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2011 Book Review
Dec. 28th, 2011 01:53 amFirst off let me confess right here and now, that I am one, slow ass reader. I am frequently mocked by my friends in the literati over the weeks, sheer weeks, I'll spend lackadaisically strolling through a book in the time a drug addled monkey could have written a doctorate on the same title. The problem is that no matter what I read it makes me want to write. An idea will spark out of a stray scene, a simple line will inspire a storyline or sometimes I'll stumble across a stray word cocooned in an ordinary sentence that will blossom into an elusive inspiration that takes startled flight and sends my attention chasing it down rabbit holes or off absurd cliffs (Fool me, all in green with bindlestick slung over shoulder hobo style). If it's a really good read, I'll find myself synching up with the author's flow, finding its rhythm infectious and needing to jump on a keyboard to play my own variation on its beat.
Pity my poor friends who lend me books or send me manuscripts to read.
That said here are the handful of titles I read this year and really enjoyed.
The shadow of the Wind ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón. A gothic romance, set against the backdrop of fascist Barcelona, where a young boy discovers a lost book that haunts him with its secrets and seduces him by the beauty of its prose. Eventually the story of the boy and the story of the book begin to intertwine, forming a narrative uroboros where we see the life of the author of the lost book and the life of the young boy enchanted with it begin to mirror one another against a background of murder and mystery. A fiction about a fiction, one that opens in the reader an awareness perhaps of how art not only reflects our lives but is also reflected in return by the lives it has engaged.
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana ~ Umberto Eco. Another book about books. I hope to one day write a book about books about books thereby opening a literary worm hole through the time space continuum (one that will no doubt unleash a vast herd of star demons and/or elder gods into our reality frequency). But until then let's echo back on the Eco. This one is about a 50-something year old antique book seller who suffers a stroke and loses all of his personal memories. The one thing he can remember with perfect clarity however is every line, every stanza, every book he's ever read. So begins a bittersweet detective pilgrimage into discovering a life lived and forgotten through a maze of old songs, comic books and literature. I have to say I must've lost a whole day after page five or six when I began trying to imagine the arduous process of piecing my life together with only odd pop culture idiosyncrasies and esoterica to go on.
Haunted - Chuck Palahniuk. And now we get into a book about writers and writing and urban legends and cannibalism and neurosis and having sex with a pool pump and already my eyes weep little tear drops of blood remembering it all. Stories within a main story unfold (detect a theme here, folks?), a grand guignol of sorts whereby a group of authors are rounded up by some decrepit fuck, who ships them out to a secluded building, locks them in and tells them the only way out is to write something worth a damn. Instead the authors descend into a lord of the fly worthy level of primitive debauchery. Think J G Ballard's 'High Rise' meets that local $500 dollar writer's workshop seminar you've been saving up for and you'll get a rough idea. A wickedly fun read, even if it made me wince at some scenes.
The First Law trilogy (The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, The Last Argument of Kings) ~ Joe Abercrombie. Okay, enough with the 'meta', how about something fun, fast and fierce? I picked 'The Blade Itself' up on a recommendation from a friend and was immediately hooked. Sword and sorcery written with a crime-fiction rhythm. A film noir 'Lord of the Rings' and a hard boiled epic that doesn't skimp on the schizophrenic barbarians, the royal intrigue of vast warring kingdoms, the wrath of magicians, the struggling against impossible odds or the horrors of the fantastic. It was like getting to sit in on a game of AD&D with Frank Miller as the DM.
Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human ~ Grant Morrison. If you ever wanted to know what a conversation with Joseph Campbell might sound like if you slipped him some quality hallucinogenics and got him on the topic of superheroes then you'll either need a ouija board, a good dealer and a lot of patience... or pop-culture futurist/comic book maverick Grant Morrison's latest. One part biography of Morrison and two parts cultural deconstruction of the American Ubermensch. When people ask me why I love a good 22 page punch 'em up between two grown men in tights I'll simply hand them a copy of this and smile knowingly.
The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack ~ Mark Hodder. A delightful ripping yarn of the utmost steam punkery, involving the famous explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton and the poet Algernon Swinburne as they track the time travelling Spring Heeled Jack across the dark streets of an alt-history London. A world where Prince Albert, not Victoria sit on the throne and it's not uncommon for a gentleman to find himself sword fighting genetically altered wolf men. Airships. Check. Living decapitated heads in jars. Check. Sex and monster boxing. Check.
Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal ~ Joe R. Lansdale. Airships. Check. Living decapitated heads in jars. Check. Sex and monster boxing. Check. A wild west all-star cast rounded out by a fez wearing seal that can write. Check and mate.
The Morning of the Magicians: Secret Societies, Conspiracies, and Vanished Civilizations~ Louis Pauwels & Jacques Bergier. True story about how I heard about this book. When my dad was a little kid, newly arrived from Liverpool, England to Brooklyn, New York, he was perusing through some comics at a book store when a stranger handed him this book and told him, in a rather mysterious tone, that it would change his life. Or words to that effect. This is a collection of atomic-age fortean delights. Lost civilizations, ancient high technology and secret society cargo cults illustrate a possible map to the higher evolution of mankind. Incidentally dad never bought the book, he went with the back issues of Spider Man instead, such was the story he told me when he gave me a copy of the book last Christmas.
