Speaking of Books...
Anyone here using Goodreads? I've just resurrected my account over there and have been inundating myself with reading recommendations as well as attempting to make more sense out of my reading pile (though I've only logged about half of it).
Comments
I hear you on the distractions, Thom, as there was a long period where video games ate up my free time and the shift into Linux sysadmin work ate up that time along with any semblance of a social life. The past couple of years, though, since we ditched traditional TV has seen us reading more and in the last 6 months we haven't turned it on and have been chewing through books at a decent rate.
What are people reading at the moment? I just started The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, been slowly working through The Way We're Working Isn't Working for our work book club, and musing on The Hatterasman because I am pining for Outer Banks.
As far as what I've been reading lately, I've been interested in reading more translations lately. I'm reading a rather strange book right now: Fieldwork in Ukranian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko. It is being sold as an novel, but it so far is not much like a novel and more of a hybrid between prose and poetry and rather graphic as the title might suggest.
About a month ago I read Buzz Alrdin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion by Johan Harstad, also a translation. Quite fun, if a little sad at times, with a lot of pop references, including book sections named after albums by the Cardigans.
I have only just discovered Haruki Murakami, I read Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and thoroughly enjoyed it, Kafka on the Shore is even better. The Village Voice described the HardBoiled Wonderland as An intertwining DNA model of seemingly contrary elements . . . a combination of Kafkas castle, Borgess library, and the Prisoners TV village. That blurb sold me.
I have Cormac McCarthy's The Road up next, but I will probably dive in for some more Murakami before the summer is over.
Up next:
I don't tend to read much fiction. Not really sure why. I have read The Road though and it is excellent. If you're a fan of McCarthy make sure you read Blood Meridian too.
Craig
What I've been reading...
"Unwritten"
-It's about Tom Taylor, a man whose childhood has been immortalized by his author/father through a popular (ie Harry Potter) fictional character, a boy magician named Tommy Taylor. Tom spends his adulthood trying to act, but mostly makes his money going to comics conventions and speaking engagements. His father disappeared mysteriously years ago and is presumed dead. Then one day, Tom is exposed as a con man, that he's not really the son of the famed author. The adoring fans now want to lynch him. But then something magical happens in a moment of surreal danger. Now everyone believes that Tom is not only the son of the author, but perhaps the son of god, sent down to redeem the world. Add into the story an ancient cabal of of authority who uses fiction to shape the world, and you've got your antagonists. The writer, Mike Carey (who also does the Lucifer series, among others) briliantly explores that concept of fiction and how it is more powerful in shaping our world and our history than the "facts". Peter Gross's artwork gives the story both a fairytale look without losing the crispness of a suspenseful thriller. I find this series extremely engaging. I've read through the first 18 issues and it's one of the best things I've read lately. It's a current series put out by Vertigo.
"Marshal Law"
-An older series, came out in the late 80s on the Epic imprint. It was owned by Marvel, but it was an early attempt by one of the Big Two (DC Comics being the other; and for those of you unfamiliar with comics, when you say Marvel, you're saying X-Men and Hulk and Spiderman and when you say DC Comics, you're saying Superman and Batman and Justice League). Anyways, in the mid-eighties, I turned my back on DC and Marvel (for the most part) and starting reading exclusively indie comic imprints like Epic and Eagle and First and Eclipse; they had better writers and artists and adult stories; they weren't the Bam!Pow!Wham! comics of kiddie-land. Marshal Law is written by Pat Mills (who also did Judge Dread) and art by Kev O'Neill (who also did League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). It's very similar in the comics deconstructionist theme behind Watchmen. San Francisco has been totaled by a nuclear disaster. It's a war zone. It's "policed" by superheroes, who are nothing more than genetically modified soldiers who no longer work as soldiers for the government (now that wartime is over) and have put on capes and masks and terrorize the citizenry so that they are able to keep getting their fix of mayhem and fighting. Marshal Law is one of them. But he polices the superheroes. It addresses theme of what superheroes are, the legacy of war, genetics and steroid use, violence against women. It is very dark and funny. This initial six issue mini-series on Epic was the best, but it did switch to other imprints down the road in one-shot stories and graphic novels. There's one in particular where the story is that a league of once-superheroes (now inmates) have taken over the mental hospital where they reside. Marshal Law is sent in to get things back in order. It's quite funny, and the way that Mills and O'Neil incorporate similar scenes from other comics and dissect them in this story is very clever. For instance, they mimic a scene from Daredevil where he is falling from a rooftop but reaches out and grabs a flagpole on the way down to reduce his speed and help break his fall; except in this story, the person falling (a superhero inmate) grabs the flagpole and leaves his arms behind as the rest of his body speeds to the concrete below with no less of a splat upon impact. This one-shot (on the A.D. imprint, I believe) pokes fun at a lot of classic comics scenes that left myself (and probably many others) at the time thinking, no way does that happen.
