these to. (I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating that if you directly line up these ‘50s “classics” next to the average sci-fi novel coming out today, you’ll get a powerful lesson in how three generations now of passionate genre fans have pushed and elevated sci-fi into a level of quality that these ‘50s pioneers only could’ve dreamed of, which is ultimately a good thing despite the reputations of these ‘50s pioneers getting a good sound thrashing as a result.) Sadly, though, until Zorp and his minions finally visit the human race and grant us this ability to travel through time (All Hail Zorp), my dreams of making a killing in the ‘50s sci-fi community will have to remain just that, so let all this serve as the only warning you need about what you’ll be getting into if you decide to pick this up. Glutton for punishment that I am, I’m still thinking of reading more of Clarke’s work in the future -- in order to read this obscure novel, I had to download a torrent containing every fiction book Clarke ever wrote, and having those 33 novels and the four-volume short story omnibus now sitting patiently on my hard drive is a tempting thing indeed -- but for now, I suppose today’s disappointed write-up will have to do. P.S. As the always great Manny Rayner says in his own review of this book, and which I had totally forgotten I was going to write about in my review too, one of the inherent problems in sci-fi -- and why it’s so problematic to write a story set One Million Years In The Future -- is that we generally can’t imagine existence more than a few generations in the future from us, which is why Clarke’s Earth One Billion A.D. here sounds pretty much like 1956 Earth but with better gadgets. This is related to what I was going to mention, how again like my previous reads recently of Asimov and Heinlein, the sheer amount of casual sexism on display here is just head-shakingly astonishing in the 2020s, and such grand irony from writers who otherwise advocated for a more enlightened and liberal future. The fact that Clarke can write here about how sexism will have been entirely eliminated by a billion years in the future, then in the very next chapter state the line (I’m paraphrasing), “Like women have been doing for a billion years now, she couldn’t stop obsessively looking at herself in the mirror,” is just the freaking chef’s kiss of unironically unaware sexism, and gives you a good idea of just how baked into the very fabric of society this casual sexism was back then. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Sep 02, 2024
|
Sep 02, 2024
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||||
0316289361
| 9780316289368
| 0316289361
| 4.32
| 8,363
| 1938
| 1999
|
it was amazing
|
THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2024 reads, #34. It’s summer, which means I’m back to my usual summer reads, a series of easy-to-digest genre novels (also sometimes known as “airport and beach reads”) being done to honor 10-year-old Jason, who used to read the kid’s version of these each year for his public library’s summer reading program. CS Forester’s “Horatio Hornblower” books are a recent addition to my summer completist list, and fall under a category that I call “Grandpa Lit,” which I just recently aged into myself (I’m 55 this year), called this mostly because the books in this category are ones I remember my own grandfathers reading back in the 1970s when I was a kid, and seem like the kinds of books that only grandpas can fully get into (including not only these but old-style Westerns by people like Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour, military technothrillers along the lines of Tom Clancy, and more). Like with the first one I read last summer, 1937’s Beat to Quarters (my review), I’m tempted to say that you actually need to know a lot less in advance about the intricacies of tall sail ships to enjoy these than you might expect at first (for those who don’t know, these all take place within the British Navy of the late 1700s and early 1800s, as they fight France in the romantically historic Napoleonic Wars); but upon reflection, perhaps it’s more that here in late middle age, I’ve finally picked up enough general information about sailing here and there over the years and decades to be able to follow along with these books in a way a younger person can’t, thus helping to explain even more why these might only appeal to grandfathers and others who have lived long enough a life to actually be able to figure out what’s going on here in these jargon-filled books full of references to “quarterdecks” and “tops’ls” and the like. And for sure, another reason grandpas gravitate towards these kinds of books is that they’re unabashedly and unapologetically old-fashioned in their morals and culture, which is something important for younger people to understand before picking one up; in the world of the Hornblower novels, men are men, women are mostly pregnant and silent, God has chosen the rich to be the natural masters over the poor (and He has given them happy permission to beat the poor with knotted ropes anytime they put up a fuss about it), and people of color largely just don’t exist at all, with most of the storylines so far revolving one way or another around the idea of the people of southern Europe, in countries like Spain and Italy, being shiftless, lazy ne’er-do-wells, constantly causing trouble for the “True Gentlemen” of northern Europe who are always having to come down with their big impressive warboats and save their incompetent asses yet again. That said, if you can embrace a milieu such as this, the Hornblower books are undeniably thrilling adventures, giving us a sweeping look at a planet quickly being corralled and mapped by the newest generation of these tech-forward, highly proficient tall ships, a world in which navies are all-powerful because water is the one and only way humans have in these years to move large amounts of goods quickly, meaning that even the largest army in the world is quickly in trouble if their navy can’t get food and ammunition to them regularly. Forester very deliberately packs in just about everything that could possibly happen to one of these naval ships into each one of these books, deliberately to crank up the drama and stakes to a ridiculously high level, where it’s a matter of life or death pretty much every week of their sometimes year-long voyages; in the first book this all happened over on the west coast of Central America, as Hornblower and company help a Nicaraguan general who has declared his independence against invading French forces, while this second book is set in the much more expected area of France’s southern coast and Spain’s eastern coast, with his ship being just one of half a dozen traveling together (the “line” of the book’s title), and whose mission is this time the much more general “try to screw things up for France in as many ways as you possibly can.” This leads us to all kinds of adventures, including lots of daring raids on occupied Spanish forts in the middle of the night (not to mention a little retconned contemporary social commentary from Forester, writing this in the late 1930s, and having Hornblower think about how the Spanish are fated to have a country-destroying civil war in the future if they don’t get their act together), all while he takes an equal amount of time to simply describe what daily life was like on these ships, a harsh martial life where it’s just taken for granted that some humans are naturally the masters over others simply because God made it that way, and where the tiniest infractions can often lead to public beatings while the offender’s crewmates are forced to stand silently and watch. That’s the main reason to read these, because they describe in exacting detail a world that not only doesn’t exist anymore but that never really existed in the first place, taking the events that might happen to half a dozen ships over their course of their entire lives back then and squeezing them all into just one ship over the course of a single year here, then making everything work out great for the British people in charge of things just from their natural can-do spirit and God-given smarts above the rest of those other, lesser European states that surround them. (Not for nothing were these novels written while in the middle of England being bombed back into the Stone Age by an all-powerful Germany at the beginning of World War Two, an attempt by Forester to nostalgically remember the “good ol’ days” when the sun never set on an unstoppable British Empire.) They should be read with this mindset; but brother, if you do, you’ll get a thrilling experience unlike any other in modern literature, and they come recommended in this highly specific, highly grandpa-friendly spirit. CS Forester "Horatio Hornblower" books being reviewed in this series: Beat to Quarters (1937) | Ship of the Line (1938) | Flying Colours (1939) | Commodore Hornblower (1945) | Lord Hornblower (1946) | Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (1950) | Lieutenant Hornblower (1952) | Hornblower and the Atropos (1953) | Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies (1958) | Hornblower and the Hotspur (1962) | Hornblower During the Crisis (1967) ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Jun 13, 2024
not set
|
Jun 13, 2024
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0142002054
| 9780142002056
| 0142002054
| 3.63
| 23,126
| Mar 26, 1956
| 2003
|
it was amazing
|
THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2024 reads, #32. It’s summer again here in Chicago, which means it’s time for me to delve back into my usual summer reads, fairly easy-to-read genre titles (often also called “airport and beach reads”) being read to honor ten-year-old Jason, who used to read such books in kid’s form for his public library’s summer reading program every year. Ian Fleming’s original 14 James Bond novels from the 1950s and ‘60s are a great series to add to this, because as we’ve discussed in previous reviews, they turn out to be almost nothing like the bombastic, overly melodramatic movie adaptations that are even more famous by now, but rather are tight little thrillers set much more in the real world than you might expect from this name now so closely associated with expensive action setpieces, futuristic secret weapons, and the gigantic boobs of that year’s Playboy Playmate of the Year (or at least if you came of age during the ‘70s Roger Moore era of the Bond films, like I did). And indeed, this fourth book in the series, originally published in 1956, continues that trend, with Bond this time doing a police-style investigation into a black market ring that has risen up among the African diamond industry, and with not a single gadget from Q in sight besides a hidden compartment in Bond’s luggage to hide a gun’s silencer. This time the action is mainly set in the US, and it’s easy to see why so many people consider this book to be the very first time in the series that everything really clicks in a satisfying way; fresh off an excursion to America himself, Fleming gets his across-the-pond setting very, very right here, and also finally balances Bond himself out from the cruel sociopath territory he’s dipped far too much into in the previous books. To remind you, Fleming started the Bond novels in the first place not because he necessarily wanted to write secret agent stories, but rather that he wanted to write stories about gambling, a favorite pastime of his in his personal life (back when gambling was still largely illegal in the UK, part of what made it so thrilling for Fleming), and made the main gambling character a secret agent simply because he thought it’d be more interesting than writing a book about a dentist gambler or a truck-driver gambler. That led to a first book, 1953’s Casino Royale (my review), that got all the details about casinos and the game baccarat exactly right, but gave us a 007 who was unnecessarily mean, openly misogynistic, and who could barely function in normal society. After all, as Fleming explicitly states in that first book, the main reason various members of MI-6 were handpicked to become “00” agents was because they were people no one else at the agency could stand, and so were put in a special division where they basically stayed out in the field 365 days a year so that no one else back at the home office ever had to deal with them. After finding much bigger success with the books than he was expecting, though, Fleming started toning down and rounding out the character in subsequent titles, until we have a Bond here who’s now a regular habituate of the Special Service office in London, with a healthier if not still sexist attitude towards women (in this book he has the closest thing he’s had yet to an actual romantic relationship, making it clearer here that it’s not that he hates women in general, but that he only likes particularly complicated women who happen to come from dark, interesting backgrounds). I mean, sure, he’s still haughty and arrogant (he basically spends the entire book dismissing both the CIA and the American mafia as worthless soft pansies), and he engages in the same casual racism as pretty much every other white male did in the 1950s (get read to hear Bond use the n-word a number of times here, to which his exasperated CIA buddy admonishes him, “Now, James, you can’t use that word in the US anymore -- in fact, you’re no longer even allowed to order a jigger of liquor in a bar, but must call it a ‘jigro,’ ha ha”); but when all is said and done, this is a more enlightened and certainly a more vulnerable Bond than we’ve seen in the previous three books, much to the series’ benefit. What really sells this book over the previous ones, though, is that Fleming picks such interesting milieus in which to set his story, and