Bryan's Book Blog

Closing a Door and Opening a Window...

2011-10-16T04:35:00.002-06:00

“What appears to be the end may really be a new beginning.” ~Irish Proverb

Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror (Kindle)

2011-08-22T01:10:00.000-06:00

by Jason Zinoman
(New York: Penguin Press, 2011)
Kindle eBook, 272 Pages, 1309 KB, Nonfiction
ASBN: B004IYJEN8, US$12.99

ABCD Rating: CHECK OUT

From the Cover: Much has been written about the storied New Hollywood of the 1970s, but at the same time as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola were making their first classic movies, a parallel universe of directors gave birth to the modern horror film-aggressive, raw, and utterly original. Based on unprecedented access to the genre’s major players, The New York Times’s critic Jason Zinoman’s Shock Value delivers the first definitive account of horror’s golden age. By the late 1960s, horror was stuck in the past, confined mostly to drive-in theaters and exploitation houses, and shunned by critics. Shock Value tells the unlikely story of how the much-disparaged horror film became an ambitious art form while also conquering the multiplex. Directors such as Wes Craven, Roman Polanski, John Carpenter, and Brian De Palma—counterculture types operating largely outside the confines of Hollywood—revolutionized the genre, exploding taboos and bringing a gritty aesthetic, confrontational style, and political edge to horror. Zinoman recounts how these directors produced such classics as Rosemary’s Baby, Carrie, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Halloween, creating a template for horror that has been imitated relentlessly but whose originality has rarely been matched. This new kind of film dispensed with the old vampires and werewolves and instead assaulted audiences with portraits of serial killers, the dark side of suburbia, and a brand of nihilistic violence that had never been seen before. Shock Value tells the improbable stories behind the making of these movies, which were often directed by obsessive and insecure young men working on shoestring budgets, were funded by sketchy investors, and starred porn stars. But once The Exorcist became the highest grossing film in America, Hollywood took notice. The classic horror films of the 1970s have now spawned a billion-dollar industry, but they have also penetrated deep into the American consciousness. Quite literally, Zinoman reveals, these movies have taught us what to be afraid of. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of the most important artists in horror, Shock Value is an enthralling and personality-driven account of an overlooked but hugely influential golden age in American film.

My Review: Okay, this book isn’t for everyone. I’ll start this review right off by saying that. Not everyone is going to find this as fascinating as I do, and even then, this book is not as shocking as I might have hoped. While there is some good insight here, most of what Zinoman has here is old hat for the horror genre … at least for those of us that are involved with the genre on a scholarly or academic level. Sure, there are some new stories here, and some interesting background material on the films in question and their creators and directors, but most of the conclusions that Zinoman has drawn are ones that I have read in articles and books that I have read as I write papers on the genre.

That said, what Zinoman has done is present this heavily academic material in a way which is easily accessible to the average reader. What I mean by that is that in order to learn some of the same things that Zinoman talks about regarding films like Halloween, Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Last House on the Left one would have to wade through a number of dense academic articles in obscure journals. For that reasons, Zinoman’s book is very handy. It is even handier (is that a word?) in Kindle form since it is searchable on the eReader and makes doing research that much easier.

In the end, though, reading Shock Value is really only for three audiences: (1) scholars and academics who are interested in the horror genre, (2) diehard fans of the genre of the kind who watch every DVD special feature and read all the articles and magazines (and often Groups 1 and 2 are one-and-the-same), and (3) Hollywood types who can’t understand why their remake of Halloween or A Nightmare on Elm Street or their Paranormal Activity knock-off have failed at the box office. Zinoman lays that out quite explicitly and Hollywood would do well to learn that lesson.

I enjoyed Shock Value, but will you? I honestly don’t know.

Zinoman wrote a four-part piece for Slate titled “How to Fix Horror” which can be found HERE and there is a Q&A with the author about his book HERE at MoreIntelligentLife.

Sample Saturday: Moon People 2 by Dale M. Courtney

2011-08-21T20:25:00.010-06:00

Moon People 2: Mars Reborn
-Moon People Trilogy, Book 2-
by Dale M. Courtney

(Bloomington, Xlibris Corp., 2010)
Kindle eBook, 102 Pages, 534 KB, Fiction
ASBN: B003XIJ9LC, US$7.69

Sample: “CHAPTER 1 Mars Reborn This story begins off the planet of Mars where the Lunar Base 1 has positioned itself for 6 mouths of exploration and study for a possible genesis for colonization. So far Mars Base has found that under the surface of Mars are large cavities of ice. Also Mars base has found that the lava core has cooled off over the centuries. They also found that Mars magnetic field is very low and the rotation of the planet has slowed to an abnormal speed. First Science Officer Captain David Braymer and the crew of the Lunar Base 1 are about to implement an experiment that will heat up the core of Mars and raise its magnetic field. Also melt the ice cavity underneath the surface, that should create oxygen through out the planet if all goes well. Also by heating up the core in the right spot should increase the speed of rotation of the planet. This is one of the areas that we are a little worried about in the experiment.

