Fiction: The Old Devils, by Kingsley Amis

Posted on by
Reply

Our November challenge book (although I finished it in January. Heh). A re-read for Dad, new to me.

This book is such a study in the group dynamic: the circle is so much more entertwined than any of them even know. All the males are in love with Rhiannon; all the females have at one time or another slept with Alan; the level of alcohol necessary to keep this group functioning is mind-blowing (they bring three CASES of scotch on a weekend trip!); most of the group is joined by their hatred of Alan and his return to Wales throws everyone off kilter. It’s got the Jane Austen socialness without the social class stuff. Also lots of old-fart commentary: “They’re selling what there now?!?”

So well-written. Amis never overexplains where people are or what they’re doing, he just puts you in the scene and lets you go. The way he dramatizes things is so well-done as well, all the affair stuff happens in such a subtle way, you’re never in the middle of a sex scene, you just realize it’s happened when the chapter starts with, say, someone tucking their blouse in

These marriages / friendships have just kept going on and on; when the one wife leaves, it’s done in such an understated way, and you find yourself wondering why they don’t ALL leave when so many of these relationships have gone sour. There’s that focus on being stuck in the working class = how can you get out of your life? You have all these bonds to other things–not just this person. Kind of like a rocket leaving earth, you need a lot of acceleration to get beyond that pull of inertia, gravity. Either you start to hate it so much that you don’t care where you go, or you meet someone / see something that’s enough to draw you out.

Thumbs up from both of us, so many different things to enjoy / explore here. (How Malcolm really is the Welsh poet Alan pretends to be; how Charlie can’t stand to be alone, several drinks in by 10 a.m., etc.)

Fiction: Sabbath’s Theater

Posted on by
Reply

Our October challenge book. A re-read for both of us.

GirlReaction: This is my all-time favorite Philip Roth book. So dark and yet so funny. But sadly I was way too swamped with school and couldn’t finish. I’ll re-read it this summer maybe. Hopefully. 🙂

DadReaction: Hilarious. This may be the funniest book i’ve ever read. I didn’t remember how sad it was–it’s savagely funny but there’s also a devastating sense of loss, raving self destruction and anger. His unreasonableness was just hilarious and unstoppable, in your face, even when people are trying to help him. A real exercise in self sabotage–anything even remotely good he will end up ruining. He’s also so self-aborbed that he defines people solely by how they relate to them and is always confused by their other attributes. The end is a real punch.

This books gets loose from some of the usual Roth tightness: a hymn to excess. Not just in the 60s “good excess” type way, but ruminating on how horrible excess can be when you’re trashing everything around you. You do forget the edge the book has–how harsh it is, even in its humor.

Catching Up with Some SciFi Series

Posted on by
Reply

So apparently I stopped blogging many book reviews sometime mid-last year. GAAAH. Yes, it has been a very busy year, but I am still annoyed with myself. Expect a lot of very short reviews (or some books on the read list [2011, 2010] never appearing here) as I am determined to be relatively caught up before Fall when I will fall off the map again. Also I will be jumping all over the map in terms of order read.

[Note, you can search by author name in the box in the right column to find reviews of previous entries in these series, in most cases.]

Adult:

River Marked, by Patricia Briggs I still absolutely 100% LOVE these characters but this was BY FAR my least favorite book in this series. Maybe because Mercy and Adam were off on their own? It felt a bit random and rushed and I didn’t enjoy it very much.

Killbox, by Ann Aguirre Fourth in the series. First half = so sappy I wanted to puke. Second half = much better. Still, a very original series.

Soulless, Changeless, and Blameless all by Gail Carriger Steam-punk sci fi, set in London with werewolves and vampires openly part of society (and, in the werewolves case, officially a part of the British empire’s army), and one soulless preternatural (the heroine). Really liked book 1, although it didn’t take on the first try (you know those nights when you’re scattered and you pick up a book and it just isn’t right for your mood?). Like the love story, the steam punk details, the society conversations. It’s like Jane Austen loosened up enough to be enjoyable. (Heh. Jane Austen fan hatemail coming my way!) The ending of book 2 made me quite annoyed so I put off reading book 3 for awhile. Liked it, but just read a review of book 4 that doesn’t sound great.

Magic at the Gate, by Devon Monk I love that Stone becomes a more important “character” as these go by. I liked this entry in the series a lot.

Mistborn and The Well of Ascension both by Brandon Sanderson Sanderson is the dude filling in for Robert Jordan to finish out the Wheel of Time books. (I’ve mentioned him before.) I LOVE the metals/magic stuff in these books. Love it! Love the secret ninja stylings of it all. Love Vin, love the bookishness of Elend. I’ve started book 3 though and it’s not moving as fast for me.

I have been reading Lauren Dane‘s Federation and Phantom Corps series also. Too sexyhot to talk about.

YA:

The Dead-Tossed Waves, by Carrie Ryan #2 in the series. Jumps ahead a generation. Not as compelling as the first book.

The Dark and Hollow Places, by Carrie Ryan #3 in the series. Congruent time- and character-wise with book 2. Loved it! A lot. Loved the new characters and how they intersected with the old and how they tied all the stories and ideas together. Really redeemed book #2 for me.

Hunger, by Jackie Morse Kessler Read about it on John Scalzi’s blog and kept, occasionally, looking for this book whenever I happened on a bookstore. (Why didn’t I just order it? I don’t even know.) FInally found it. LOVED it. Slim book, quick read. Nicely done. This will be a cool series to follow.

