Books Part V, featuring Benny Profane and the Whole Sick Crew

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Yeah the second half of that book is much better than the first. Took me a while to get into it as well. And there aren't that many chapters with the characters from the last book so I wouldn't look forward to it too much. Just lots and lots of Dany, Jon and Tyrion which is fine by me.
 
I almost wish it was more of just those three. I grow tired of all these wedding plots.

FWIW, I have always read the paperback copies of these books, and I'm suddenly no longer confused as to why it has taken so long for the paperback copy of this book to come out. It's going to be huge. I've never read something so slowly in all my life. 4 hours of reading last night and I'm not sure I cracked 100 pages.

Ok, I read one book more slowly and that was book four of The Dark Tower *shudder*
 
Thais, by Anatole France

This was the last of the opera reading for this season. It's and "ironic" and "sardonic" tale of a self-righteous ascetic in fourth or fifth century Egypt who has the hots for a courtesan in Alexandria. He gets the idea to walk up to Alexandria and get her to become a Christian and enter a convent, which France "ironically" calls a nunnery. We get some of Thais' backstory about her childhood. Then, in the middle of the book, comes about 47,000 pages of a philosophical dialogue with all the different ideologies of the time represented. :crack: Then, in the end, the ascetic realizes that the whole time, he just wanted to slip her the bone. He goes nuts. The end. The opera better have some good tunes.

To get this bad taste out of my mouth, I reread Excellent Women, by Barbara Pym. I enjoy her very much. This is a classic Barbara Pym novel about an Anglo-Catholic spinster on the fringes of anthropologists and their dramas, kind of like her actual life, but I suspect the novels are funnier and more charming than her actual life was.
 
Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris

I bought this not because it is a murder mystery, but because it offered a peak into life in Saudi Arabia. The author once lived there with her Saudi husband, so she is in a good position to write about the country from a less biased POV.

I did enjoy learning about life in Saudi Arabia and the two main characters, Nayir and Katya, are not objects but well-rounded characters used to tell about a religious unmarried man and a highly educated career woman engaged to be married to the man's best friend. I guess many of us tend to think Saudi men and women are like robots obeying religious orders in an ultra-conservative country, but this novel makes you realize that they struggle in such a world.

The one I didn't like too much was who the killer was and why the murder was done. It wasn't a big surprise and the murder reason had little merit compared to why the other suspects could've done it. The part fell flat to me.

Other than that, pretty good.
 
Finished another Tolstoy The Devil. It was a weaker story but had good descriptions of infidelity/guilt/addictiveness. There were two endings and none of them really satisfied. The endings both had similar parts describing the mother in law's opinion of the main character which was pretty funny.
 
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (Michael Chabon, 2007): I’m a big Chabon fan, so it was hard for me not to like this one, but I don’t think I would rank it as high as his other books (which speaks more to the quality of his oeuvre than the flaws of this particular novel). It’s a good homage to detective stories, enriched by Chabon’s always baroque prose. The plot is quite fun: what if Israel had lost the 1948 war and (mostly European) Jews had to relocate to Alaska? It allows Chabon to explore a number of his familiar themes about Jewishness, a migrant’s identity, but also the father-son relationships that are always part of his books. My main problem with the novel was that the characters were not particularly interesting, and were often quite one-dimensional. I do get that it was at least partly deliberate, given the detective stories homage, but it still took away from my enjoyment. I would still rate it a solid 3/5.
 
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (Michael Chabon, 2007): I’m a big Chabon fan, so it was hard for me not to like this one, but I don’t think I would rank it as high as his other books (which speaks more to the quality of his oeuvre than the flaws of this particular novel). It’s a good homage to detective stories, enriched by Chabon’s always baroque prose. The plot is quite fun: what if Israel had lost the 1948 war and (mostly European) Jews had to relocate to Alaska? It allows Chabon to explore a number of his familiar themes about Jewishness, a migrant’s identity, but also the father-son relationships that are always part of his books. My main problem with the novel was that the characters were not particularly interesting, and were often quite one-dimensional. I do get that it was at least partly deliberate, given the detective stories homage, but it still took away from my enjoyment. I would still rate it a solid 3/5.

I loved the book, but maybe that's because I'm a tribe member and some of the nuances and language meant more to me. It's no Kavalier & Clay but I still loved it.
 
Yeah, I had a Yiddish dictionary tab open while reading it. I liked it a lot, but I prefer Kavalier & Clay and Telegraph Avenue to it. Probably rank it the same as Wonder Boys. Haven't read Mysteries of Pittsburgh yet.
 