then writes out these milieus in such exacting, memorable ways, based mostly on him having just finished visiting these places himself in real life a year before writing this. So after first flying in to New York on the brand-new “jumbo jets” of the age, he’s then off to Saratoga Springs for the first major plot point, which Fleming fascinatingly describes as still basically a backwoods village whose one and only thing going for it is its famous racetrack (and if you’ve ever wanted to see James Bond drink Miller High Lifes while having a country-fried steak at a highway-exit diner, then brother, you’ve picked the right book); then he’s off to a pre-gentrified Las Vegas, which as Fleming interestingly reminds us, New York didn’t even have direct flights to in the 1950s, visitors basically having to fly to Los Angeles first and then take a rickety propeller plane from there to Sin City; and then eventually he heads back to England on the RMS Queen Elizabeth, the same luxury ocean liner Fleming himself took during his own trip home from America, where we have basically the most exciting action scene of the entire novel, one that involves Bond climbing around the vertical outer skin of the ship using nothing but a makeshift ladder made out of his cabin’s bedsheets. That’s really what saves these novels, is that the action itself is much more of the realistic Jason Bourne type, versus the “jumping out of helicopters while wearing skis” nonsense of the Hollywood movies; and that combined with the more well-rounded, easier to injure, and easier to root for Bond makes this fourth novel of the series easily the best one yet, and definitely the place to start if you’re going to be only a casual fan of this series and not a completist like me. (That said, get ready for yet more ridiculous descriptions of what British people considered “fine dining” in the 1950s; there is not one but two separate times here, for example, when characters say with a lot of admiration that their dinner beef “was boiled for so long, it can be cut with a fork,” which I guess is something people found pleasurable about red meat in the ‘50s?) Today it becomes the first Bond book of the series to get a full five stars from me, and I’m now eagerly looking forward to the next title, 1957’s From Russia, With Love, come this time next summer. I hope you’ll have a chance to join me here again for that one. Ian Fleming books being reviewed in this series: Casino Royale (1953) | Live and Let Die (1954) | Moonraker (1955) | Diamonds Are Forever (1956) | From Russia, With Love (1957) | Dr. No (1958) | Goldfinger (1959) | For Your Eyes Only (1960) | Thunderball (1961) | The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) | On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963) | You Only Live Twice (1964) | The Man With the Golden Gun (1965) | Octopussy and the Living Daylights (1966) ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jun 11, 2024
|
Jun 11, 2024
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0300093055
| 9780300093056
| 0300093055
| 4.05
| 41,640
| 1956
| Mar 01, 2002
|
really liked it
|
2024 reads, #16. As friends know, I'm on a bit of a Eugene O'Neill mini-kick this month, after mentioning him in a recent review of Joshua Mohr's Dama
2024 reads, #16. As friends know, I'm on a bit of a Eugene O'Neill mini-kick this month, after mentioning him in a recent review of Joshua Mohr's Damascus (my review), then remembering that I had always meant to sit down and read his most famous plays, after doing so a decade ago with his peer Tennessee Williams after my brother moved to New Orleans and I started making regular visits there myself. Written in 1939 but not publicly premiered until 1956, right after his death (thankfully betraying his original wishes to not have it produced until 25 years after his death, in 1978), I'm simply not going to have as much to say about Long Day's Journey Into Night than I did about his other magnum opus, The Iceman Cometh (my review), because there's simply not as much to say; smaller in scope than the other play, it's the story of a single middle-class family over the course of a single 16-hour working day, as they start the morning with the kind of bland, pleasant interactions you would expect from such a family, but by midnight have turned into a bunch of screaming, irrational monsters clawing at each other's throats, greatly fueled by an entire day and evening of substance abuse (alcohol in the case of the father and two grown sons, morphine in the case of the mother). This makes it much clearer than Iceman why O'Neill is considered one of the three founders of American Modernist drama, along with Williams and their mutual peer Arthur Miller; because much like Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Miller's Death of a Salesman, Long Day's Journey primarily concerns itself with a deeply dysfunctional middle-class family, one which will never be able to solve its problems because the family members are incapable of acknowledging that they have a problem in the first place, and are too much of weak moral cowards to ever be able to directly confront their own dysfunctional behavior and bring a stop to it. And all three of these plays came out right in the middle of the post-war Mid-Century-Modernist period of the 1940s and '50s, when an ascendent American military-industrial complex was attempting to sell the idea to a war-weary, shell-shocked American public that the concept of the bland "nuclear family" was actually the pinnacle of enlightened, civilized society, as most notoriously seen in the '50s television show Leave It to Beaver, which represented one of these post-war nuclear families in its perfect ur-form. Now, don't get me wrong, decades of data have now conclusively proved that a society full of bland, happy middle-class families really does prevent the rise of radical politics and its inevitable degradation into violent authoritarianism (either fascism from the far-right or communism from the far-left), as we're unfortunately seeing in our own age, when the rapid disappearance of the middle class has left us with a country with no other choices left but the MAGAs or the Wokes, essentially the Hitler and Stalin of our own times; in fact, business guru Peter Drucker was expressly preaching this message in all his early books from these same 1950s years (but for more, see my review of his classic The End of Economic Man), and he turned out to be exactly right, which is what made him such a hugely influential figure in post-war politics and economics. But there are three big problems with this theory, which not by coincidence are the exact three problems addressed in these plays, which is why they were so passionately loved by 1950s audiences: being a bland middle-classer is a soul-killing experience; such a society tends to turn conformity and a rigid adherence to rules into an all-holy religion; and most importantly, sometimes it simply doesn't work, and you can do all the things society tells you to do in order to be happy and prosperous and still end up a miserable failure, the exact subject of Death of a Salesman, which is why Miller's play is far and away the most powerful and successful of all three of these. As much as a post-Holocaust American society wanted to believe in the power of the bland middle-class, they were smart enough to be able to sniff out the bullshit that often lies underneath this pretty fairytale; and that makes it easy to see why they went so crazy for plays like these when they first came out, because all of them take the unspoken anxiety about post-war promises and makes them explicit, a rightly nagging worry that fixing the world after a planet-destroying war was going to be a lot more complicated than simply giving the Beaver a stern talking-to. Like with the other plays, that makes Long Day's Journey much more interesting now as a historical document than as a contemporary piece of drama to be enjoyed for simple pleasure; but as a historical document, it's a fascinating one, a brilliant record of the exact things the entirety of American society was worrying about in these years, which makes it all the more astounding that it's actually an autobiographical play based on the relationships his real family members had with each other during O'Neill's youth in the 1910s (thus explaining why he didn't want the play produced until long after the death of everyone who knew his family). It should be read with this mindset, that it's no longer exactly a powerful story unto itself (like Williams and Miller, there's an awful lot of stagey melodrama and other "THEATAAHHHH!!!!" moments going on here, which is why it's getting four stars from me instead of five), but rather a powerful reminder of just how shaky American society was in the years after the war, when everyone agreed that they never wanted another Hitler and Stalin again, but didn't quite yet know what would replace them. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Mar 08, 2024
not set
|
Mar 08, 2024
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0142002062
| 9780142002063
| 0142002062
| 3.80
| 28,746
| 1955
| Dec 31, 2002
|
it was ok
|
THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2023 reads, #67. It's summer, which means among other things that it's time again for another of Ian Fleming's 14 original James Bond novels, which I'm reading in chronological order by publishing date. Regular readers will remember that I added Fleming to my Great Completist Challenge in order to "reclaim" these stories from my 1970s-'80s Generation X childhood, when the only Bond I knew was the silly, hammy, over-the-top Roger Moore Bond of such terribly rotoscoped, cheap-feeling, laurels-skating nonsense as The Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only. My Baby Boomer father and many other men of his generation loved these stories sincerely, and I thought it'd be a nice reading project to go back and discover why these Mid-Century Modernist males went so nuts for the franchise, before the whole thing became a self-parodying cultural cartoon all about cars and gadgets and Playboy Playmates and Playboy Playmate boobs (speaking of Baby Boomer legacies). I've been so far really satisfied by the results of the first two novels, 1953's Casino Royale (my review) and the next year's Live and Let Die (my review), because they indeed show a leaner and meaner Bond who's actually supposed to exist in the real world, stripped of all the movie regalia and heavy mythos of things like the Q department and the million-dollar sci-fi toys (about the most exotic tool Bond uses in these first stories is simply scuba gear), as well as his suave, womanizing nature. (In the early books, Bond is actually supposed to be kind of a cruel sociopath who no one gets along with, with Fleming intimating that the reason a guy like Bond is made an 00 Secret Service field agent in the first place is because no one else at the agency really wants him around the central office, and that he's so unpleasant that no one would really miss him if he died.) And indeed, this third book of the series, written one year after the last one (an annual schedule Fleming would keep up until his death in 1964), keeps up with the movie mythos deconstructivist demolishing, revealing among other things that Bond's boss is known as M. not as a code word applied to all past and future holders of the office as well, but literally because his first name is "Miles;" and that as of 1955, only three 00 agents are actually still in active service, their numbers surprisingly being 007, 008 and 0011, implying that these numbers are permanently retired after an agent leaves the service. Unlike the first two, though, here the actual story being told just falls flat on its face, in such a surprisingly clunky and terrible way that I'm kind of surprised the franchise even survived a title such as this one. Based on the limited research I've done into the subject at Wikipedia and Goodreads, it's my understanding that Fleming was already thinking about the movie version of Bond even here in the early 1950s, after receiving early interest from producer Alexander Korda; and that the plot of this book had actually started life as Fleming's own attempt at writing a James Bond film, but after realizing that in prose form it would only make up about two-thirds of a small novel, he had tacked on the current first third that infamously feels exactly like a separate story tacked on to the main one just to pad the page count. Namely, just like Casino Royale, Bond spends a hundred pages meeting and getting to know the main villain through a convoluted evening of high-class, high-stakes card gambling, and only about a third of the way in learns that said villain, one Hugo Drax, is actually planning something evil, kicking off the main "Bond-style" story of this book. (And indeed, Fleming basically admitted in later interviews that the entire reason he started writing novels was actually more an attempt to write about card games, with it occurring to him that it'd be randomly interesting to make a secret agent the card player in question; Fleming was obsessed with the subject himself, helpfully explaining in Moonraker's fictional first third that even in real life, gambling in the UK was illegal at the time, but could be gotten away with at the super-rich blue-blood gentlemen's clubs of London, because these clubs were made up of all the rich white dudes who created and enforced the gambling laws in the first place.) That makes this a bizarre, disjointed mess of a story, with a prologue that's an entire third of the book, a proper first act that doesn't even begin until the 33% mark, and a climax that just flies by at the very end in the blink of an eye. This is then further marred by Fleming's strange decision that for this particular novel, he really wanted to