“The Mars Base will be monitoring everything down on Mars and we will be monitoring everything from space. We do not really know exactly how much we will need to heat up the core. We have a few differences of opinions. We are going to use a microwave beam to heat up the core at three-second intervals. The beam itself has the strength of 200,000 watts once it leaves the ship. By the time it hits the surface the strength is about 50,000 watts and by the time it gets through to the core the power level is about 20,000 watts.

“On the bridge of the Lunar Base 1, Admiral Benson is in command. (Admiral Benson) Let’s put everything on the main viewer Lieutenant Parsons.”

My Reaction: First, my promise to you is that everything you see in that sample is in the book, typos and photo included. I cannot tell you how excited I am about this book, and I cannot wait to have the pocket money to be able to download this to my Kindle. I kid you not. I loved its predecessor Moon People (reviewed here) and this sample has me excited to enter more of the world that Dale M. Courtney has so carefully crafted for my reading pleasure! I would, however, recommend that you read Moon People before reading Moon People 2 because the first book’s plot is so intricate and the characters so complex that to dive right into Moon People 2 would be the height of folly. The very height!

The Friday 56: You Don't Say

2011-08-21T19:30:00.001-06:00

The Friday 56 is hosted by Freda’s Voice

RULES

Grab a book, any book.
Turn to page 56.
Find a sentence that grabs you.
Post it.
Post a link with your post to Freda’s Voice (and here on Bryan’s Book Blog).

A little behind in posts because I’ve been feeling under the weather and not up to the mental activity blogging requires, but now that I think I’m coming out from under it, here is this week’s The Friday 56 (on Sunday) which comes from a book that was languishing at the bottom of my Kindle, and that I didn’t even remember I had probably due to the fact that it starts with Z, that and the fact that I’m knee deep in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire right now. So, without further ado, The Friday 56:

Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead

by Jonathan Maberry

(New York: Citadel Press, 2008)

Kindle eBook, 404 Pages, 2938 KB, Nonfiction

ASBN: B0041OT9JE, US$9.99

My 56: “‘The human body decomposes at varying speeds depending on a myriad of factors,’ [Martin Leadbetter, FFS, RPS, BA (Hons), international fingerprint expert and chairman of the Fingerprint Society] says” (56).

Book Beginnings: Here Come the German and the Greeks

2011-08-21T18:20:00.000-06:00

Book Beginnings is hosted by A Few More Pages

How to Participate: Share the first line (or two) of the book you are currently reading on your blog or in the comments. Include the title and the author so we know what you're reading. Then, if you would like, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line, and let us know if you liked or did not like the sentence. The link-up will be at A Few More Pages every Friday and will be open for the entire week.

I’m still slogging through A Clash of Kings, so it would be redundant to repost the opening. However, I am also listening to an audiobook, so I think I’ll post the opening to that particular book. It is The Ruins by Scott Smith. I first read this (in print) three years ago and loved it, so here is the beginning of The Ruins:

My Book Beginnings: “They met Mathias on a day trip from Cozumel. They’d hired a guide to take them snorkeling over a local wreck, but the buoy marking its location had broken off in the storm, and the guide was having difficulty finding it. So they were swimming about, looking at nothing in particular. Then Mathias rose toward them from the depths, like a merman, a scuba tank on his back. He smiled when they told him their situation, and led them to the wreck. He was German, dark from the sun, and very tall, with a blond crew cut and pale blue eyes. He had a tattoo of an eagle on his right forearm, black with red wings. He let them take turns borrowing his tank so they could drop down thirty feet and see the wreck up close. He was friendly in a quiet way, and his English was only slightly accented, and when they pulled themselves into their guide’s boat to head back to shore, he climbed in, too.

“They met the Greeks two nights later, back in Cancún, on a beach near their hotel. Stacy got drunk and made out with one of them. Nothing happened beyond that, but the Greeks always seemed to be turning up afterward, no matter what they were doing. None of them spoke Greek, of course, and the Greeks didn’t speak English, so it was mostly smiling and nodding and the occasional sharing of food or drinks. There were three Greeks—in their early twenties, like Mathias and the rest of them—and they seemed friendly enough, even if they did appear to be following them about” (1).