Mysteries is a great debut.

I just picked up a copy of Wonder Boys recently; never got around to it because I've seen the movie a few times and wanted to wait til it wasn't so fresh.
 
Yeah, I had a Yiddish dictionary tab open while reading it. I liked it a lot, but I prefer Kavalier & Clay and Telegraph Avenue to it. Probably rank it the same as Wonder Boys. Haven't read Mysteries of Pittsburgh yet.

I found Telegraph Avenue to be a huge letdown. Just did not enjoy it, much to my surprise and disappointment. Mysteries is good.
 
It feels like Telegraph Avenue is quite divisive. I heard many people complain about the somewhat stereotypical approach to the black characters and their voice. I didn't particularly feel that way, but it could be due to my lack of perception to some of the language subtleties. I thought it was a welcome change of environment for Chabon, from the sprawling world of Amazing Adventures (and Yiddish Policemen's Union) to a more confined story in time and space.
 
I agree that the change of environment was welcome, for sure. Just did not like the execution. I know some people that loved it, though, and they are more learned than I am.
 
Finished some more Tolstoy short stories:

Master and Man:
This was another good description of death coming unexpectedly. He makes all our plans seem small when death arrives. Whether someone is the master or the slave we are equal in the end.

Father Sergius: Great story about pride and the solution.

After the ball: Curious weird story about unexpected life circumstances changing your way of thinking. Nothing special otherwise.

Alyosha the Pot: Short and forgettable.
 
Moneyball (Michael Lewis, 2004): I've been following baseball analytics for a while, so the book wasn't particularly surprising. It was still an entertaining read, particularly the little side stories he tells about relatively unknown players and events. My favorite section was probably the chapter on the draft - the description of the discussions in the A's "war room" was very entertaining. In a way, the boom is somewhat dated in Lewis' defensiveness: the old school has definitely lost their battle within the profession (but not in the broader world, like sportscasters, sadly). A good companion piece to Moneyball is Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, which shows that the war for better analysis remains to be won, particularly in politics.

Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (Ben Fountain, 2007): Fountain's debut is a brilliant collection of short stories about (mostly) normal people living amidst large-scale political upheaval: from Colombia and Burma to Haiti (which is the background to three of the stories) and turn-of-the-century Vienna. Fountain has a talent for extracting comedy out of deeply depressing or absurd situations, in a way that almost reminds me of Latin American magic realism. I was very impressed, and have now bought his first novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, which some friends have been raving about.
 
Love Among the Ruins, by Angela Thirkell


Number 17 of the 29 Barsetshire novels Thirkell wrote. I'm still working my way through these in order.

(I had suspected that people who liked Downton Abbey would like these. My niece read one and confirmed it. I have yet to see the show.)

Anyway. At first, it seemed like Thirkell was just throwing in old characters for nostalgia, instead of keeping the focus on two or three families, as she usually does, but then I realized that they were all people who'd been in love and hadn't had it work out; those storylines followed the theme and title of the book. The ruins weren't just what was left of England after the war, and trying to make do with the peacetime rationing; they were also the ruins of past relationships. One can be crippled by them, or one can step around the ruins and keep going forward. There's a lot of lamenting of the dying landed gentry class, but Thirkell's beginning to see that maybe the change, while inevitable and upsetting, can be seen as part of the long-term evolution of English society.

And, of course, I laugh out loud at her lovely way with a sentence. Her characterizations are nearly as good as Trollope's in the original Barsetshire novels of the late 1800s. And he was a master at it.
 
Stalingrad by Antony Beevor

I always enjoy reading books on Russian culture/history written by non-Russians, and this account of the Stalingrad battle was no exception, paricularly as it gives insight into both Soviet and German sides of the story. And mentions facts that probably wouldn't be mentioned in the Russian books, like the fact that thousands of Soviets were fighting on the side of the Germans. Occasionally my eyes were glazing over with the effort of keeping up with all the tactical stuff and army manoeuvres, but where I felt the book was truly outstanding and involving was in the depictions (needless to say, often extremely harrowing and brutal) of the daily lives of the ordinary civilians and soldiers on both sides.
 
I'm skeptical towards his work in general, but I was always interested in The Stand by Stephen King. And now I see there are two versions, one significantly longer than the original one (the "uncut" version). Which one I should get if I'd ever delve into the book? I'm leaning towards the shorter one, since my curiosity isn't that big.
 