play up and emphasize all the fine, wonderful things about England that make it in his opinion The Greatest Country On The Whole Damn Planet, and so decided to set the entire adventure this time within the small confines of just London and Dover, with the globetrotting and exotic locations already present from the first book now entirely gone, and with Fleming's attempts to highlight "the best of British culture" now being so inept and old-fashioned that they often now elicit unintentional laughter. (At a certain point, Bond and his companion order for dinner a Salisbury steak, bone marrow [delivered in actual overcooked bones with accompanying tiny spoon], and a pile of raw pineapple slices, and I was like, "Jesus Christ, Fleming, is this really your ultimate example of the brilliance of British cuisine?!") That I suppose is what makes it ironic that among his contemporary readers of these actual years, Drax was far and away seen by many as Bond's greatest villain, precisely because he seemed the most realistic to 1950s audiences; an amnesiac war orphan who stumbled out of the conflict with no identity and no money, he nonetheless spent the go-go postwar years becoming a rich and powerful innovator of rocket technology, eventually inventing what at the time was the science-fiction concept (but actually invented a few years later) of the intercontinental ballistic missile, the "Moonraker" of the book's title. (And this, by the way, is another huge drawback of this book; for it seems that Fleming rather thought of himself here as a fellow "hard science-fiction" author in the style of his '50s contemporaries like Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, and here files one of the most overwritten and tediously detailed explanations of how rockets work that I've ever seen, just pages upon pages of badly written pseudoscience babble that you can just entirely skip right over.) This being a James Bond novel, Drax of course turns out to not be what he seems; but what he actually is and what he's actually attempting to do don't get revealed until way far along into the third act, already unusually short because of all the "bridge game for a million pounds? Don't mind if I do, sir!" nonsense of the book's start, which when combined with the blase settings (c'mon, bro, Dover?) leads to just a really lackluster reading experience, one that if I didn't know any better (for example, if I was a contemporary audience member who was reading these as they actually came out) would cause me to think, "Does this guy even know what he's doing?" It's telling, for example, that when the Albert Broccoli money-printing machine did finally start cranking out Bond movies beginning in the Kennedy '60s, they deliberately wrote an entirely new story for the film version of Moonraker, retaining the title and the villain's name but otherwise changing every single other detail, despite Fleming having meant for this to be his first sincere attempt at actually writing a screenplay himself. That kind of tells you how much this isn't working, and now makes me interested in seeing how he managed to save himself from a short and unremembered three-book career with the next novel after this, the hugely popular Diamonds Are Forever (aka the last of the Sean Connery films). I'll see you in Summer 2024 for that one! Ian Fleming books being reviewed in this series: Casino Royale (1953) | Live and Let Die (1954) | Moonraker (1955) | Diamonds Are Forever (1956) | From Russia, With Love (1957) | Dr. No (1958) | Goldfinger (1959) | For Your Eyes Only (1960) | Thunderball (1961) | The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) | On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963) | You Only Live Twice (1964) | The Man With the Golden Gun (1965) | Octopussy and the Living Daylights (1966) ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Aug 26, 2023
|
Aug 26, 2023
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0099086700
| 9780099086703
| B001E52GWA
| 3.76
| 1,808
| 1956
| 1967
|
2023 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. I originally picked this up because of the "Five Books About..." series at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor,
2023 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. I originally picked this up because of the "Five Books About..." series at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor, I believe in that case the subject being five books about alternative forms of spaceflight besides fuel-based rockets. It was written by James Blish, one of those Silver Age also-rans who was writing and publishing sci-fi in the 1950s that sounded almost exactly like his peers Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, but who ended up not achieving nearly the same kind of success as them. (He's arguably most famous now not for his original work but for being the first-ever author of official Star Trek non-canon novels, back in the late 1960s soon after the original series first went off the air, including the now classic Spock Must Die!) As such, then, it's important to know that Blish's work suffers from all the same problems as Asimov and Heinlein as well, only magnified and then intensified since his writing doesn't contain the kinds of strengths that allowed Asimov and Heinlein's work to counterbalance the weaknesses. In particular, one of the big drawbacks here is that Blish very much defined himself (at least with these books) as a "hard" sci-fi author, meaning that the main point of his books is to actually examine the real science behind whatever subject is being discussed (in this case the human race's discovery of "anti-gravity," with Blish positing this development a mere two decades after the real-life discovery of "anti-matter," basically allowing his fictional humanity to begin interstellar exploration in the year 2018); but as we've discovered now, 75 years later, what the writers of the '50s called "hard" sci-fi was actually based on little more than academic theories at the time that have largely been disproven by now, meaning that the "hard" sci-fi they thought they were writing has turned out to be as soft and squishy as a children's book about little Mary Sue playing with her adorable little dog. That's a huge problem with authors like Blish, because when you remove the debunked science from their stories, almost nothing is left from a literary aspect, with Blish (much like Asimov and Heinlein) not really that interested in such petty things as "compelling characters" or "believable dialogue" or "a three-act plot that makes any sense whatsoever." Now add that he suffers from the same woman-hating problem as all these other bullying '50s nerds (there's literally two female characters in this entire novel, and both of them are described primarily by how fuckable they are in the eyes of James Blish), and you've got yourself a book that's nearly impossible to actually get through in the 2020s, much less enjoy. I originally checked out the four-book omnibus of this series from the library, entitled Cities in Flight; but I have to admit, I couldn't even get halfway through the first book in the tetralogy (1956's They Shall Have Stars) without throwing away the entire thing in bored, offended disgust, which unfortunately has been the case with most 1950s sci-fi I've tried to read here in the 21st century. That's a shame, because this important genre deserves a better history than the one filled with manipulative sexists writing terrible books that we actually have; but it doesn't stop the fact that this is now a book to be avoided instead of celebrated, and that the problematic elements regarding the origin of modern science-fiction is destined to simply get worse with each passing year instead of better. It should all be kept in mind when deciding whether or not to pick up a copy yourself. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||
1585676020
| 9781585676026
| 1585676020
| 3.93
| 6,571
| 1970
| Jan 04, 2005
|
2023 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. I originally picked this up because of the "Five Books About..." series at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor,
2023 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. I originally picked this up because of the "Five Books About..." series at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor, I believe in that case the subject being five books about alternative forms of spaceflight besides fuel-based rockets. It was written by James Blish, one of those Silver Age also-rans who was writing and publishing sci-fi in the 1950s that sounded almost exactly like his peers Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, but who ended up not achieving nearly the same kind of success as them. (He's arguably most famous now not for his original work but for being the first-ever author of official Star Trek non-canon novels, back in the late 1960s soon after the original series first went off the air, including the now classic Spock Must Die!) As such, then, it's important to know that Blish's work suffers from all the same problems as Asimov and Heinlein as well, only magnified and then intensified since his writing doesn't contain the kinds of strengths that allowed Asimov and Heinlein's work to counterbalance the weaknesses. In particular, one of the big drawbacks here is that Blish very much defined himself (at least with these books) as a "hard" sci-fi author, meaning that the main point of his books is to actually examine the real science behind whatever subject is being discussed (in this case the human race's discovery of "anti-gravity," with Blish positing this development a mere two decades after the real-life discovery of "anti-matter," basically allowing his fictional humanity to begin interstellar exploration in the year 2018); but as we've discovered now, 75 years later, what the writers of the '50s called "hard" sci-fi was actually based on little more than academic theories at the time that have largely been disproven by now, meaning that the "hard" sci-fi they thought they were writing has turned out to be as soft and squishy as a children's book about little Mary Sue playing with her adorable little dog. That's a huge problem with authors like Blish, because when you remove the debunked science from their stories, almost nothing is left from a literary aspect, with Blish (much like Asimov and Heinlein) not really that interested in such petty things as "compelling characters" or "believable dialogue" or "a three-act plot that makes any sense whatsoever." Now add that he suffers from the same woman-hating problem as all these other bullying '50s nerds (there's literally two female characters in this entire novel, and both of them are described primarily by how fuckable they are in the eyes of James Blish), and you've got yourself a book that's nearly impossible to actually get through in the 2020s, much less enjoy. I originally checked out the four-book omnibus of this series from the library, entitled Cities in Flight; but I have to admit, I couldn't even get halfway through the first book in the tetralogy (1956's They Shall Have Stars) without throwing away the entire thing in bored, offended disgust, which unfortunately has been the case with most 1950s sci-fi I've tried to read here in the 21st century. That's a shame, because this important genre deserves a better history than the one filled with manipulative sexists writing terrible books that we actually have; but it doesn't stop the fact that this is now a book to be avoided instead of celebrated, and that the problematic elements regarding the origin of modern science-fiction is destined to simply get worse with each passing year instead of better. It should all be kept in mind when deciding whether or not to pick up a copy yourself. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||
0316404055
| 9780316404051
| 0316404055
| 3.93
| 11,746
| Jan 01, 1963
| Aug 05, 2014
|
it was amazing
|
2023 reads, #47. THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they