Across the Universe, by Beth Revis If you have other friends who read YA SciFI then surely you have already heard rave reviews of this book. Definitely on the science/space end of SciFi — which can only be a good thing as movies are revisiting that genre these days as well! 🙂 Definitely part of the current wave of dystopian universes (the Hunger Games, for example) but less warrior-, revolution-, heroine/leader-focused and with a LOT more science. A smaller story in some ways, although not all. I found it engaging and thoughtful and really good.

Vampire Academy (books 1-6) by Richelle Mead Like the Sweep series, or Twilight, or any other YA vamp/witch series, this one has a few of its own twists (the guardian/vampire pairings) while exploring much of the same ground. Completely engaging and emotional while you’re reading them (obsessively, of course). Easy to walk away from after that though. Sometimes I miss being a teenager and having everything been OH SO IMPORTANT. Then again, have I really moved away from that at all? My friends might say no. 🙂

Space Demons and Skymaze by Gillian Rubinstein I found these a little derivative and a bit stiff. None of the characters felt fully fleshed out to me.

Shiver and Linger by Maggie Stiefvater I really liked these. I liked that they (despite being werewolf books) are set so very much in the real, contemporary world. I liked the change of viewpoint from book 1 to book 2. I liked the way the romance developed. I felt like we really got into the main character’s heads and understood their motivations. Evocative, sweet and tender. (Note my friend Sarah thought the second one was too mushy and wistful in places. Heh.)

Big Screen: Incendies (en français)

Posted on by
Reply

One of many recommendations I have gotten from Ebert Presents, my latest favorite TV show (thanks, Dad!). 🙂

Two adult twins, living in Canada, meet with their lawyer after their mom dies, and are given two letters to deliver: one to their father (long gone, they never knew him) and one to a brother they never knew they had. The sister decides to accept the challenge and winds up in the middle east (filmed in Jordan but I believe this is supposed to be Lebanon) digging through layers of time to discover her mom’s younger days (which we see filmed). The brother eventually joins her. The mom was involved in Lebanese civil war, not just politically based but also religious.

This is one of those movies that while afterward there are any numbers of things you could nitpick apart from the plot, the setting, etc., the acting is so engaging that you 100% believe in it while you’re watching, particularly that of the actresses playing the mother and the daughter.

The ending is far more horrible than I remembered the review suggesting; as things begin to unfold, you start to realize there are only a few bad ways things could go…

Felt a little shellshocked at the end, but was really entranced the whole time. Despite various melodramatic tendencies, this totally worked for me.

Big Screen: Thor

Posted on by
Reply

Thankfully I was able to find a 2D viewing.

Fluffy superhero fun. Not up to Iron Man levels (oh, Iron Man) but certainly acceptable for what it is.

The Thor dude is quite pretty, don’t ya know. And Idris Elba is fantastic, but I couldn’t stop wonder whether he was wearing colored contacts the whole time? The actor playing Loki was suitably creeptastic.

And there you have it. Good summer fun if you need a couple hours of air conditioning in your day. 🙂

Big Screen: Cave of Forgotten Dreams (3D)

Posted on by
Reply

The best use of 3D I’ve ever seen.

The inside-the-cave stuff in this movie is SO COOL. The cave itself, the drawings in the cave, the way those primitive artists used the 3D bumps and bruises of the cave to enhance their drawings, the calcite stuff that has formed over everything, creating the most awesome stalactites and glimey goopy stuff you’ve ever seen.

If only it was a silent movie….

I mean the narration has a lot of really dumb stuff. I went with two academics and they were both really frustrated by the things the filmmaker chose to talk about (and the things he didn’t). And there were some really REALLY ridiculous parts, especially in interviews outside the cave.

Like when the dude wearing reindeer-skin boots and poncho plays the starspangled banner on a flute made from the tendon of a bat? (I AM NOT JOKING.)

There was one cool interview — with these two people who are figuring out which drawings came when i.e., “so first there was this, then 10,000 years later someone added this, then 4,000 years later, a bear scratched this up here”…but a lot of the interviews SHOULD have been done in the person’s native language and subtitled (as a few were) b/c the ones done in English had a lot of places where the person was obviously struggling to find the right word and ended up sounding much less smart and insightful than they probably really are.

Thumbs up for getting to be inside the cool cave and the use of 3D and the really really cool stuff you see. The cave is AWESOME.

Thumbs down for the narration, most of the interviews, and some really ridiculous speculation. Including, especially, the albino alligator stuff which was just BIZARRE and out of left field.

Big Screen: Hesher

Posted on by
Reply

I think a lot of people are probably going to hate this movie. It’s certainly heavy-handed and over the top and JGL is doing one of those “so much against type that there are times you don’t believe it” roles.

But I really enjoyed it and really this is a movie about the kid. Not JGL, not Dwight (Rainn Wilson), not Portman. The kid and what he needs and how he grows.

It’s hard to watch, there is some ick. But not “scar you for life” ick, just uncomfortable.

Sci Fi: Aftertime, by Sophie Littlefield

Posted on by
Reply

Wow. Really good. Really.

Is this being marketed as YA though? Both the sex and the violence are, I would say, significantly more graphic than anything in, for example, the Carrie Ryan books, or the Hunger Games or Twilight.

I thought it was great but I did find myself pondering whether it could be recommended to my future 6th graders, who could read all of those others mentioned.

EDITED TO ADD: Steph assures me this is being marketed as adult. And who doesn’t want an adult version of all the dystopian YA that’s out there now? Go read it. 🙂