My Thoughts: Now, reading these two opening paragraphs one would never know that this was, in fact, a horror novel and quite a creepy one at that. Yet, there are some early stirrings of the uncanny going on in here that if you know your horror movies you can spot … and it certainly sets up the young Americans in trouble in a foreign country (none of whom really speak the language) very well. The Ruins does take some time to get started, though, and reader Patrick Wilson doesn’t necessarily do a stellar job of reading … I might call it passable. He certainly is no Frank Muller or Jim Dale or Campbell Scott or Ron McLarty. As for Smith’s book, you really do have to stick with it, because in spite of the opening, it does, in fact, get much better. (And much scarier.)

Bookshelf Lust

2011-08-21T14:55:00.000-06:00

(via)

Get It?

2011-08-21T14:40:00.000-06:00

(via)

(The answer)

How DOES One Pronounce "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"

2011-08-20T11:45:00.002-06:00

So, seeing as I only have 15 minutes left until it is no longer the 20th, I have to saw Happy Birthday to Mr. H.P. Lovecraft who is 121 years old today. May I say sir, you look wonderful for your age.

So, in order to commemorate Mr. Lovecraft’s birthday, I give you the following story from the blog The Lovecraftsman (which I highly recommend if you are a fan of Howard Phillips’ work). The post (from August 4 … I’ve been sitting on it, wanting to reference it here, but haven’t had a chance yet) is titled “The Dunwich Horror Reader Sets 23-Year Record for Most Overdue Book” and it reads as follows:

An H.P. Lovecraft reader in Wellington, New Zealand, holds the record for the most overdue book at the local library after checking out The Dunwich Horror and Others on Feb. 12, 1988. More than 23 years later the book has yet to be returned, which amusingly puts it in the library’s “long-term overdue” category.

At the library’s 80-cents-per-day late fee that would amount to a fine of $6,851.20 and counting, although the fee is capped at $22.40 per book.

Update: The best comment ever about this story was just left on The Lovecraftsman Facebook page: “Will they find his rotted copse with the yellowed pages clutched spasmodically in his withered hand, and a look of cosmic horror on this face?” - Nick Hydra

Happy Birthday Mr. Lovecraft. Thanks for all the chills.

Some Song of Ice and Fire Fun

2011-08-16T21:20:00.003-06:00

Here is some Song of Ice and Fire fun for your Tuesday evening…

From College Humor “If Adult TV Shows Were Remade for Children” (via)

Foxtrot by Bill Amend, August 14. 2011 (via)

“Game of Breakfast Win” from Win! (via)

Teaser Tuesdays: Great. Now I'm Hungry!

2011-08-16T03:45:00.000-06:00

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (Make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Today’s Teaser come from Book Two of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, and is especially apropos since I recently discovered the blog Cooking Ice and Fire which is Adam Bruski’s “journal of [his] ongoing efforts to cook every dish mentioned and described in Martin’s series and explore the history, real world references, techniques, and science behind each.” So with that, enjoy this week’s Teaser:

A Clash of Kings

by George R.R. Martin
-A Song of Ice and Fire, Book Two-

(New York: Bantam, 2003)

Kindle eBook, 1,040 Pages, 1803 KB, Fiction

ASBN: B000FC1HBY, US$8.99

MY TEASER: “While singers sang and tumblers tumbled, they began with pears poached in wine, and went on to tiny savory fish rolled in salt and cooked crisp, and capons stuffed with onions and mushrooms. There were great loaves of brown bread, mounds of turnips and sweetcorn and pease, immense hams and roast geese and trenchers dripping full of venison stewed with beer and barley” (347).

A Game of Thrones (Kindle)

2011-08-16T03:15:00.001-06:00

by George R.R. Martin
-A Song of Ice and Fire, Book One-
(New York: Bantam, 2003)
Kindle eBook, 864 Pages, 2075 KB, Fiction
ASBN: B000QCS8TW, US$8.99

My Rating: ACQUIRE

From the Cover: Long ago, in a time forgotten, a preternatural event threw the seasons out of balance. In a land where summers can last decades and winters a lifetime, trouble is brewing. The cold is returning, and in the frozen wastes to the north of Winterfell, sinister and supernatural forces are massing beyond the kingdom's protective Wall. At the center of the conflict lie the Starks of Winterfell, a family as harsh and unyielding as the land they were born to. Sweeping from a land of brutal cold to a distant summertime kingdom of epicurean plenty, here is a tale of lords and ladies, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and bastards, who come together in a time of grim omens. Here an enigmatic band of warriors bear swords of no human metal; a tribe of fierce wildlings carry men off into madness; a cruel young dragon prince barters his sister to win back his throne; and a determined woman undertakes the most treacherous of journeys. Amid plots and counterplots, tragedy and betrayal, victory and terror, the fate of the Starks, their allies, and their enemies hangs perilously in the balance, as each endeavors to win that deadliest of conflicts: the game of thrones.