2023 reads, #47. THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) Pulp author Jim Thompson is one of the few writers in this Great Completist Challenge I'm not reading in chronological order; and that's because I only started reading him in the first place to read the specific novel Pop. 1280 from late in his career, then got mostly interested in reading the books that have been made into famous movies, such as After Dark, My Sweet and The Getaway. Today's title, 1963's The Grifters, is another one of these titles turned into Hollywood adaptations, but in this case I've actually seen the movie, in fact multiple times because of it being a favorite back in my twenties, making me accidentally a Thompson fan long before I was consciously aware that I was one. And how can a noir fan not love this book, I ask you? A nasty, nasty little tale about three petty con artists and the various sick, twisted ways they all use each other and are used by the others in return, it's both dark as fuck and filled with fascinating, quirky, easily rootable characters, doing sometimes despicable things but always in a way we eventually seem to forgive, or at least enough that we remain interested in seeing what eventually happens to them. That's really what makes Thompson so superlative in this genre, I'm quickly learning now that I'm getting more and more of his titles under my belt; the pulp genre relies on prurience, on transgression, not just people being bad but doing so in a way that legitimately shocks and disturbs, and Thompson's as good as it gets when it comes to that specific subject, even if his actual prose skills sometimes remain at just the pedestrian level for big chunks of his books. (Let's not forget, he was an unchecked alcoholic cranking out a book every three months just to make ends meet, so there's a reason he never really rose to the level of more disciplined and measured peers.) As seen in his books, the humans of the Thompsonverse are as prurient as they come, not hesitating even a moment over behaving in the most cruel, decadent, inhumane ways a person even can, a long wallow in the dark and deep end of the moral pool for those who want their stories as dark and bleak as a moonless night in a Lovecraftian forest; and that's exactly what we noir fans want, a face-first plunge into the darkness, tied to a clever plot and a spare, sometimes poetic prose style. Thompson excels at that here, which is what makes him like crack to a genre fan, by which I mean they'll easily forgive him his other literary faults since he so intensely delivers the thing that actually gets them high. So, just to get it out of the way, I think next I'll take on arguably the most well-known title from Thompson's career, 1952's indelible The Killer Inside Me, recently made into an amazing movie by the always excellent Michael Winterbottom. In fact, I've seen that movie already, so I know the novel's bound to be a disappointment, because I'll already know so much of the story in advance; but still, if this is to be a true completist read, I do need to get this one under my belt as well, especially since I'm sure there will be at least small changes between the book and movie that are worth noting and examining. After that, then, probably back to one of his early middling novels, back when he was trying to be a New Deal-funded social-realist "serious" writer like Steinbeck; next on the list for those is 1946's Heed the Thunder. Talk with you again about those soon! Jim Thompson books included in this review series: Now and On Earth (1942) | Heed the Thunder (1946) | Nothing More than Murder (1949) | The Killer Inside Me (1952) | Cropper's Cabin (1952) | Recoil (1953) | The Alcoholics (1953) | Savage Night (1953) | Bad Boy (1953) | The Criminal (1953) | The Nothing Man (1954) | The Golden Gizmo (1954) | Roughneck (1954) | A Swell-Looking Babe (1954) | A Hell of a Woman (1954) | After Dark, My Sweet (1955) | The Kill-Off (1957) | Wild Town (1957) | The Getaway (1958) | The Transgressors (1961) | The Grifters (1963) | Pop. 1280 (1964) | Texas by the Tail (1965) | South of Heaven (1967) | Child of Rage (1972) | King Blood (1973) | The Rip-Off (1989) ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
May 13, 2023
|
May 13, 2023
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
1560006218
| 9781560006213
| 1560006218
| 4.46
| 59
| 1939
| Jan 30, 1995
|
really liked it
|
2023 reads, #22. I've only recently developed a new fascination for economic theorist Peter Drucker, because I only recently learned that he was the o
2023 reads, #22. I've only recently developed a new fascination for economic theorist Peter Drucker, because I only recently learned that he was the one who almost single-handedly proved that in a post-World-War America, the previous Henry Ford-derived theory about what makes a nation economically prosperous (that is, lots of humans combined with lots of factories, both of them thought as of a series of easily replaceable cogs in a giant machine) needs to be replaced with the concept of what he (and the rest of the world) would eventually call "knowledge workers," specialized and educated intellectuals whose main job is to oversee and improve the rapidly expanding series of automated machines quickly taking over the former jobs of "human cogs," leading to a new world of corporate offices filled with "white collar" workers (named literally after the starched white shirts and ties they wore to work, versus the factory workers' "blue collar" denim work shirts), doing what quickly became known as the defining job of the latter half of the 20th century, being "managers." (To give you an idea of how radical his theories were at the time, and how thoroughly they've since been adopted, consider the fact that Drucker himself was the creator of one of the first-ever "Masters of Business Administration" [or MBA] degree programs, something that seemed ludicrous to many at the time but has by now essentially become a requirement for anyone planning on having a career at a corporation.) What's really fascinating about all this, though, is that Drucker actually started his career as a nerdy, abstract philosophy professor, and that his interest in economics didn't even begin until his alarm over the rise of fascist governments around the world in the 1930s. (Of course, it helped that Drucker was actually born and raised in Austria, the exact birthplace of the Nazi Party, leaving himself by fortunate coincidence in the early 1930s because of a business opportunity elsewhere in Europe, and never returning to his homeland again.) He knew that these authoritarian governments went directly against what at the time was the unquestioned assumption by the Enlightenment philosophers of the 1700s that humans were fundamentally rational beings (the "economic man" of this book's title), and that in all situations will act with scientific, predictable behavior to promote their own interests and always strive for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Fascism turns this theory on its head, which we can easily see by example in the newest crop of far-right radicals who have been threatening to take over our own country for the past 20+ years now; note for one example how many far-right people espouse the opinion (even if they don't necessarily say it this way out loud with these exact words, but rather demonstrate it through their actions) that they are perfectly fine with their own lives being destroyed, as long as it guarantees the destruction of the lives of their perceived enemies as well (or put another way, "I'm too busy trying to outlaw gay rights to worry about possible new laws that would make my own finances go better"). This is essentially a complete repudiation of what the Enlightenment philosophers argued, an argument that had become unquestioned by the 1930s when fascism became an international movement; and so Drucker started concentrating almost exclusively in his philosophical writings about this subject, on why fascism happens, what might happen in a society that would convince people to voluntarily act against their own self-interests, and what kind of society we might be able to create once the war was over that would end this kind of irrational self-destruction for good. And so I thought that would make it worthwhile to actually start way back at the very first book Drucker ever published, then move forward chronologically until finally reaching his famous books in the '50s and '60s on modern management that ended up having such a profound influence over the American business world at the time (or, well, eventually did -- an infamous part of the Drucker legend, in fact, is that he first got involved in the business world by being hired exactly by "human cog" companies like General Motors in the late 1940s to given them philosophy-based breakdowns of their companies and how they could improve their business practices, but his radical new ideas about entire companies that consisted only of 100% college-educated managers went down so badly with these elderly executives left over from the Victorian Age, all these first companies essentially ignored his conclusions, with for example the chairman of GM being so incensed that he declared that no employee was to ever mention the name Peter Drucker out loud in front of him ever again). That had me starting this way all the way back with The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism, which to be clear doesn't have anything to do with business at all, other than Drucker's pleadings of "there's got to be a better way of running the world besides everyone hurtling towards self-destruction because at least it means the destruction of their enemies as well." Unfortunately, though, since this was written in the years 1936 and '37 and then published in '38, there's not really too much to this slim book that we don't now already know in detail about authoritarian societies and how they come about, with Drucker's tone mostly being in this book, "No, SERIOUSLY, I understand you think these Nazis are ridiculous cartoon characters that will come to nothing, but I assure you that they're just about to try to take over the world, and all your pretty little Enlightenment thinking about how the citizens of Germany wouldn't ever sign on to something so self-destructive is basically nonsense that can no longer be trusted in a 20th-century world." And so, while he was much more correct than any of us wish he would've been, this also doesn't make for very exciting or even illuminating reading by here in the 2020s, and I found myself sort of skipping around and just skimming a lot of this stuff about how "Germany's economy has tanked yet they all continue worshipping Hitler like a god for some strange irrational reason" (which, again, none of us in 21st-century America would know anything about whatsoever). So, that has me moving on quickly to the first book he published after the war, 1946's Concept of the Corporation, basically his book-length conclusions about the year he spent as an embedded consultant inside GM with a VIP pass to all the proceedings, basically one of the first books to introduce the concept of "behavioral economics" (i.e. "sometimes humans act insane, and it's the modern business's job to prepare for it and then overcome it"), which like I mentioned went over with GM's executives like a lead balloon. (However, the book was a huge hit in post-war Japan, which inspired Drucker to go over there and start consulting in the early 1950s, one of the main reasons history saw the rise of mega-successful corporations there in the wake of their war loss and moment of national identity-searching.) Please keep an eye out for my review of that here in the coming weeks. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Mar 26, 2023
not set
|
Mar 26, 2023
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0575003499
| 9780575003491
| 0575003499
| 3.81
| 23,937
| Aug 14, 1969
| Jan 01, 1969
|
it was amazing
|
2022 reads, #56. Let me confess right off the bat that my score here for today's book is somewhat of a misnomer, in that I only ended up reading one c
2022 reads, #56. Let me confess right off the bat that my score here for today's book is somewhat of a misnomer, in that I only ended up reading one chapter from this collection of long-form journalism pieces by famed New Yorker financial reporter John Brooks; in fact, that's the entire reason I picked it up in the first place, because I recently read in someone else's book that Brooks in this book does one of the best jobs ever at explaining what exactly happened behind one of the most notorious failures in American business history, the release and subsequent tanking of the Ford Edsel in the late 1950s, a story I've always been curious to know more about. And indeed, it turned out to be as fascinating as you would expect, especially now when we've long forgotten what the state of the automobile industry was in the '50s when these events occurred, or for that matter what the state of the modern marketing and advertising industry was in these years as well. Basically, in the '50s there were only three types of cars on the market, known as the "cheap" one, the "middle" one, and the "expensive" one, with the rapidly expanding American middle-class expressing their newfound wealth by officially "trading up" as soon as they could afford it; but while Ford had a good-selling cheap car and expensive car at the beginning of the '50s, they lacked a middle-priced car, which is how the idea for the Edsel first came about. Unfortunately for them, a sort of perfect storm of problems happened on the way to the car's release half a decade later, including a too-long development period that misjudged what the future of cars would be (the Edsel finally got released in 1957, just in time for the big new trend in "compact" cars, including Ford's own Falcon in 1960 which quickly eclipsed the Edsel in sales); a wasteful developmental period as well, which spent way too much money on frivolous details (including having armed guards manning the doors of Ford's drawing rooms as a form of publicity stunt, and hiring famed poet Marianne Moore to suggest names for the car [including such hilarious options as the Utopian Turtletop and the Pastelogram]); what at the time was a brand-new obsessive reliance on public opinion polls and customer psychological profiles (one of the very first examples of a type of marketing that was to eventually become the national norm); too much of an attempt to make the Edsel the everything car for everybody (after discovering that most Americans assigned their own mental beliefs to a car make no matter if the car company wanted them to or not, the Ford marketers decided to get ahead of the game and start aggressively promoting the Edsel as the car for young people and old people and men and women and rich and poor and everyone else, leading to four main lines of the car with 18 varieties apiece, or 72 different kinds of Edsels one could ultimately choose from); heavily overinflated expectations the car itself could never live up to (among other terrible decisions that sounded wise at the time, the company made a national public spectacle out of recruiting 12,000 new Edsel dealerships across the country, keeping the dealers' sneak preview of the car under lock and key, leading a frenzied public to believe that the new vehicle was essentially going to be a futuristic rocket car in the style of The Jetsons); massive overspending in advance of the car's release (today's equivalent of over three billion dollars before a single car had been sold, including an entire million dollars on one single press conference on release day); and simply too much overconfidence on the part of Ford's employees, who in a glorious postwar environment thought they were the business that could do no wrong, assuming as the saying goes that if they simply built it, "they would come." As promised, Brooks does a thorough, plain-spoken, and highly entertaining job covering the entire thing, including such delightfully snotty lines as, "Three days after release, an Edsel was stolen from a north Philadelphia dealership; it can reasonably be argued that the crime marked the high-water mark of public acceptance of the car." I imagine he does this in all the other chapters of this book as well, including stories about the meteoric rise of the Xerox Corporation, the Wall Street "mini-crash" of 1962, the history of the federal income tax, GE's Congressional antitrust hearings during the Kennedy years, and other such issues; but I'm so ridiculously behind on my reading at this point that I simply can't justify spending time on these subjects I just barely care about, so I simply finished up this Edsel piece and declared myself done with the book. It therefore comes strongly recommended, but with the understanding that this is based on only reading a small bit of it, with the suspicion but not the confirmed knowledge that the rest of it is as good as well. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Dec 12, 2022
