in a few words, here and there

This is a very dark tale of a father and son traveling through a burnt, post-apocalyptic land.  It's purely about survival.  The writing is nearly stream-of-consciousness but the stream is from a halting conscious - it does set up frame of mind for the wandering, desperate characters.  Even though I was left with a dismal feeling in the pit of my stomach, I thought it was very, very good - perhaps precisely because of the emotion that was evoked within. 

If I had known what this book was really about, I just might have read it some time ago.  The cover and beginning of this book suggests that this is the story of students at an elite Catcher in the Rye-esque boarding school, but as it is revealed that this is the story of a community of clones that are raised so that they can contribute their organs for the medical betterment of the society from which they have been isolated. 

The author never abandons the style of the writing that sets up the story as an English society novel.  The emotions and subtle social nuances of the characters (such things that I might never notice in a typical conversation/interaction)  are far more important than the greater frame of the story.  However it was Ishiguro's audacious portrayal of clones falling into (or perhaps creating?) a society that somehow showed their human-ness instead of their lack of human-ness --which also existed -- which made this much more of a society novel than sci-fi.  I held on until the end, but ultimately thought that despite great potential, this book didn't take me everywhere that it certainly could have, even emotionally. 

Macedonia by Harvey Pekar.


I may have only been interested in this because I did my undergrad thesis on the Balkan wars of the 90s. It was okay - points for the graphic novel format but minuses for the dry storytelling.

Cliché to say - but this graphic novel is so incredibly ahead of it's time (written in the mid-80s). Surprisingly well crafted and one of the better graphic novels I've ever read. I'd recommend it to anyone who's ever liked reading any comics, but especially to people who pay half a bit of attention to politics.

A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby.

This is my first Hornby book, but I picked it up because I enjoyed High Fidelity, the film, and I have no idea how faithful it is to Hornby's book.  Based on what I knew from High Fidelity, I expected it to be a bit funnier - but then was High Fidelity all that funny?  I guess not.  I enjoyed this book, though I wanted it to be funnier.  I suppose that I thought the premise of the book - four social opposites meet each other on top of a high-rise that they all planned to fling themselves from on New Year's eve -  would lead to ye ol' crazy hijinks but it was a more medium set of hijinks.  Ah, jeez, what am I saying?  I'm not sure...

Animal Farm by George Orwell. 

I am a bit surprised that I did not read this until I was an adult.  It's a quick read with less that a hundred moving pages.  Between Animal Farm and 1984, a lot of people have trouble believing that Orwell was a socialist.  But he was a believer in the socialist democracy and had a lot to critique on the Soviet model of communism. 

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn.

This is one of those books that seems to have a cult of loyalists, much as Arturo the Aqua Boy had of his own in the novel.  I, however, am not drawn into the cult. 

I guess I thought that a tale of a family of circus freaks would be interesting... especially that of a family that created its own freakdom from experiments with drugs and poisons while the babes were in utero.  But nah, it's awful boring and non-emotionally involving.  There are holes in the plot - rushed unsatisfying endings of parallel stories and plot set-ups that fizzle into wanting-for-a-better-explanation.  When I first finished the book, and Tony asked me how I felt about it, we went into a long conversation about the story and the way it was told.  Initally I was non-plussed, but the more I tried to describe the book and it's characters, the more negative I became about it as a whole.  Hurumph. 

Persepolis, Persepolis 2, & Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi.

This is a graphic novel trilogy based on the author's life as she experiences the Iranian Revolution.  I read the first book before seeing the movie, and I thought it was really good.  I saw the movie, which I thought was great - I especially liked how the art design carried over to film and was elaborated on for great transitions and fantastic use of black & white.  Then I read Persepolis 2 which perhaps I was less into because the movie had spoiled some of the events of the story for me?  Or perhaps I was losing interest in her teenaged self versus her childhood self?  Embroideries is still stories from Satrapi's life, yet she changed up the art design in her graphic novel and it focuses narrowly on her adulthood as shared in afternoon gossip sessions with her female family and friends. 

Rats: Observations of the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan.

I read this a couple of months ago and the information that most sticks in my brain are the crazy physical details about the rats - i.e. they have sex about 20 times a day or that brown rats have forced black rats out of most American cities - Los Angeles being one of the few exceptions where black rats like to live in palm trees.  I haven't looked at a palm tree the same way since...

I think I liked the beginning best, where the author discussed the low down on rats more than later when he talks about his own ratscapades more.