My Review: Back in April, I was in San Antonio, Texas, to present a paper at a conference. The first couple of nights that I was there, I suffered from some pretty extreme insomnia and so I started flipping through channels and came across the HBO adaptation of Martin’s series. Little did I know what I was getting into. I immediately downloaded the sample to A Game of Thrones to my Kindle, and devoured that over breakfast the next morning. By then, I was hooked and as soon as I could afford it, I started downloading the series.

Book One, A Game of Thrones, immediately sucked me into the world of the Seven Kingdoms and I am loathe to leave. I know I must sound like a gushing fanboy, but in reality it is rare for me to find a fantasy series with a created world that is believable enough to me to jump in with both feet. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, Rowling’s world of Harry Potter, and Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis’ world of Krynn from the Dragonlance series are the only ones that I can think of that I willingly gave myself over to. Now, Martin has drawn me in in much the same way.

What I found most appealing about what Martin has done is that he has not sacrificed character for world building. All-too-often an author dabbling in these sorts of stories will create a massive and detailed world but will not put hardly any effort into the characters, resorting to the standard tropes that one might find in any high school game of Advanced Dungeon & Dragons. Martin’s characters, however, are fully-realized, seemingly living and breathing people who inhabit the space with you as you begin reading. I was especially taken with the Stark family (which is really no surprise, given that the book is designed to manipulate you to take the Starks’ point of view and sympathize with Eddard, Catelyn, Sansa, Arya, Bran and Jon Snow) and keenly felt each victory and defeat that they experienced. That Martin is able to accomplish that with me, someone who considers himself a rather jaded reader of fantasy fiction, was a very nice surprise. It allowed me to find pleasure in reading again after two years of grad school and intensely studying literature for that whole time, and for that I will always be grateful to George Martin.

That said, I don’t know that this series is for everyone. It is long and sprawling—none of the books are under 750 pages and they require a pretty big commitment in terms of time, effort and brain power expended in trying to keep track of everything that is going on. The searchable text of the Kindle helped in that respect (as did the fact that I did not have to carry around a monster-sized paperback) but on the whole, you really have to decide if you want to fork over the time to really give your all to this series especially when one considers the fact that Martin has stated that the Song of Ice and Fire series will in fact be a septet, and there are only five books so far (with a five year gap between Books Four (A Feast for Crows) and Five (A Dance with Dragons)) and according to reports Martin only has about 100 pages of Book Six (titled The Winds of Winter) down on the page. If you think you can commit like that to a series of books, then by all means, pick up A Game of Thrones, you won’t be sorry.

How To Train Your Dragon (Audio)

2011-08-16T02:35:00.001-06:00

by Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III
translated from the Old Norse by Cressida Cowell
read by David Tennant
-How to Train Your Dragon Series, Book 1-
(London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2004)
MP3 Audiobook, 343.3 MB, 3.4 Hours, Children’s Fiction
ISBN: 9781840329698, US$15.95

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

From the Cover: Can Hiccup pass the Dragon Initiation Programme with a toothless dragon AND fight the Sea Dragonus Maximus before it gobbles up every Viking on Berk? It’s time for Hiccup to learn how to be a Hero.

My Review: Again, a book that I only picked up because I freakin’ loved the movie and I wanted to see what the source material was like. Also, it is read by David “The Tenth Doctor” Tennant, and how can you not love that?! I want to say up front that if you go in to this book expecting something similar to the DreamWorks film, this is what is the same: both have Vikings and both have dragons. That’s about it. The two stories could really not be more different, however “different” isn’t a bad thing. As much as I liked the film revision of Cowell’s story, I enjoyed the actual story all that more.

The tale that Cowell—through the character of Hiccup Horrendous Haddock—spins is absolutely wonderful. Sure, the Vikings she depicts are broad stereotypes, but when you’re in the middle of a story this good … the growth of Haddock from Hiccup the Useless to Hiccup the Useful, the faults and warts sort of just fall away and the story shines (much like what happens when reading the Harry Potter series). This is the perfect story for a young boy (in the age range of 7 to 10) especially one who might find himself bullied or picked-on at school because he’s not like the other boys. They will be able to relate to Hiccup and possibly even learn from his story and find a way to grow beyond the influence of bullying. This is not to say that this story is a magic bullet for bullies, but the ways in which Hiccup overcomes his supposed faults and is able to save the day will definitely be inspiring.

As for this audio edition, it doesn’t get much better than having David Tennant read this story. Tennant has the perfect balance of mirth and seriousness in his voice and is able to strike a balance between the two in order to really bring Cowell’s words to life. The only reader who could have possibly been better than Tennant would maybe have been Craig Ferguson.

