Book Capsules
In a probably vain attempt to avoid having a huge pile of book capsules at the end of the year, here are the books I've read in 2014 worth commenting on:
At the beginning of the year I read two popular non-fiction books by Simon Garfield. Both Just My Type: A Book About Fonts and On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks featured short frothy chapters covering some aspect of the subject matter in a small amount of depth. It makes for an entertaining light overview of the topic at hand. I myself didn't find the typefaces to be terribly interesting, but the maps were fascinating. If you have some interest but little knowledge about one of these topics, go ahead and pick these up.
Pretty much every Jewish kid in American in the last 20 years had to read Elie Wiesel's Holocaust book Night, but most of us haven't read much besides that. I found a copy of The Judges while cleaning out some of my ex's stuff and decided to give it a whirl. Five characters are trapped by circumstance in a house with a man who announces that he is judging them and that at the end of the night one of them will be killed. Unfortunately, this solid premise ends up in a completely muddled mess. Three of the characters are very well drawn so it may still be worth your time, but that's the best that can be said for it.
rshruti suggested that I read The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. The last 50 pages of this messed up family story are really, really good. Unfortunately, you kind of have to read the first 250 pages to get there, and those were a tedious slog. Too bad it wasn't a short story or a novella instead.
I randomly picked up Greg Bear's recent effort Hull Zero Three, which is set on a generation ship. Our protagonist wakes up from a dream of a landing on a colony planet, only to find that he doesn't remember who he is, how he got there, or why the ship is trying its damnedest to kill him. This isn't the hard science fiction I usually associate with Bear, but it's enjoyable enough survival horror with a spaceship background. Honestly, it reads like a really good novelization of a video game, which is probably a bit of an insult, but I don't mean it that way.
Nobody specifically recommended American Psycho to me, but bart_calendar seems to reference it a lot, and I respect his taste so I figured I'd try it out. I loathed every single character in this book. The titular psycho is a horrible person even if all of the lovingly described murders are merely the ravings on an unreliable narrator. His victims are not much better. If Patrick Bateman really did kill a lot of the super-consumerist yuppie scum, he probably improved Manhattan measurably. Bret Easton Ellis may be a great author, but if this book is representative of his style then I think I can probably pass. On the other hand, I had a really strong visceral reaction to the book, which is rare, so maybe it was better than I thought. Polarizing, perhaps?
That's all this year so far, which is a rate of about one book per week, which isn't great, especially since the first five were in the first two weeks of the year.
At the beginning of the year I read two popular non-fiction books by Simon Garfield. Both Just My Type: A Book About Fonts and On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks featured short frothy chapters covering some aspect of the subject matter in a small amount of depth. It makes for an entertaining light overview of the topic at hand. I myself didn't find the typefaces to be terribly interesting, but the maps were fascinating. If you have some interest but little knowledge about one of these topics, go ahead and pick these up.
Pretty much every Jewish kid in American in the last 20 years had to read Elie Wiesel's Holocaust book Night, but most of us haven't read much besides that. I found a copy of The Judges while cleaning out some of my ex's stuff and decided to give it a whirl. Five characters are trapped by circumstance in a house with a man who announces that he is judging them and that at the end of the night one of them will be killed. Unfortunately, this solid premise ends up in a completely muddled mess. Three of the characters are very well drawn so it may still be worth your time, but that's the best that can be said for it.
rshruti suggested that I read The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. The last 50 pages of this messed up family story are really, really good. Unfortunately, you kind of have to read the first 250 pages to get there, and those were a tedious slog. Too bad it wasn't a short story or a novella instead.
I randomly picked up Greg Bear's recent effort Hull Zero Three, which is set on a generation ship. Our protagonist wakes up from a dream of a landing on a colony planet, only to find that he doesn't remember who he is, how he got there, or why the ship is trying its damnedest to kill him. This isn't the hard science fiction I usually associate with Bear, but it's enjoyable enough survival horror with a spaceship background. Honestly, it reads like a really good novelization of a video game, which is probably a bit of an insult, but I don't mean it that way.
Nobody specifically recommended American Psycho to me, but bart_calendar seems to reference it a lot, and I respect his taste so I figured I'd try it out. I loathed every single character in this book. The titular psycho is a horrible person even if all of the lovingly described murders are merely the ravings on an unreliable narrator. His victims are not much better. If Patrick Bateman really did kill a lot of the super-consumerist yuppie scum, he probably improved Manhattan measurably. Bret Easton Ellis may be a great author, but if this book is representative of his style then I think I can probably pass. On the other hand, I had a really strong visceral reaction to the book, which is rare, so maybe it was better than I thought. Polarizing, perhaps?
That's all this year so far, which is a rate of about one book per week, which isn't great, especially since the first five were in the first two weeks of the year.