|
Dec 12, 2022
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0316289329
| 9780316289320
| 0316289329
| 4.29
| 11,727
| Feb 04, 1937
| Sep 30, 1985
|
it was amazing
|
2022 reads, #47. THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they
2022 reads, #47. THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation I recently had a chance to watch again all eight of the "Horatio Hornblower" television movies produced by the British ITV in the late 1990s and early '00s, regarding the derring-do adventures of an officer in the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars; and my big enjoyment of them all over again finally convinced me to try reading at least one of the original books by CS Forester these are based on, first published in the 1930s through '60s. I've put it off until now, frankly, because it feels like a real grandpa move to me; and that's primarily because when I was a kid in the '70s, these were exactly the kinds of books my actual grandfathers and all the grandfather-types around me used to read, along with unending amounts of Louis L'Amour, Zane Grey, James A. Michener and other such "manly men" genre thrillers about cowboys and conquistadors and square-jawed sailing ship captains, screaming "FIRE!!!" to their dutiful crew shooting a 50-pound cannon out a hole in the side of their wooden ship at those damned dirty Frenchies. On the other hand, however, I am trying to get in more easy-reading genre thrillers in my life these days, or at least during the summer, to nostalgically honor my pleasant memories of being in my public library's childhood Summer Reading Camp each year; and it's not like I had to sign on for the entire eleven-book series just to check out one of them, and not like I even had to finish the first book if I wasn't jibing with it, given that I just got it from the Chicago Public Library for free anyway. And so I tried it, and I suddenly discovered why grandpas the world over have been falling in love with these books for the last 80 years and still counting, because this turned out to be a lot easier for a non-sailing enthusiast like me to read and understand than I had been expecting, a real corker of a swashbuckler that not only delivers action-movie thrills but also gives you a lot to philosophically think about when it comes to human nature, why we admire the people we do, and the age-old question of whether the severe stoicism of military life erodes our fundamental humanity or not. Here in the first book of the series, originally published in 1937 during the interregnum of the World War (which, as sci-fi author Ada Palmer has inspired me to do, I now treat as just one big war that lasted from 1914 to 1945, not a War 1 and War 2), we are introduced to our series hero already as a middle-aged captain of a major naval ship in the year 1808, in the middle of the war years when the people of Spain and its Central American colonies rose up against French occupation, declared independence and suddenly became the allies of Great Britain. That's what takes Hornblower and the HMS Lydia not just to Central America but to the western, Pacific side of Central America, where British ships almost never went (this is long before the Panama Canal, mind you, when the only way over there from Europe was to sail all the way around the southern tip of South America), to help out a former member of the Nicaraguan nobility who has decided to enact a military coup of the occupying French forces. This nicely also helped Forester solve the challenge he faced each time with every new book, which is that he didn't want to have to deal with the Mid-Century Modernist equivalent of snotty Comic Book Guy leaving rants at Amazon about how he got tiny details of actual Napoleonic battles wrong, so he instead set each Hornblower book far away from any of the actual battles that were taking place in the real world at that time. In the 1808 of this book, these were mostly back in Spain and Portugal, so Forester instead places Hornblower literally thousands of miles away, which allows him to be both geographically accurate in the book but also take a lot of liberties when it comes to what actually happens. That's what lets him stuff this first one to overflowing with fascinating developments that, while fanciful, did actually happen occasionally in these years; the Central American noble he's sent to help turns out to be a dictatorial psychopath who literally crucifies his enemies, while Hornblower's ship ends up in a rare turn of events picking up a woman for part of its trip, an important noble back in Britain who's also unusually forward and independent, and unusually has training in treating the sick and injured (and so helps out after a major battle in which half the ship is injured or killed, gaining her a lot of admiration among the all-male crew). And that's not even counting the chasing of a fabled ship filled with Spanish gold; the idyllic pause at a sandy South Pacific island while they tip the entire ship sideways, repair the hole-filled bottom, and create a brand-new 125-foot-tall main mast; and the bragging contest on board over which sailor ate the most amount of rats during a period at sea when they ran out of food. Yeah, Forester's packing in every detail he can get away with in a tale about the Napoleonic British Navy, including introductory lessons on sailing terms and how ships navigated in the 1700s using only a sextant and the night sky. That's what makes this so memorable, because it's everything and the kitchen sink, not just exciting but thought-provoking and instructive, and so scratches that very specific older male itch that modern authors like Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton do in our own times. That makes it all the more the surprise that it's so relatable and easy to follow as well, and that Forester really squeezes as much as he can out of this milieu by making Hornblower an unusual character on top of everything else, unusually caring and sensitive but who overcompensates by always maintaining a stony arms-length demeanor with his men, ironically celebrated by them for this as an exemplary example of the True British Man. That's beating in the heart of any grandpa nerd who still tears through a book every couple of days like they did when younger, but whose tastes have simply gravitated towards the more traditional, more historical and more conservative as they've gotten older; underneath the fascination with guns and vehicles and other inventions is the heart of a romantic, and this Hornblower novel lets this tech-obsessed military-friendly male reader vicariously see himself in our admirably tender captain, who feels much more deeply for his men than the infamously insular discipline of a naval ship would ever allow him to display publicly. Forester actually wrote five novels in a row depicting Hornblower at the height of his powers, a dashing and wise Jean-Luc Picard type who is never less than brave, honest, even-tempered, and most often the smartest one in the room, which got us in his fictional timeline to July 1815 and Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo; but public demand for more stories was so vociferous, Forester then turned to Hornblower's early years in the Navy as a bumbling teenager who was constantly making mistakes but still acting with guts and bravery, set way back in the 1790s when Napoleon was still just a military commander and not yet emperor. Those turned out to be equally as popular, so much so that some people now read them in the chronological order of the character, not the order Forester originally wrote them. (Certainly this is what the ITV movie series did, following an adventurous Hornblower in his teens and twenties as he rises from a lowly midshipman [basically a cadet] to eventually the captain of his own warship; star Ioan Gruffudd, who moved to Hollywood at the end of the series to star in the ill-fated "Fantastic Four" movies, has publicly stated in many interviews since that he'd be very enthusiastic about doing a contemporary big-budget adaptation of this first Hornblower adventure now, in that he's currently middle-aged himself and thus naturally ready to take on the part.) Whatever the case, with there being only eleven books in the whole series, I think for sure that I'll be tackling at least one more of them, and I imagine unless they suddenly go horrible that I'll probably be incorporating the rest into my summer reading challenges over the next decade, when I tackle such other summer-friendly beach and airport authors as Lee Child, Jim Butcher, Elin Hilderbrand, Terry Pratchett and more. For now, I very enthusiastically recommend this first book of the series, at least for those of you who also have at least a theoretical interest in Clancy, Crichton, Michener, Grey, L'Amour and others. I'm 53 this year, so I'm just officially old enough now to start unironically embracing the "grandpa-lit" category out there (eat your heart out, chick-lit); and this first Hornblower novel is a super-solid entry in this category, exactly the gift for the silver-haired technothriller fan in your own life. CS Forester "Horatio Hornblower" books being reviewed in this series: Beat to Quarters (1937) | Ship of the Line (1938) | Flying Colours (1939) | Commodore Hornblower (1945) | Lord Hornblower (1946) | Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (1950) | Lieutenant Hornblower (1952) | Hornblower and the Atropos (1953) | Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies (1958) | Hornblower and the Hotspur (1962) | Hornblower During the Crisis (1967) ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Sep 16, 2022
|
Sep 16, 2022
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0553293419
| 9780553293418
| 0553293419
| 3.85
| 20,561
| 1952
| Dec 01, 1991
|
it was ok
|
THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse 2021 reads, #97. I mentioned this at the very start of my Isaac Asimov "Future History" completist run, but today in particular I think it bears repeating, that instead of reading these 15 books in the order they were first written and published, I'm reading them in the chronological order of the fictional timeline involved, since the entire "megaseries" (comprising the former smaller 1950s series "Robot," "Empire" and "Foundation," plus a series of bridging novels in the 1980s that thematically linked them all together) is supposed to cover roughly a 22,000-year persistent, paradox-free history, and I thought it'd be worth reading them in the order of the events covered if for nothing else than to see how the '80s titles clash or complement the '50s ones they're interspersed with under this kind of reading order. So even though the three novels known as the "Empire" series were published in the order of first Pebble in the Sky in 1950, then The Stars, Like Dust in '51 and The Currents of Space in '52, I'm reviewing them here in the order of Stars then Currents then Pebble, in that this order shows us the slow rise and eventual domination of the Galactic Empire the series is named after. As I've talked about previously, all three of these books are from the very start of Asimov's career, back in the 1940s when people like him and such other eventual Silver Age pioneers as Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury were all in their twenties, and therefore had to adhere to the genre standards of the now middle-aged editors and agents that at the time ran the sci-fi publishing industry. And those guys all grew up on proto-sci-fi from the late Victorian Age and early 20th century, back when the genre was essentially "Tarzan in space," the books that give us the now hoary term "space opera" which was ironically invented precisely by people like Asimov later in his career, to dismissively categorize the type of stuff he was forced to write back when he was young and unknown; and so that's why the other smaller series from the larger Future History megaseries, including the "Robot" books (set in a "day after tomorrow" universe, which for him was the late 20th century) and the "Foundation" books (set thousands of years after the Empire books) are so much better known, because Asimov worked very hard during his lifetime to have those two other series much better known, and to downplay these early, frustration-filled Empire novels and never revisit them again. And indeed, just like I was saying during my review of Stars, Asimov was correct to do this; these play now like the