In the end, I really enjoyed How to Train Your Dragon and so did my family; we listened to it in the car together anytime we were driving somewhere, and we’re all looking forward to the next book in the series.

True Grit (Kindle)

2011-08-16T00:55:00.001-06:00

by Charles Portis
(New York: Overlook Press, 2007)
Kindle eBook, 240 Pages, Western
ASBN: B004I8V0Q8, US$14.95

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

From the Cover: Charles Portis has long been acclaimed as one of America’s foremost writers. True Grit, his most famous novel, as first published in 1968, and became the basis for the movie starring John Wayne. True Grit tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shoots her father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash. Mattie leaves home to avenge her father’s blood. With the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available U.S. Marshal, by her side, Mattie pursues the homicide into Indian Territory. True Grit is eccentric, cool, straight, and unflinching, like Mattie herself. From a writer of true status, this is an American classic through and through.

My Review: Well, it’s been so long since I’ve read this that it seems unfair to write a review, but I will try to jot down some of the thoughts that were going through my head at the time I was reading this. It was finally seeing the Coen Brothers’ 2010 film that made me want to pick this up. I enjoyed the film, and being the book geek that I am, I wanted to read the story that inspired it. Honestly, I can say that seeing the Jeff Bridges movie is extraordinarily close to reading Portis’ novel. They were very faithful to the source. As for what I thought of Portis’ book, the clearest thought that I remember having while reading this was that True Grit is a book that I am going to have my daughters read when they reach the age of about 10 or 11. While the films focus on the character of Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne and Jeff Bridges) the book is all about Mattie Ross.

Mattie is such a wonderful female character in a genre that has very few strong female characters. Westerns are usually all about strong men who are tough as nails and any female characters are typically ancillary and typify the Madonna-Whore dichotomy (though in Westerns we might call it the School Marm-Saloon Girl dichotomy). Mattie, however, been just barely a teenager, is a much different character and one whom I would be thrilled to have my daughters read and emulate. Add to all of this a great adventure tale, easily the equal of Treasure Island (the book I’ll be giving to my son when he’s about the same age) and this is the perfect book to give to the pre-teen girl in your life, especially if you are like my wife and I and make every attempt to eschew and avoid the Disney Princess style of “femininity.” Mattie Ross will blow Aurora or Cinderella out of the water any day of the week!

Musing Mondays: I am Nosy

2011-08-15T23:50:00.000-06:00

Today’s Musing Mondays (hosted by Should Be Reading) is as follows: Do you like looking at other people’s bookshelves?

My name is Bryan and I peer at other people’s bookshelves. (Hi Bryan) It has been 48 hours since I was last in someone’s house and nosed through their books. I have been doing this for years … since as far back as I can remember. Is it nosy? Probably, but if people didn’t want me looking at their books, why the Hell did they put them out on shelves in the goll-durned living room in the first place? Honestly, I can’t help it. I see a bookshelf and I have to wander over to it and start ogling the books. It’s almost a compulsion. Part of it is probably that I am not a very socially outgoing person, and so when I find myself in a social gathering, in order to avoid talking to people I will pore over books on shelves. Anyway, that’s my story.

Sample Saturday: Nerd Do Well by Simon Pegg

2011-08-13T03:00:00.003-06:00

So, I’m test driving a new meme for Bryan’s Book Blog and I’m calling it Sample Saturdays. As you may or may not have noticed around here, I’ve become enamored with my Kindle and I am especially in love with the Sample feature. If you don’t already know, the basic idea is that through Amazon, you can send the beginning of any eBook to your Kindle, free of charge, in order to get a feel for the book. I have used this feature to death on my Kindle, so much so in fact, I currently have 255 unread samples on my Kindle. They have been a great help in choosing which books to move to my Wish List to eventually purchase and download, and which books to avoid like the plague … and there have been more than a few which I have chosen to ignore and never read again.

So, what I plan on doing for Sample Saturdays is choosing a Kindle sample I have read during the week, and do a run-through here including the publisher info, a sample from the beginning of book and then a quick reaction including whether or not I’ve decided to save it to my Wish List to purchase at a later date or send it to the trash heap.

Nerd Do Well: A Small Boy’s Journey to Becoming a Big Kid
by Simon Pegg

(New York: Gotham Books, 2011)
Kindle eBook, 368 Pages, 490 KB, Autobiography
ASBN: B004RKXO1Q, US$12.99

Sample: “FORWORD Hello, North America. Welcome to a very special edition of Nerd Do Well and to a foreword I am writing just for you. This isn’t in the original British version of the book, which is a good thing because the whole ‘Hello, North America’ salute would be lost on them, or else they might assume I was being ironic and making a comment about how North American culture has had such an influence over our own; we have become a sort of miniature facsimile of it, aping its cultural ephemera like an aspirational younger sibling. Ironic in itself considering Britain is culturally ancient and collectively cynical whilst contemporary North American society is relatively young and brash like a teenager: full of opinions, optimism and self-confidence.