Yeah the filmography had me in stitches.

Not sure if you've arrived at the Eschaton play-by-play part yet but that was also a hilarious highlight.

A hilarious highlight indeed. It's so wonderfully written, especially when the whole thing escalates and starts to fall apart. I was laughing the whole time.

Only 700 pages left. :drool:
 
Forgot to mention that I finished The Killer Inside Me. Loved the ambiguous ending and the slow mental breakdown of the protagonist. Writing a serial killer story in first person was a bold choice and it paid off.

I'm reading the Black Dahlia right now. A lot of people seemed to be turned off by the boxing shit, but I love the sport and found it well written.
 
I'm skeptical towards his work in general, but I was always interested in The Stand by Stephen King. And now I see there are two versions, one significantly longer than the original one (the "uncut" version). Which one I should get if I'd ever delve into the book? I'm leaning towards the shorter one, since my curiosity isn't that big.

For the love of God, don't read the Uncut version.

I may be the only person to tell you that, but I can't even begin to express how badly I wish I'd not read that version first.
 
Forgot to mention that I finished The Killer Inside Me. Loved the ambiguous ending and the slow mental breakdown of the protagonist. Writing a serial killer story in first person was a bold choice and it paid off.

I'm reading the Black Dahlia right now. A lot of people seemed to be turned off by the boxing shit, but I love the sport and found it well written.

I haven't read the book, but the movie really seemed like a flawed adaptation from the get-go, since I know that the narrator in the book gets more and more unreliable with time, which the film takes a bit too literally as it moves towards a closure. The ending in the movie was ridiculous. I'm still intrigued about the book though.

Cool to see you getting your Ellroy fix. I'd definitely read The Big Nowhere afterwards.

For the love of God, don't read the Uncut version.

I may be the only person to tell you that, but I can't even begin to express how badly I wish I'd not read that version first.

Heh, it was more of a rhetorical question anyway. I'm not a fan of King so I wouldn't want to spend so much time with one of his books.
 
Yeah the second half of that book is much better than the first. Took me a while to get into it as well. And there aren't that many chapters with the characters from the last book so I wouldn't look forward to it too much. Just lots and lots of Dany, Jon and Tyrion which is fine by me.

I have arrived...and there's still almost 400 pages left. Even if it's not that many chapters featuring the characters themselves, it's certainly a nice breathing point for me. I feel like I finished one book and have begun another. This is a good thing, the size of this book has been weighing me down, figuratively and literally.
 
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Mark Haddon, 2003): this is a cute little book with a bittersweet story about an autistic boy who decides to investigate the death of his neighbour’s dog. Haddon writes it in the first person, and his greatest merit, in my view, is how he captures the voice/worldview of autism. There are a few gimmicks here and there that annoyed me a bit, but overall it was an interesting read. A short one, too.

By Nightfall (Michael Cunningham, 2010): I didn’t like this one as much. Cunningham, in my view, has a certain disdain for his female characters and an undue fascination for his dull male protagonist, the owner of an art gallery in Chelsea who lives in a Soho loft (does it get more predictable than this?) and who is (guess what?) going through a mid-life crisis and may or may not have feelings for his brother-in-law. To make matters worse, his prose is unnatural and his lyricism is forced. I hate labelling things as pretentious because it is often mistaken for ambition, I would give By Nightfall this label – a made-for-preppies book.

Leviathan (Paul Auster, 1992): Auster is a good example of ambition than is often mistaken for pretention. Leviathan is a touching tale of a writer’s disillusionment and decent towards radicalism. Despite the book-within-a-book structure, Leviathan has a pretty conventional narrative style (at least for Auster), and its beauty lies in the psychological exploration of the two main characters.

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2009): I expected more of Ishiguro, although this is perhaps not the best place to start. This is a collection of very loosely connected short-stories that have some relation to music (which was the selling point for me). With one or two exceptions, I didn’t find the stories (or characters) to be very interesting, and Ishiguro’s sparse, simple style didn’t do much for me either.

Cosmopolis (Don DeLillo, 2003): Mixed feelings about this one. I absolutely loved DeLillo’s prose in this one – quite beautiful and lyrical, and often impressionistic. At the same time, I wasn’t crazy for the story or most of the characters (except for the wife). I thought DeLillo went a little overboard with his parable of de-humanization in the digital age; I usually prefer my moral lessons to be subtler, if that makes sense. In any case, the writing was good enough to make me want to dig further into his material. White Noise will be next, most likely.
 
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