Starstruck (Deluxe Edition)
-My in-laws bought this for me (via Amazon gift card; thanks, guys!). It just came out a couple months ago. It's a collection of one of my favorite teenage comics (also on the Epic Imprint) called Starstruck. This is a hardcover oversized edition with enhanced art and sections of story not included in the original series... a director's cut, so to speak, in HD.
Starstruck was originally a Broadway play, written by Elaine Lee (who also wrote the comic). Michael Kaluta is a genius with the artwork. Copied from Wiki... "Starstruck is set in an anarchic future in which humans now span across the universe. The Great Dictator has fallen and a power vacuum sets off a chess game of eccentric players scheming for control. The seriocomic stories follow Captain Galatia 9 and her running partner, Brucilla The Muscle, as they navigate madcap scenarios and surreal misadventures in between the galactic infighting." It is quite a funny and smart series. Think of a PG Wodehouse Blandings Castle cast, but more violence and sex and spaceships. Or perhaps a Jim Thompson novel written as a space opera. Brilliant stuff. This comic in particular really opened my eyes to what comics really could be, and both story and art helped take me away from a difficult childhood. There was the original graphic novel and then six issues before the Epic imprint went bust and all the stories stopped and were hung up in bankruptcy court. Eventually they got Starstruck on another imprint many years later, but this is a development I was entirely unaware of until recently, so I don't know any at all about the series run later on IDC.
Anyways, this was something of a vanity purchase, because I have many of the original issues and the original graphic novel, but the extra material and the oversized book, I wanted it to read and look at and to see something special on my bookshelf. Also, its significance to my teenage years carried a lot of weight as I considered how to use my gift card.
Here's the original issues from the Epic imprint that greeted me at Abraham's Comics (RIP) over on Clark near Morse...
Because I'm so broke, I've begun re-reading all the TPBs and individual comics on my shelf. I've been focusing my reeding on two series: Sandman and The Invisibles...
The Invisibles (written by Grant Morrison) follows a team of psychic counter-revolutionaries as they attempt to stop the Powers That Be from entering the world into a new Dark Age. It's a mix of The Prisoner and HP Lovecraft and Thomas Pynchon. A parade of different artists were used throughout the series, often to great effect.
The Sandman, the classic series of Neil Gaiman, which along with Alan Moore's Watchmen, lifted the comics medium up to a level of prestige and artistry never before experienced. In it, Gaiman created a new mythos of gods, one being Morpheus (Sandman) whose domain is that of dreams. He is the physical representation of a collective belief of society (the sandman brings dreams to the world), not unlike the idea of Mother Nature or Death representing their respective areas. Anyways, it follows the story of Morpheus as he is forced to interact more extensively with the world and its inhabitants, a situation which imposes (or attempts) change upon him, something the gods aren't typically known to do or handle very well. Gaiman gives Morpheus's story a classic odyssey story arc, often done through the point of view of others. In fact, there are several issues where he doesn't appear in the story at all, yet it still affects him. The series spans something like ten volumes of TPBs, so I have plenty of reading to do. It was Sandman that got me back to reading comics in the mid-nineties, after about seven years away from things.
Gotta love the covers Dave McKean did for the series...
I do read the occasional fiction book. The last was Great Expectations which I'd somehow never read before. Usually, though, its post apocalyptic or distopic stuff. Or Vonnegut. I worship at the altar of Kurt Vonnegut.
Craig
Have just finished ploughing through Consider Phloebas, Matter, and Surface Detail. They are all large-scale, interesting, inventive, and intricately plotted, but somehow I keep failing to fully warm to his characters. I'm interested to know how it all turns out in the end, but not because I feel really personally involved. Matter was the best so far in this respect - I felt the main characters underwent more interesting development, rather than just being zoomed from one space battle or alien cultural experience to the next.
On the evidence so far I like Reynolds better - now that I've done my Banksian duty for the moment I have a fresh pile of his novels to tackle.
A gentleman of my acquaintance has a new ebook out, How to Suceed in Evil For only $.99 you can read the adventures of Edwin Windsor, Evil Efficiency Consultant. His tries to help supervillains with their evil plans. Naturally, since they're all egomaniacs, they don't follow his advice, and entertaining bumbling ensues. Highly recommended.
You don't have to own a Kindle, you can download a software reader. I got a Kindle app for my Crackberry so I can read it on the train.
I'm also hopping around a whole ton of public domain stuff from iBooks. I wish public domain music would catch up to public domain books.
And Link does some great work, not just in writing, but in publishing as well.