“A confused metaphor, I know, but it explains our respective attitudes toward sarcasm and irony. I often find myself irked by my countrymen when they snootily insist that North Americans don’t ‘do’ irony. This simply isn’t true; there is a rich vein of dry and ironic humo(u)r which permeates the North American cultural output. The difference is simply a social one and I believe it goes back to the relative ages of our respective nations.”

My Reaction: I have always been a big fan of Simon Pegg’s work—Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Doctor Who, Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, etc.—so when I saw that he had written an autobiography, I knew it was something that I was going to want to read. After diving in to Nerd Do Well’s sample, I found that it was pretty much what I had expected: smart, self-deprecating, humble, and absolutely hilarious. I want to finish reading it because Pegg is such an engaging writer, but I don’t know if it is something that I want to pay $12.99 for. It’s not at my local library, and so the only way that I am going to get to be able to finish reading this book would be to pay for it and again, I’m not sure I want to do that. At some point, I probably will, but the bottom line is that Nerd Do Well is not moving straight to the top of my Kindle Purchase List, but I am saving it to my Wish List so I can remember it when the time comes.

Book Beginnings: The Comet's Tail, the Maester, and the Gargoyles

2011-08-12T20:30:00.006-06:00

Book Beginnings is hosted by A Few More Pages

Just yesterday I started a new book: the second installment of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, A Clash of Kings. Here’s the opening handful of sentences to set the mood:

My Book Beginnings: “The comet’s tail spread across the dawn, a red slash that bled above the crags of Dragonstone like a wound in the pink and purple sky. The maester stood on the windswept balcony outside his chambers. It was here the ravens came, after long flight. Their droppings speckled the gargoyles that rose twelve feet on either side of him, a hellhound and a wyvern, two of the thousands that brooded over the walls of the ancient fortress” (1).

My Thoughts: I’ve been hooked on these books since page one of book one, so it’s hard not to have a favorable impression of the opening of A Clash of Kings. I will freely admit that I am devouring this book, and would probably do so even if the opening was less than promising (and this might even be the case in the future if the rumors and rumblings of Books Four and Five I’ve been are true). So, onward I read…

The Friday 56: Silent Lucidity

2011-08-12T20:00:00.001-06:00

The Friday 56 is hosted by Freda’s Voice

RULES

Grab a book, any book.
Turn to page 56.
Find a sentence that grabs you.
Post it.
Post a link with your post to Freda’s Voice (and here on Bryan’s Book Blog).

Again, easing back into the world of book blogging memes, and so here is my Friday 56 which comes from Henry James’ inimitable novella, The Turn of the Screw:

A Treasury of Great Ghost Stories

edited by Ira Peck

(New York: Popular Library, Inc., 1965)

Paperback, 256 Pages, Short Fiction Anthology

ISBN: N/A, US$0.50

My 56: “My lucidity must have seemed awful, but the charming creatures who were victims of it, passing and repassing in their interlocked sweetness, gave my colleague something to hold on by; and I felt how tight she held, as without stirring in the breath of my passion, she covered them still with her eyes” (56).

Friday Finds: August 12, 2011

2011-08-12T19:25:00.001-06:00

Friday Finds (hosted by Should Be Reading)

What great books did you hear about/discover this past week?
Share with us your FRIDAY FINDS!

Okay … I’m working to get back in the swing of things. In my heyday, I was posting 12-14 books under my Friday Finds. This time, however, I’m going to be scaling it back and starting with five that have me really excited. Here they are, and yes, some are old but I’m catching up here. Hope you enjoy them too!

The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars by Christopher Cokinos
Nerd Do Well: A Small Boy’s Journey to Becoming a Big Kid by Simon Pegg
The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World by Jay Bahadur
The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century by Scott Miller
Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror by Jason Zinoman

And NOW We're Back...

2011-08-12T15:45:00.001-06:00

Well, I know I promised I was going to start updating this blog more often, but life (or the lack there of) gets in the way. I have, however, turned over a new leaf and made a promise to myself to be more diligent in posting reviews and book news and book memes and other book-related nonsense. As it is, I’ve got four reviews to write up and post, and I’m going to be starting a new feature: Sample Saturdays, but more on that tomorrow.

For now, to tide you over, here are some fun book-related images:

This art installation was created by design team Linda and John Meyers for the VIA Advertising Agency in Portland, Maine which recently renovated and moved their offices into the old Baxter building, which served as Portland's public library from 1888 until the 1960s. (Photo: Wary Meyers, http://www.warymeyers.com)

(From There I Fixed It)

How awesome is this!?

