Words Words
I'm so bored and tired I am going a little crazy. I want to go back to school so I can work some more at becoming a professional reader of books. To that end, I feel like going on a bit of a whinge about some of the books I read this summer. Here are some of the ones I can remember.
A Seperate Peace
Some kind of classic of American literature or some shit. It was nice to see an exploration of an awkward adolescent male friendship (no homo), but the characters were so young and unformed that they didn't really do or say anything significant. I think the author was trying to make some large, significant point about how war and the desire for manhood corrupts innocence, but I couldn't really get a handle on it. I'd like to have it taught to me in English class, but it wasn't much fun on my own. A little more homo wouldn't have run amiss.
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Awkward but brilliant nerd girl befriends a group of hard-partying, rich-bitch high school elites. She reads a lot and they smoke and drink and have a lot of sex. Neither is in the least interesting. I feel like the author accidentally made a great point about how it doesn't matter what section of the high school hierarchy you come from, you need some personality to actually be cool. The whole thing devolves into a conspiracy thriller at the end, involving anarchist groups and a whole bunch of bullshit. More dialogue and fewer Balzac references would have been appreciated.
Am I Somebody?
Bitterly depressing memoir of a smart girl growing up in conservative 1950's Ireland. Hey, you know what's great? Secular schools and birth control.
The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories
Feminist tales from the early twentieth century, by noted American writer and sociologist Charlotte Gilman. I liked this book a lot, but mostly because Gilman seems to hold all the same views I have always fought for all my life, and she was born way before ladies could vote or wear pants. The Yellow Wallpaper is the only really exceptional story in the volume, most of the others are just the same story of an oppressed woman finding fulfillment and freedom by defying convention. Which is nice, but anyone surprised by such stories would probably never read this book in the first place. The anthology gets mucho bonus points for an excerpt from Herland, Gilman's novel in which three bumbling male explorers discover a country composed entirely of females. Gilman gets it hilariously wrong by earnestly believeing that such a land of sisterhood would be a paradise. Everyone is stupid, honey, ladies and dudes together. Nice try.
The Gunslinger
Terse. Terse and curt. Terse again. Then maybe a bit laconic, just to mix things up. I was both intrigued and annoyed by this book (first in Steven King's Dark Tower series. The protagonist is the kind of guy who shoots an entire town to solve his problems, then just brushes the dust off his hands and doesn't have any feelings about it. I'm glad King didn't keep this a stand alone novel as he originally planned, because while it's promising, it really cries out for some exposition (tersely).
Snow in August
Irish kid in Brooklyn in the late 40's befriends a rabbi at a local synagogue. It's pretty cute most of the way through, all about appreciating the power of education and overcoming your prejudices by talking to people for like ten minutes. I got a little annoyed at way the auther used sports the ultimate way for people to overcome their differences, and there was a lot of unnecessary stuff about Jackie Robinson and his role in revolutionizing American race relations and blah blah (but no actual black characters). It got a little weird and fantastical at the end when the boy builds a golem to beat up the bigoted street gang that's been pretty mean to some of the people in the neighborhood. The end was schlocky, and felt a little facile for a book in which a primary character's wife died in the holocaust.
Black and Blue
Everything I hate about gender compressed into a single novel. It's nominally the story of a woman escaping her abusive husband. But, really, it's about all the stupid things that our society let's us believe about sex and marriage and gender. Only violent, dangerous men are attractive, men and women have nothing in common, the miracle of motherhood is the greatest single experience a woman can have in her life, and blabbity blah blah. The book did a god job of creating a sympathetic character who believed a lot of dumb shit, but man, I was angry basically the entire time I read this.
Skinny Dip
I hate comedy novels. So much effort expended to create witty and elaborate backstory, so little to make any of the characters interesting.
Twilight
Vampires are cool when they are the decadent embodiments of all repressed human desires. Then they get to be sexy and dangerous, seducing and murdering and slinking around in a lot of tight black leather. Vampires who enroll in high school and fall in love with unremarkable transfer students and then become sweet, attentive stalkers are most decidedly not cool. In a similar vein (haha), love stories are cool when they feature two distinct, interesting individuals who fall in love with each other. Love stories featuring two people who fall in love because one in a breathtakingly gorgeous vampire and the other is a stand-in for the preteen girl audience are extremely uncool. Seriously, I think all the male lead's dialogue in this book could have been reduced to "I love you" and "But shit, I'm a vampire," with no noticeable changes to the overall book. The best thing I can say about this book is that it gave me a renewed appreciation for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I've also read a lot of trashy fantasy and Shakespeare. But trashy fantasy novels are all pretty much the same, and if I have anything meaningful to say about Shakespeare, I'm probably going to need to save it up for grad school.