Locos: A Comedy of Gestures ~ Felipe Alfau. Finally we end with a surrealist novel where the characters openly revolt against their authors intentions across a shifting dreamscape of interweaving stories. At times absurd, at times moving, a fun little overlooked gem of a piece whose novelty in a less skilled hand could've produced something terribly overbearing and pretentious.
Pity my poor friends who lend me books or send me manuscripts to read.
That said here are the handful of titles I read this year and really enjoyed.
The shadow of the Wind ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón. A gothic romance, set against the backdrop of fascist Barcelona, where a young boy discovers a lost book that haunts him with its secrets and seduces him by the beauty of its prose. Eventually the story of the boy and the story of the book begin to intertwine, forming a narrative uroboros where we see the life of the author of the lost book and the life of the young boy enchanted with it begin to mirror one another against a background of murder and mystery. A fiction about a fiction, one that opens in the reader an awareness perhaps of how art not only reflects our lives but is also reflected in return by the lives it has engaged.
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana ~ Umberto Eco. Another book about books. I hope to one day write a book about books about books thereby opening a literary worm hole through the time space continuum (one that will no doubt unleash a vast herd of star demons and/or elder gods into our reality frequency). But until then let's echo back on the Eco. This one is about a 50-something year old antique book seller who suffers a stroke and loses all of his personal memories. The one thing he can remember with perfect clarity however is every line, every stanza, every book he's ever read. So begins a bittersweet detective pilgrimage into discovering a life lived and forgotten through a maze of old songs, comic books and literature. I have to say I must've lost a whole day after page five or six when I began trying to imagine the arduous process of piecing my life together with only odd pop culture idiosyncrasies and esoterica to go on.
Haunted - Chuck Palahniuk. And now we get into a book about writers and writing and urban legends and cannibalism and neurosis and having sex with a pool pump and already my eyes weep little tear drops of blood remembering it all. Stories within a main story unfold (detect a theme here, folks?), a grand guignol of sorts whereby a group of authors are rounded up by some decrepit fuck, who ships them out to a secluded building, locks them in and tells them the only way out is to write something worth a damn. Instead the authors descend into a lord of the fly worthy level of primitive debauchery. Think J G Ballard's 'High Rise' meets that local $500 dollar writer's workshop seminar you've been saving up for and you'll get a rough idea. A wickedly fun read, even if it made me wince at some scenes.
The First Law trilogy (The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, The Last Argument of Kings) ~ Joe Abercrombie. Okay, enough with the 'meta', how about something fun, fast and fierce? I picked 'The Blade Itself' up on a recommendation from a friend and was immediately hooked. Sword and sorcery written with a crime-fiction rhythm. A film noir 'Lord of the Rings' and a hard boiled epic that doesn't skimp on the schizophrenic barbarians, the royal intrigue of vast warring kingdoms, the wrath of magicians, the struggling against impossible odds or the horrors of the fantastic. It was like getting to sit in on a game of AD&D with Frank Miller as the DM.
Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human ~ Grant Morrison. If you ever wanted to know what a conversation with Joseph Campbell might sound like if you slipped him some quality hallucinogenics and got him on the topic of superheroes then you'll either need a ouija board, a good dealer and a lot of patience... or pop-culture futurist/comic book maverick Grant Morrison's latest. One part biography of Morrison and two parts cultural deconstruction of the American Ubermensch. When people ask me why I love a good 22 page punch 'em up between two grown men in tights I'll simply hand them a copy of this and smile knowingly.
The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack ~ Mark Hodder. A delightful ripping yarn of the utmost steam punkery, involving the famous explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton and the poet Algernon Swinburne as they track the time travelling Spring Heeled Jack across the dark streets of an alt-history London. A world where Prince Albert, not Victoria sit on the throne and it's not uncommon for a gentleman to find himself sword fighting genetically altered wolf men. Airships. Check. Living decapitated heads in jars. Check. Sex and monster boxing. Check.
Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal ~ Joe R. Lansdale. Airships. Check. Living decapitated heads in jars. Check. Sex and monster boxing. Check. A wild west all-star cast rounded out by a fez wearing seal that can write. Check and mate.
The Morning of the Magicians: Secret Societies, Conspiracies, and Vanished Civilizations~ Louis Pauwels & Jacques Bergier. True story about how I heard about this book. When my dad was a little kid, newly arrived from Liverpool, England to Brooklyn, New York, he was perusing through some comics at a book store when a stranger handed him this book and told him, in a rather mysterious tone, that it would change his life. Or words to that effect. This is a collection of atomic-age fortean delights. Lost civilizations, ancient high technology and secret society cargo cults illustrate a possible map to the higher evolution of mankind. Incidentally dad never bought the book, he went with the back issues of Spider Man instead, such was the story he told me when he gave me a copy of the book last Christmas.
Locos: A Comedy of Gestures ~ Felipe Alfau. Finally we end with a surrealist novel where the characters openly revolt against their authors intentions across a shifting dreamscape of interweaving stories. At times absurd, at times moving, a fun little overlooked gem of a piece whose novelty in a less skilled hand could've produced something terribly overbearing and pretentious.