(Entrance to the Children’s Library, Cerritos Public Library, Cerritos, California)

And finally, Great Book Store, or Greatest Book Store?

(From WIN!)

Teaser Tuesdays: That's What She Said!

2011-06-21T20:45:00.002-06:00

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (Make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

No blahdy-blah-blah this week, just my teaser which I feel speaks for itself:

The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession

by David Grann

(New York: Doubleday, 2010)

Hardcover, 338 Pages, Nonfiction

ISBN: 9780385517928, US$26.95

MY TEASER: “Meanwhile, the first mate, Didier Ragot, descended from the deck into the cabin, opened a trapdoor in the floor and peered through a porthole into the ocean, using a flashlight. He glimpsed something by the rudder. ‘It was bigger than a human leg,’ Ragot later told me. ‘It was a tentacle’” (154).

A New Venture...

2011-06-19T20:45:00.000-06:00

Ever since I saw The Exorcism of Emily Rose in the theater one fall day, I have wanted to blog about horror movies. Today, that dream has taken one more step toward fulfillment. If you feel so inclined, join me over at Schlock Watch: The Horror Movie Blog and we’ll step into the dark recesses of the theater to talk about horror films.

Booking Through Thursday: The Reports of Books' Deaths are Greatly Exaggerated

2011-06-16T22:20:00.000-06:00

Another Thursday is upon us, and that means it is time for yet another Booking Through Thursday prompt. What will it be this week, you ask? Here you go…

Prompt: With the advent (and growing popularity) of eBooks, I’m seeing more and more articles about how much “better” they can be, because they have the option to be interactive … videos, music, glossaries … all sorts of little extra goodies to help “enhance” your reading experience, rather like listening to the Director’s commentary on a DVD of your favorite movie. How do you feel about that possibility? Does it excite you in a cutting-edge kind of way? Or does it chill you to the bone because that’s not what reading is ABOUT?

I honestly think that the hysteria surrounding the supposed “death” of print literature is greatly exaggerated. Sure, I have engaged in lamenting the passing of print, but as the months have passed, I have come to realize that lamenting the “death” of printed literature amounts to nothing more than the fetishization of printed books. It’s not the books that are important, the pages, the covers, the inks, the papers … it’s the ideas that they carry and eReaders carry those ideas just as well as print books. The interactive aspect of eReaders like the Kindle and Nook and iPad are nothing more than bells and whistles that do not, in my opinion, affect reading anymore than the internet or TV does to print books.

I have a Kindle, and if anything it has made reading easier. It certainly made my life as a grad student much easier since I could store and read PDFs and Word documents on it as well as eBooks. But I’ve strayed from the question at hand. I don’t think that the interactivity really excites me about my Kindle (though the instant dictionary is helpful) its more the convenience of the device that excites me. The fact that I can carry around 200+ books, the fact that I can have all of the research I need for a paper in one place (without having to carry around multiple printed PDF articles), the fact that I can read samples of books before deciding if I want to continue … it makes it really convenient.

Sure, I have decried the electronic revolution, but I’ve come to realize that eReaders are not the end of print books … as I’ve said, reading is about ideas and stories and characters and eReaders convey those just as easily as print books, flashy interactivity or not.

Get the F**k to YouTube...

2011-06-14T22:45:00.001-06:00

Apparently, some enterprising soul has posted the entire audiobook of Go the F**k to Sleep on YouTube complete with pictures. Enjoy it while you can before it is taken down:

Go the F**k to Sleep (Audio)

2011-06-14T22:35:00.000-06:00

by Adam Manbach
read Samuel L. Jackson
(Newark: Audible, Inc., 2011)
MP3 Audiobook, 3.3 MB, 6½ Minutes, Satire
ISBN: N/A, US$0.00

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

From the Cover: Academy Award nominee Samuel L. Jackson rocks this mock bedtime story, capturing a hilarious range of emotions as the voice of a father struggling to get his child to sleep. Go the F**k to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don’t always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. California Book Award-winning author Adam Mansbach’s profane, affectionate, and radically honest verses perfectly capture the familiar—and unspoken—tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. In the process, he opens up a conversation about parenting, granting us permission to admit our frustrations and laugh at their absurdity. Beautiful, subversive, and pants-wettingly funny, Go the F**k to Sleep is a book for parents new, old, and expectant. Due to its explicit language, you probably should not play it for your children. Go the F**k to Sleep is available free for a limited time. Feel free to share the link to this page with tired parents and other people who could use a good swear and a laugh.