worn-out, badly outdated radio-serial-style screenplays that he himself could already see them to be back in the '40s, when he was forced to write them in order to get published at all, and which prompted him to write next the much more heady and startlingly unique "Foundation" stories, as well as going in the opposite direction and trying to bring a Michael Crichton-style, grounded-in-today's-science approach to his "Robot" stories. In contrast, these Empire novels are way more in the vein of Flash Gordon, John Carter of Mars, Tom Swift, and the "Radium Age" books of EE "Doc" Smith, in which the focus is much more on empty spectacle, melodramatic derring-do, and strict adherence to traditional gender roles, the "science" involved being just whatever random made-up nonsense needed to be invented in order to push along its childlike plot, in which we are introduced to a humanity-settled galaxy that's ruled with an iron fist by an all-powerful evil empire, and follow along with some plucky heroes as they try to rage against the machine. If this all sounds familiar, that's because the original Star Wars in 1977 was intended by George Lucas to be a loving homage to these creaky old space operas he grew up on in the '40s, books exactly like today's under question, which were unceremoniously killed off by the rise of Silver Age authors precisely like Asimov in his more well-known books, just the moment they became famous and powerful enough that they could. But the reason Star Wars was such a phenomenon was because it was so much insanely better than anyone expected a Flash Gordon homage to be, so don't expect Asimov's Flash Gordon ripoffs here to even hold a candle to them, or to be nearly as entertaining a reading experience. All three of these are instead real clunkers of melodramas, paycheck-generating pulp serial stuff (indeed, the very medium that first published these three novels, originally in 15 monthly installments throughout the late '40s); and if you think you're missing some sort of hidden gems because of Asimov himself downplaying these books for the entire rest of his career, rest assured that you're not. Thankfully, though, this finally gets us over and done with the Empire books for good; and that means we're ready to move on to the most famous books of Asimov's career, the paradigm-expanding "Foundation" series (first a trilogy in the '50s, then with two sequels in the early '80s, then with two prequels in the late '80s and early '90s). Since we're taking these in the timeline's chronological order, that means our next read will be 1988's Prelude to Foundation, another of these "bridging" novels that shows how series patriarch Hari Seldon first invented the field known as psychohistory as a young man, which in Asimov's retconned history is largely through the help of the robot hero of this megaseries' very first books, now 20,000 years old and hiding in plain sight among the far-future humans of the Empire's home planet of Trantor. As always, I hope you'll have a chance to join me again here soon for my look at that. Isaac Asimov books being reviewed for this series: I, Robot (1950) | The Caves of Steel (1954) | The Naked Sun (1957) | The Robots of Dawn (1983) | Robots and Empire (1985) | The Stars, Like Dust (1951) | The Currents of Space (1952) | Pebble in the Sky (1950) | Prelude to Foundation (1988) | Forward the Foundation (1993) | Foundation (1951) | Foundation and Empire (1952) | Second Foundation (1953) | Foundation's Edge (1982) | Foundation and Earth (1986) ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Nov 28, 2021
|
Nov 28, 2021
|
Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
3.94
| 8,211
| 1964
| 2000
|
it was amazing
|
Earlier this year, on the day of her death, I ran over to the Chicago Public Library website and checked out as many random ebook titles by children's
Earlier this year, on the day of her death, I ran over to the Chicago Public Library website and checked out as many random ebook titles by children's author Beverly Cleary that I could get my hands on, which turned out to be eight volumes spanning her entire career that I got done reviewing a little while ago (full list at the bottom of this review). But I realized that my middle-aged reassessment of Cleary would never be truly complete without revisiting the entire series of the one character I cared about as a kid way more than any other, which is our perpetually put-upon tween hero Henry Huggins. He was the protagonist of her very first book, after all, written while working as a public librarian in Portland, Oregon, and hearing little boys in there constantly complaining about the badly outdated Victorian "Little Lord Fauntleroy" nonsense constantly being crammed down their throats at school; and he would remain Cleary's "main character" from his explosive start in 1950 all the way until the mid-'70s, when as a grandmother she embraced the new wave of "young adult" writers like Judy Blume and Betsy Byars, and took her former impish devil Ramona Quimby and aged her up to a tween herself in order to write stories more emotionally revealing and bittersweet than the Huggins books earlier in her career. But that's okay with me! I loved the Huggins books as a kid, especially that magical age between seven or eight and twelve to thirteen, and would re-read the entire six-book series seemingly every summer* (including 1950's Henry Huggins, '52's Henry and Beezus, '57's Henry and the Paper Route, '62's Henry and the Clubhouse, and '64's Ribsy). Now that I've reread them as a middle-ager, it's easy to see why, because they clearly have the same tone and spirit as Jeff Kinney's modern hit Diary of a Wimpy Kid, of tween boys acting stupid and silly and very real, but also coming to grips with some adult truths about the world for the very first time, and growing into some adult traits for the first time like natural politeness, concern for others, etc. Henry doesn't have the "stolen inheritance" adventures of Victorian children's tales, but very real adventures -- the one year he and his buddies build a clubhouse, his agony about not being old enough yet for his first summer job -- and instead of fairytale villains he has very real villains -- such as the aforementioned Ramona Quimby, seen as a hellion four-year-old in these books, a personification of Discordia who leaves a FEMA-level disaster in her wake anywhere she walks. It's basically a genteel version of social realism, showing the great drama inherent just in these small ordinary lives here in this pleasant mid-sized city; we take it so much for granted now in children's literature, so it's a fresh shock all over again to remember how groundbreaking and controversial it was when Cleary started writing books for children in this fashion, starting just one year before JD Salinger kickstarted the Young Adult genre into existence with The Catcher in the Rye (helped immensely of course three years later with William Golding's Lord of the Flies). Cleary's Henry Huggins books are kind of like that for those readers' little brothers in fourth through sixth grade, which is what makes them still so timeless and readable to this day, especially series high point Henry and the Clubhouse which features almost a perfect blend of zany standalone stories but all of them combining into a grand finale at the very end, with a good dose of earned sentimentality too. If you take on these six books, and then the '70s more touchy-feely fellow six-book series of Ramona as a tween, you'll have pretty much read the top twelve books of her career, making the rest only really of worth to diehard completists. They come recommended in this spirit. *Like I suspect is the case with a lot of the nerds here at Goodreads, every year of my childhood I participated in my public library's summer reading program, in which goals at home for books checked off a list was combined with live social events at the library's large back field, and that this combination of indoor and outdoor activities makes up a giant sweet spot of my fond memories of my tween years (whatever ones I can still remember here in my fifties, anyway). I always went for the biggest goal you could get, which was something ridiculous like 30 books in the 15 weeks between Memorial Day and Labor Day; but the only way I could get to that number by the end of the summer was to re-read a certain amount of books I was already familiar with, which is how I ended up re-reading the entire Huggins series every summer, a lot of Judy Blume books every summer, the "Mad Scientist Club" books every summer, etc. I was actually reading them again from cover to cover, so I suppose technically that counts! The 2021 Beverly Cleary Memorial Re-Read: Henry Huggins (1950) Henry and Beezus (1952) Otis Spofford (1953) Henry and Ribsy (1954) Fifteen (1956) Henry and the Paper Route (1957) Henry and the Clubhouse (1962) Ribsy (1964) Ramona and Her Mother (1979) Dear Mr. Henshaw (1983) Ramona Forever (1984) Strider (1991) ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
May 23, 2021
May 23, 2021
|
May 23, 2021
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||||
4.07
| 4,880
| 1962
| Mar 18, 2014
|
it was amazing
|
Earlier this year, on the day of her death, I ran over to the Chicago Public Library website and checked out as many random ebook titles by children's
Earlier this year, on the day of her death, I ran over to the Chicago Public Library website and checked out as many random ebook titles by children's author Beverly Cleary that I could get my hands on, which turned out to be eight volumes spanning her entire career that I got done reviewing a little while ago (full list at the bottom of this review). But I realized that my middle-aged reassessment of Cleary would never be truly complete without revisiting the entire series of the one character I cared about as a kid way more than any other, which is our perpetually put-upon tween hero Henry Huggins. He was the protagonist of her very first book, after all, written while working as a public librarian in Portland, Oregon, and hearing little boys in there constantly complaining about the badly outdated Victorian "Little Lord Fauntleroy" nonsense constantly being crammed down their throats at school; and he would remain Cleary's "main character" from his explosive start in 1950 all the way until the mid-'70s, when as a grandmother she embraced the new wave of "young adult" writers like Judy Blume and Betsy Byars, and took her former impish devil Ramona Quimby and aged her up to a tween herself in order to write stories more emotionally revealing and bittersweet than the Huggins books earlier in her career. But that's okay with me! I loved the Huggins books as a kid, especially that magical age between seven or eight and twelve to thirteen, and would re-read the entire six-book series seemingly every summer* (including 1950's Henry Huggins, '52's Henry and Beezus, '57's Henry and the Paper Route, '62's Henry and the Clubhouse, and '64's Ribsy). Now that I've reread them as a middle-ager, it's easy to see why, because they clearly have the same tone and spirit as Jeff Kinney's modern hit Diary of a Wimpy Kid, of tween boys acting stupid and silly and very real, but also coming to grips with some adult truths about the world for the very first time, and growing into some adult traits for the first time like natural politeness, concern for others, etc. Henry doesn't have the "stolen inheritance" adventures of Victorian children's tales, but very real adventures -- the one year he and his buddies build a clubhouse, his agony about not being old enough yet for his first summer job -- and instead of fairytale villains he has very real villains -- such as the aforementioned Ramona Quimby, seen as a hellion four-year-old in these books, a personification of Discordia who leaves a FEMA-level disaster in her wake anywhere she walks. It's basically a genteel version of social realism, showing the great drama inherent just in these small ordinary lives here in this pleasant mid-sized city; we take it so much for granted now in children's literature, so it's a fresh shock all over again to remember how groundbreaking and controversial it was when Cleary started writing books for children in this fashion, starting just one year before JD Salinger kickstarted the Young Adult genre into existence with The Catcher in the Rye (helped immensely of course three years later with William Golding's Lord of the Flies). Cleary's Henry Huggins books are kind of like that for those readers' little brothers in fourth through sixth grade, which is what makes them still so timeless and readable to this day, especially series high point Henry and the Clubhouse which features almost a perfect blend of zany standalone stories but all of them combining into a grand finale at the very end, with a good dose of earned sentimentality too. If you take on these six books, and then the '70s more touchy-feely fellow six-book series of Ramona as a tween, you'll have pretty much read the top twelve books of her career, making the rest only really of worth to diehard completists. They come recommended in this spirit. *Like I suspect is the case with a lot of the nerds here at Goodreads, every year of my childhood I participated in my public library's summer reading program, in which goals at home for books checked off a list was combined with live social events at the library's large back field, and that this combination of indoor and outdoor activities makes up a giant sweet spot of my fond memories of my tween years (whatever ones I can still remember here in my fifties, anyway). I always went for the biggest goal you could get, which was something ridiculous like 30 books in the 15 weeks between Memorial Day and Labor Day; but the only way I could get to that number by the end of the summer was to re-read a certain amount of books I was already familiar with, which is how I ended up re-reading the entire Huggins series every summer, a lot of Judy Blume books every summer, the "Mad Scientist Club" books every summer, etc. I was actually reading them again from cover to cover, so I suppose technically that counts! The 2021 Beverly Cleary Memorial Re-Read: Henry Huggins (1950) Henry and Beezus (1952) Otis Spofford (1953) Henry and Ribsy (1954) Fifteen (1956) Henry and the Paper Route (1957) Henry and the Clubhouse (1962) Ribsy (1964) Ramona and Her Mother (1979) Dear Mr. Henshaw (1983) Ramona Forever (1984) Strider (1991) ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