A Seperate Peace
Some kind of classic of American literature or some shit. It was nice to see an exploration of an awkward adolescent male friendship (no homo), but the characters were so young and unformed that they didn't really do or say anything significant. I think the author was trying to make some large, significant point about how war and the desire for manhood corrupts innocence, but I couldn't really get a handle on it. I'd like to have it taught to me in English class, but it wasn't much fun on my own. A little more homo wouldn't have run amiss.
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Awkward but brilliant nerd girl befriends a group of hard-partying, rich-bitch high school elites. She reads a lot and they smoke and drink and have a lot of sex. Neither is in the least interesting. I feel like the author accidentally made a great point about how it doesn't matter what section of the high school hierarchy you come from, you need some personality to actually be cool. The whole thing devolves into a conspiracy thriller at the end, involving anarchist groups and a whole bunch of bullshit. More dialogue and fewer Balzac references would have been appreciated.
Am I Somebody?
Bitterly depressing memoir of a smart girl growing up in conservative 1950's Ireland. Hey, you know what's great? Secular schools and birth control.
The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories
Feminist tales from the early twentieth century, by noted American writer and sociologist Charlotte Gilman. I liked this book a lot, but mostly because Gilman seems to hold all the same views I have always fought for all my life, and she was born way before ladies could vote or wear pants. The Yellow Wallpaper is the only really exceptional story in the volume, most of the others are just the same story of an oppressed woman finding fulfillment and freedom by defying convention. Which is nice, but anyone surprised by such stories would probably never read this book in the first place. The anthology gets mucho bonus points for an excerpt from Herland, Gilman's novel in which three bumbling male explorers discover a country composed entirely of females. Gilman gets it hilariously wrong by earnestly believeing that such a land of sisterhood would be a paradise. Everyone is stupid, honey, ladies and dudes together. Nice try.
The Gunslinger
Terse. Terse and curt. Terse again. Then maybe a bit laconic, just to mix things up. I was both intrigued and annoyed by this book (first in Steven King's Dark Tower series. The protagonist is the kind of guy who shoots an entire town to solve his problems, then just brushes the dust off his hands and doesn't have any feelings about it. I'm glad King didn't keep this a stand alone novel as he originally planned, because while it's promising, it really cries out for some exposition (tersely).
Snow in August
Irish kid in Brooklyn in the late 40's befriends a rabbi at a local synagogue. It's pretty cute most of the way through, all about appreciating the power of education and overcoming your prejudices by talking to people for like ten minutes. I got a little annoyed at way the auther used sports the ultimate way for people to overcome their differences, and there was a lot of unnecessary stuff about Jackie Robinson and his role in revolutionizing American race relations and blah blah (but no actual black characters). It got a little weird and fantastical at the end when the boy builds a golem to beat up the bigoted street gang that's been pretty mean to some of the people in the neighborhood. The end was schlocky, and felt a little facile for a book in which a primary character's wife died in the holocaust.
Black and Blue
Everything I hate about gender compressed into a single novel. It's nominally the story of a woman escaping her abusive husband. But, really, it's about all the stupid things that our society let's us believe about sex and marriage and gender. Only violent, dangerous men are attractive, men and women have nothing in common, the miracle of motherhood is the greatest single experience a woman can have in her life, and blabbity blah blah. The book did a god job of creating a sympathetic character who believed a lot of dumb shit, but man, I was angry basically the entire time I read this.
Skinny Dip
I hate comedy novels. So much effort expended to create witty and elaborate backstory, so little to make any of the characters interesting.
Twilight
Vampires are cool when they are the decadent embodiments of all repressed human desires. Then they get to be sexy and dangerous, seducing and murdering and slinking around in a lot of tight black leather. Vampires who enroll in high school and fall in love with unremarkable transfer students and then become sweet, attentive stalkers are most decidedly not cool. In a similar vein (haha), love stories are cool when they feature two distinct, interesting individuals who fall in love with each other. Love stories featuring two people who fall in love because one in a breathtakingly gorgeous vampire and the other is a stand-in for the preteen girl audience are extremely uncool. Seriously, I think all the male lead's dialogue in this book could have been reduced to "I love you" and "But shit, I'm a vampire," with no noticeable changes to the overall book. The best thing I can say about this book is that it gave me a renewed appreciation for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I've also read a lot of trashy fantasy and Shakespeare. But trashy fantasy novels are all pretty much the same, and if I have anything meaningful to say about Shakespeare, I'm probably going to need to save it up for grad school.