May 23, 2021
not set
|
May 23, 2021
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||||
4.03
| 6,759
| 1957
| Mar 18, 2014
|
it was amazing
|
Earlier this year, on the day of her death, I ran over to the Chicago Public Library website and checked out as many random ebook titles by children's
Earlier this year, on the day of her death, I ran over to the Chicago Public Library website and checked out as many random ebook titles by children's author Beverly Cleary that I could get my hands on, which turned out to be eight volumes spanning her entire career that I got done reviewing a little while ago (full list at the bottom of this review). But I realized that my middle-aged reassessment of Cleary would never be truly complete without revisiting the entire series of the one character I cared about as a kid way more than any other, which is our perpetually put-upon tween hero Henry Huggins. He was the protagonist of her very first book, after all, written while working as a public librarian in Portland, Oregon, and hearing little boys in there constantly complaining about the badly outdated Victorian "Little Lord Fauntleroy" nonsense constantly being crammed down their throats at school; and he would remain Cleary's "main character" from his explosive start in 1950 all the way until the mid-'70s, when as a grandmother she embraced the new wave of "young adult" writers like Judy Blume and Betsy Byars, and took her former impish devil Ramona Quimby and aged her up to a tween herself in order to write stories more emotionally revealing and bittersweet than the Huggins books earlier in her career. But that's okay with me! I loved the Huggins books as a kid, especially that magical age between seven or eight and twelve to thirteen, and would re-read the entire six-book series seemingly every summer* (including 1950's Henry Huggins, '52's Henry and Beezus, '57's Henry and the Paper Route, '62's Henry and the Clubhouse, and '64's Ribsy). Now that I've reread them as a middle-ager, it's easy to see why, because they clearly have the same tone and spirit as Jeff Kinney's modern hit Diary of a Wimpy Kid, of tween boys acting stupid and silly and very real, but also coming to grips with some adult truths about the world for the very first time, and growing into some adult traits for the first time like natural politeness, concern for others, etc. Henry doesn't have the "stolen inheritance" adventures of Victorian children's tales, but very real adventures -- the one year he and his buddies build a clubhouse, his agony about not being old enough yet for his first summer job -- and instead of fairytale villains he has very real villains -- such as the aforementioned Ramona Quimby, seen as a hellion four-year-old in these books, a personification of Discordia who leaves a FEMA-level disaster in her wake anywhere she walks. It's basically a genteel version of social realism, showing the great drama inherent just in these small ordinary lives here in this pleasant mid-sized city; we take it so much for granted now in children's literature, so it's a fresh shock all over again to remember how groundbreaking and controversial it was when Cleary started writing books for children in this fashion, starting just one year before JD Salinger kickstarted the Young Adult genre into existence with The Catcher in the Rye (helped immensely of course three years later with William Golding's Lord of the Flies). Cleary's Henry Huggins books are kind of like that for those readers' little brothers in fourth through sixth grade, which is what makes them still so timeless and readable to this day, especially series high point Henry and the Clubhouse which features almost a perfect blend of zany standalone stories but all of them combining into a grand finale at the very end, with a good dose of earned sentimentality too. If you take on these six books, and then the '70s more touchy-feely fellow six-book series of Ramona as a tween, you'll have pretty much read the top twelve books of her career, making the rest only really of worth to diehard completists. They come recommended in this spirit. *Like I suspect is the case with a lot of the nerds here at Goodreads, every year of my childhood I participated in my public library's summer reading program, in which goals at home for books checked off a list was combined with live social events at the library's large back field, and that this combination of indoor and outdoor activities makes up a giant sweet spot of my fond memories of my tween years (whatever ones I can still remember here in my fifties, anyway). I always went for the biggest goal you could get, which was something ridiculous like 30 books in the 15 weeks between Memorial Day and Labor Day; but the only way I could get to that number by the end of the summer was to re-read a certain amount of books I was already familiar with, which is how I ended up re-reading the entire Huggins series every summer, a lot of Judy Blume books every summer, the "Mad Scientist Club" books every summer, etc. I was actually reading them again from cover to cover, so I suppose technically that counts! The 2021 Beverly Cleary Memorial Re-Read: Henry Huggins (1950) Henry and Beezus (1952) Otis Spofford (1953) Henry and Ribsy (1954) Fifteen (1956) Henry and the Paper Route (1957) Henry and the Clubhouse (1962) Ribsy (1964) Ramona and Her Mother (1979) Dear Mr. Henshaw (1983) Ramona Forever (1984) Strider (1991) ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
May 23, 2021
not set
|
May 23, 2021
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||||
0380728044
| 9780380728046
| 0380728044
| 3.96
| 5,238
| 1956
| Jan 02, 2007
|
liked it
|
2021 reads, #16. Stop everything! BEVERLY CLEARY HAS DIED! Like millions of others, Cleary is one of the authors I used to regularly read back in my c
2021 reads, #16. Stop everything! BEVERLY CLEARY HAS DIED! Like millions of others, Cleary is one of the authors I used to regularly read back in my childhood in the 1970s; and I've been meaning to do a middle-aged reassessment of her work, much like I did with Judy Blume in 2019, so her unfortunate passing seemed as good a day as any to jump on the Chicago Public Library website and check out eight of her ebooks before everyone else could come around to the idea of doing so themselves. One of the big surprises I've learned about Cleary from this exercise is that back in the '50s when her career was first taking off, she wrote not only the Klickitat Street chapter-book series that she's now largely remembered for, but a whole series of "young romance" novels designed specifically for teenage girls, with this one being the first of a string of books with such provocatively '50s titles as The Luckiest Girl and Sister of the Bride. And indeed, this book is as delightfully dated as the Klickitat books are elegantly timeless, all poodle skirts and drugstore milkshakes and ducktailed boys with fintailed cars. It's quite clearly the reason these books were largely forgotten during the countercultural age of the late '60s (the last of Cleary's "young romance" books was published the exact month and year of Kennedy's assassination), and never rediscovered by further generations the way her books for younger reasons have perpetually been since then; but still, there was something delightful about reading this and being reminded that these kinds of stories used to be published all the time without even the slightest trace of irony, even if one such book of this type was way more than enough to satisfy my curiosity for the rest of my life. If they're to be read at all, they should be read in this forgiving, nostalgic spirit, an age when picking the right chiffon dress for the coming sock hop was what the American arts thought was the most pressing concern for the average teenage girl. The 2021 Beverly Cleary Memorial Re-Read: Henry Huggins (1950) Henry and Beezus (1952) Otis Spofford (1953) Henry and Ribsy (1954) Fifteen (1956) Henry and the Paper Route (1957) Henry and the Clubhouse (1962) Ribsy (1964) Ramona and Her Mother (1979) Dear Mr. Henshaw (1983) Ramona Forever (1984) Strider (1991) ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Mar 28, 2021
|
Mar 28, 2021
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0449206521
| 9780449206522
| 0449206521
| 4.04
| 16,218
| 1947
| Sep 12, 1984
|
really liked it
|
The Jason Pettus 2020 Autumn Reading Challenge (join us!) #4: A Pulitzer Prize winner When I was growing up in the 1970s, seemingly every adult I knew h The Jason Pettus 2020 Autumn Reading Challenge (join us!) #4: A Pulitzer Prize winner When I was growing up in the 1970s, seemingly every adult I knew had at least a couple of James A. Michener's humongous historical-fiction tomes in their bookshelves, and it always made me curious to take some of them on once I got old enough and became a good enough reader to do so; but now that I have gotten old enough, Michener has profoundly fallen out of favor, and in the 2020s I doubt you'll find even one young person out of ten who has even heard of him. That's a shame, I discovered after finally reading my very first book of his, which happens to be the very first book he wrote, 1947's Tales of the South Pacific; because despite the daunting reputation of his books' page counts, this turned out to be one of the more pleasantly readable books I've taken on in the last year, a much more poetic and emotionally moving manuscript than I was expecting from Michener's reputation as "King of the Overlong Exposition." Michener's one and only Pulitzer win of the over 50 books he published, and the source material for the Broadway musical of the same name, this is even more surprising when you realize that he was a simple high-school teacher with no publishing credits in the years leading up to World War Two, and that he only wrote this book in a personal attempt to capture all the crazy stories he witnessed as a Navy journalist during the war (a position he volunteered for because of otherwise being a pacifist Quaker, and a position only given to him because his commanding officers mistakenly thought he was the son of Admiral Marc Mitscher, and therefore needed to be handled with kid gloves). But once you read it, you immediately understand why the wartime Pulitzer committee would consider this irresistible catnip; because much like John Hersey's fellow Pulitzer-winning A Bell for Adano two years previously, Michener's main point here is to show how the benefits of a capitalist democracy like the US provided the exact entrepreneurial skills and "can-do attitude" that allowed the US to be the decisive factor in the Allies winning the war in the first place, a sort of paean to the kinds of quick thinking, solutions on the fly, and dogged persistence that allowed the American military to finally overcome a vastly superior Japanese force, one that already knew the tiny hidden islands of the Pacific Ocean with a kind of intimacy and mastery that the US still hasn't acquired even 80 years later. But what sets this apart from previous wartime books -- and what truly made it so beloved when it first came out -- is that Michener digs down to find the beating heartbeat of humanity that lurks within these stories of battleship maneuvers and bombing raids, excelling at showing just how much downtime there is between battles in war, and the various good, bad, serious and silly ways the soldiers involved deal with these anxious downtimes. And in this, Michener is surprisingly critical of the very soldiers he means to champion, not shying away at all from the acknowledgement that alcoholism was rampant among the US military during the war, that there were many soldiers who used fascism as a convenient excuse to line their own pockets, and that American nurses had to be stationed literally on islands by themselves with no male soldiers in sight, for fear of otherwise being the perpetual victims of sexual assault the entire time they were there. It's the back-and-forth between this idealistic heroism and the sometimes ugly realities of human nature that provides the frisson that makes this book so readable, and it pretty much draws a line in the sand that demarks the way that all military stories were told before it, and the way all such stories were permanently changed after it. Nonetheless, I'm giving it 4 stars instead of 5, mostly as a way of acknowledging that younger readers and especially readers of color will find every single problematic element that's almost always found in books this old; for despite Michener's relatively progressive stance here that "rape is bad," he still loads this manuscript up with so many awkward cultural statements about race and gender as to give heart palpitations to any good Woke. I personally wasn't that particularly bothered by it; but with every passing year, I feel more and more compelled to follow up such statements with an acknowledgement that I'm a 51-year-old straight white male, so of course I wasn't that particularly bothered by it, but that others with different backgrounds than mine will find this a much more troubling book than I did. (And of course, the less said about the musical adaptation's "There's Nothin' Like a Dame," in which Rodgers and Hammerstein make a lighthearted joke about these soldiers' predelection for serially raping any woman who comes within grabbing distance of them [actual lyrics: "We feel as hungry as the wolf felt when he met Red Riding Hood"], the better.) So all in all, like most books of this type, caution and an open mind is required when approaching Tales of the South Pacific here 74 years after its initial publication; but if you're able to do so, you'll find a surprisingly enjoyable, surprisingly sophisticated record of both the highs and lows of the so-called "Greatest Generation," and I have to admit that this did nothing but even further solidify my interest in reading yet more by Michener. (For those who don't know, by the '70s Michener had become much more famous for outputting enormous 1,500-page novels every few years about such specific subjects as the history of Poland, the founding of Judaism, and the establishment of America's space program, gaining accolades worldwide for his meticulous research and even-handed overviews; so there's a big part of me that feels like I haven't "truly experienced" Michener until I take on at least one of these.) That probably won't be coming until another year from now, though, so I hope you'll join me again in late autumn 2021 for that! ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Dec 12, 2020
|
Dec 12, 2020
|
Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0374520968
| 9780374520960
| 0374520968
| 3.60
| 4,540
| May 1966
| May 01, 1988
|
really liked it
|
THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse So with 1966's The Crystal World, I now finally finish up my reading of JG Ballard's "Catastrophe" novels, the Mid-Century-Modernist-style straightforward science-fiction books that first gained him a fan following at the beginning of his career, before the Postmodernist era ushered in a culture that allowed for him to write the much weirder, much darker "Ballardian" novels that he's now much more famous for. (To give you a sense of the timeline, with this book we're now currently seven years away from Crash, and nine years away from High-Rise.) Like the other Catastrophe novels, this book is centered around a natural disaster that threatens to destroy all life on the planet within the next decade (in this case, something in space is starting to convert all of Earth's swampy areas from organic matter into crystals, which scientists have determined is proceeding at a rate of 400 new yards every single day); and like the others, Ballard comes up with a "scientific" explanation for this that barely makes sense and that he almost immediately shrugs off (in this case, writing about a decade after the real-life discovery of "antimatter," he proposes that a phenomenon called "antitime" is turning the most primordial areas of Earth back into the state they were in when the planet was first formed trillions of years ago); and like the others, Ballard pays only lip service to traditional Mid-Century-Modernist sci-fi story elements (a James-Kirk-like protagonist; a love interest for this Kirk-like protagonist; an armed conflict between rival groups that this Kirk-like protagonist finds himself stuck in the middle of), which feels at all times like it's something his publisher is forcing on him but that he has zero interest in writing about; and like all the others, the only time the book rises above ho-hum to truly interesting is when Ballard is writing about the growing amount of people who feel like humans should actually be embracing the catastrophe, in that they believe it will usher our race into our next natural stage of evolution, which comes off to everyone else like they've gone psychotically insane. (And yes, like the others, this group of psychotically insane "true believers" includes at least one Catholic priest who has interpreted the catastrophe as proof that God has abandoned his children.) I've found it fascinating to read these novels long after the fact, and to see that they clearly show a young Ballard who is itching to write about the black pit at the heart of the human soul, but who in the early 1960s is simply not being allowed by his publisher to just go full-out into such territory, but is instead boxed in by the Silver Age genre expectations that his more famous "hard science" peers like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein had made such an unthinking norm by then. (Let's never forget, after all, that after Ballard attended his first Worldcon science-fiction convention in 1957, he became so depressed by the state of the genre that he completely stopped writing altogether for an entire year.) As such, then, all of these Catastrophe novels come with only a limited recommendation, suitable only for Ballard completists who like me are interested in seeing how his Ballardian elements started peeking out here and there during the start of his career. (If you're only going to read one of them, make it the book before this one, 1964's The Burning World, which is very clearly the best out of all four; and like me, you can entirely skip the first Catastrophe novel altogether, 1961's The Wind From Nowhere, which later in life Ballard entirely disavowed as "unreadable paycheck garbage" just as soon as he was famous enough to get away with it.) Apparently, though, the one place Ballard was getting a chance to go "full Ballardian" in these years was in the decidedly less commercial world of short fiction; and it's this medium that I'll be exploring next, in his 1970 linked story collection The Atrocity Exhibition, the first book of his oeuvre that most fans point to as finally showcasing Ballard in his mature form. I hope you'll join me here again later in the year for my look at that. JG Ballard books being reviewed for this series: The Drowned World (1962) | The Burning World (1964) | The Crystal World (1966) | The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) | Crash (1973) | Concrete Island (1974) | High Rise (1975) | The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) | Hello America (1981) | Empire of the Sun (1984) | The Day of Creation (1987) | Running Wild (1988) | The Kindness of Women (1991) | Rushing to Paradise (1994) | Cocaine Nights (1996) | Super-Cannes (2000) | Millennium People (2003) | Kingdom Come (2006) ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Aug 11, 2020
|
Aug 11, 2020
|
Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0679761675
| 9780679761679
| 0679761675
| 3.78
| 13,640
| unknown
| May 30, 1995
|
really liked it
|
THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Daphne du Maurier | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | PG Wodehouse Finished: Christopher Buckley | Shirley Jackson Figuring out where to start with my completist read of Philip K. Dick turned out to be more complicated than with many of the other authors in this challenge; for while with most you can simply start with the first book they published and move forward chronologically from there, that's complicated in PKD's case because he started his career as basically a hack writer of quickie Silver-Age-style Mid-Century-Modernist sci-fi, while the main reason to read him now is for the trippy mind-bending classics of his 1970s late career, and especially the ones he wrote after his drug-complicated hallucinatory schizophrenic breakdown in February and March of 1974. But the whole point of doing a completist challenge is to search back and start before an author got to their mature classics, to see whether you can spot telling signs in the early books of the masters they would become; but I'm aware that the earliest of his books is not much more than mediocre pay-per-word space-opera kiddie stuff, and I don't want to actively torture myself just for the sake of saying that I did a truly complete read of his entire oeuvre. So I thought a good compromise would be to start with his 1962 The Man in the High Castle, which won PKD his first and only Hugo Award for Best Novel, and was also the first book that made many in the industry say, "Oh, okay, this isn't just a hacky writer of quickie pulp stuff, he's capable of greatness too." But I've already read High Castle, albeit almost 30 years ago; and I also just recently watched the Amazon Prime adaptation of the book as well, and wasn't feeling like going through such a well-known project again as my first PKD read. So instead I chose the first book after that, 1964's Martian Time-Slip, and now at this point am promising to stick chronologically to the rest, until we finally reach the final book he wrote before his premature death, 1982's The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. At that point, then, I'll decide whether to go back and read all those early space operas from the 1950s, or the string of '50s titles that only got published in the '80s after his death in order to further cash in on his name. Whew! As I was expecting, Martian Time-Slip reads through a lot of its page count like the kind of normal mid-'60s Silver Age sci-fi story that was so in vogue at the time, combining the "Long and Grand Terraforming of Mars" trope with the "Libertarians in SPAAAACE!!!" trope to tell a tale of political intrigue between the various factions (private institutions, national governments, the UN) who have formed the first settlements on a barely livable Mars, with PKD in this case envisioning a red planet that already had life when Earthlings first visited, essentially distant cousins of African aboriginals who have now suffered essentially the same colonial, oppressive fate as those Earth cousins did hundreds of years ago. But we know we're in for something different when PKD suddenly takes a detour in our Mars tour to examine the fate of the small number of autistic children who have now been born on the planet, who are all basically removed and housed in a special institution walled off from the rest of society, and with there being a hot debate over whether autistic children shouldn't instead be quietly euthanized upon diagnosis, because there's so much to be gained right now by convincing Earth's overly crowded population to emigrate to Mars en masse, and that's going to be even harder if everyone's convinced that their children will come out as deranged freaks. In fact, echoing common actual medical theory at the time, PKD posits here that autism and schizophrenia are actually the same thing, only one being a form you're born with and the other a condition you specifically develop (and hence is the one form that can eventually be "cured"); and as the page count continues, the story becomes more and more focused on this particular aspect of Martian society, as our main menagerie of characters slowly become convinced that autism/schizophrenia is actually a case of select humans having the ability to time travel using only their brains, much like how others are apparently born with the gift of ESP, and that they're experiencing the space-time continuum in such a profoundly different way than us that it renders them virtually incapable of normal communication with non-affected people. Mind you, this is all in service of a convoluted plot about Martian politics and a coming secret land grab, and the story never really transcends the mid-'60s boundaries that PKD was forced to work within at the time in order to have any kind of viable commercial career. But in this case, you really can see him yearning to add the trippy stuff he was genuinely interested in exploring within what's essentially a Robert A. Heinlein pastiche (just from the standpoint of the political plot, this could easily be a sequel to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress), and is a nice portent of the truly weird, truly brilliant novels that would start coming out of him in just another ten years. It's not perfect, which is why it's not getting five stars from me; but if I was a contemporary sci-fi reader back in the mid-'60s, I would've finished this and thought, "Hmm, yeah, that was quite clever and good. I bet this guy's going to have even better stuff down the line." That's always a great thing to catch in the early volumes of any author in this Completist Challenge, and makes me excited to dive into the next PKD book, The Game-Players of Titan which was basically published at the same exact time as this one but by a different publisher. See you again then! Philip K. Dick books now read: Martian Time-Slip ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
May 31, 2020
|
May 31, 2020
|
Paperback
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
3.74
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 28, 2024
not set
|
Sep 28, 2024
|
||||||
4.08
|
it was ok
|
Sep 02, 2024
|
Sep 02, 2024
|
||||||
4.32
|
it was amazing
|
Jun 13, 2024
not set
|
Jun 13, 2024
|
||||||
3.63
|
it was amazing
|
Jun 11, 2024
|
Jun 11, 2024
|
||||||
4.05
|
really liked it
|
Mar 08, 2024
not set
|
Mar 08, 2024
|
||||||
3.80
|
it was ok
|
Aug 26, 2023
|
Aug 26, 2023
|
||||||
3.76
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
|||||||
3.93
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
Jul 24, 2023
|
|||||||
3.93
|
it was amazing
|
May 13, 2023
|
May 13, 2023
|
||||||
4.46
|
really liked it
|
Mar 26, 2023
not set
|
Mar 26, 2023
|
||||||
3.81
|
it was amazing
|
Dec 12, 2022
|
Dec 12, 2022
|
||||||
4.29
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 16, 2022
|
Sep 16, 2022
|
||||||
3.85
|
it was ok
|
Nov 28, 2021
|
Nov 28, 2021
|
||||||
3.94
|
it was amazing
|
May 23, 2021
May 23, 2021
|
May 23, 2021
|
||||||
4.07
|
it was amazing
|
May 23, 2021
not set
|
May 23, 2021
|
||||||
4.03
|
it was amazing
|
May 23, 2021
not set
|
May 23, 2021
|
||||||
3.96
|
liked it
|
Mar 28, 2021
|
Mar 28, 2021
|
||||||
4.04
|
really liked it
|
Dec 12, 2020
|
Dec 12, 2020
|
||||||
3.60
|
really liked it
|
Aug 11, 2020
|
Aug 11, 2020
|
||||||
3.78
|
really liked it
|
May 31, 2020
|
May 31, 2020
|