My Review: So, what does it say about my reading habits immediately out of two years of grad school for a Masters in English that the first two books that I review are the amazingly so-bad-its-good Moon People: The Age of Aquarius and now Go the F**k to Sleep? This book has been circulating among my group of friends on Facebook for some time now (and yes, we are all parents) and we’ve all been discussing who we would like to read the audiobook. My votes were for either Denis Leary or Lewis Black, but that was before I found out that Samuel L. Jackson would be reading the audio edition, and I can honestly say that there is no one better suited for this book than Mr. Jackson.

Any parent who has tried to get a young child to sleep will love this book (provided your sense of humor is of the variety that doesn’t mind the occasional profanity). The book was released today and for a limited time you can download it for free on Audible.com. My wife and I listened to it and we could not stop laughing. Mansbach perfectly captures a parent’s frustration at trying to get a child to go to sleep, and there have certainly been moments in my fatherly career when I have just wanted to say “GO THE F**K TO SLEEP” but you just can’t do that … can you?

Anyway, I cannot recommend this book enough, especially as read by Samuel L. Jackson. Run, don’t walk over to Audible.com and download for free right now. You will not be disappointed.

Teaser Tuesdays: Now That's What I Call a Threat!

2011-06-14T13:50:00.000-06:00

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (Make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

This week, my teaser comes from Charles Portis’ True Grit. I want to save what I have to say about it for my review, so I’ll just leave you with my Teaser:

True Grit

by Charles Portis

(New York: Overlook Press, 2007)

Kindle eBook, 240 Pages, Western

ASBN: B004I8V0Q8, US$14.95

MY TEASER: “‘You have no case.’
“‘Lawyer J. Noble Daggett of Dardanelle, Arkansas, may think otherwise. Also a jury.’” (34).

Moon People: The Age of Aquarius (Kindle)

2011-06-13T17:45:00.003-06:00

by Dale M. Courtney
-Moon People Trilogy, Book 1-
(Bloomington: Xlibris Corp., 2008)
Kindle eBook, 80 Pages, 280 KB Science Fiction
ASBN: B003NX70B8, US$9.99

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE*

From the Cover: This Book is based on the turning point for Earth into a new era of space travel and the beginning of the Age of Aquarius. The story focuses on one Man by the Name of David Braymer and his adventures from High school teacher to 1st Science Officer on board the Lunar Base 1 Mobile Base Station and his encounters with Alien Life forms through out our universe and the space Battle of all battles David experiences. I hope you enjoy the many adventures of David Braymer and his conquest in space and our journey into the Age of Aquarius.

My Review: Have you ever fallen in love with a movie that no one else can stand? One that was so bad it was good? Something that maybe turned up on Mystery Science Theater 3000? A film like Eegah!, The Lost Continent, The Day the Earth Froze or The Wild Wild World of Batwoman? Well, that’s what Moon People: The Age of Aquarius is like. I first came across Courtney’s book while I wasting time on the internet (I was probably supposed to be reading something for a class, but there you go.) Anyway, someone had posted the first page or so of the book, and I just couldn’t believe what I was reading. So, I tracked it down on Amazon and read the first chapter for free. I fell instantly in love. A couple of months later when my wife bought me a Kindle for Christmas, Moon People was one of the first books I downloaded.

I can’t even begin to describe what it is like to read this book. I suggest you head to Amazon and read the first chapter, and you’ll get some idea. Yet, that doesn’t capture the full experience of reading Dale M. Courtney’s prose. I mean, what do you do with passages like the following?

This Story Begins on a beautiful sunny day in Daytona Beach Florida with a man by the name of David Braymer. A 45-year-old single man that works at the local high school as a science teacher. He also teaches astronomy in the 12-grade level. Now he has been here about 5 years and has become somewhat partial to a young lady by the name of Cheral Baskel a local restaurant owner in Daytona Beach Florida. At the moment, Cheral is preparing her restaurant for another shuttle launch at the cape. Everyone always gathers at her place because you can see the launch real good there. It is on the water and its real close to the Cape. She always decks the place out right before a launch too. Now David always goes to Cheral’s place before work every morning for breakfast because it is on his way to his school. He has never missed a shuttle launch at Cheral’s place since he’s been at his school. David was not always a teacher. Before he was a teacher, he use to work for the government for U.F.O. research about five years ago. He didn’t like the job that much because he was always bored.

He really wanted to teach anyway. Today is also Oct. 27 in the year 2048. The next shuttle launch at the Cape is on Halloween. There has been some unusual events the last 2 shuttle launches though. They would get right up to the launch sequence and stop the launch for some kind of weird problem.

Well, you get the idea. The book is self-published (Xlibris is one of those pay-and-get-published vanity presses) and has obviously not gone through the editorial process, because the book is riddled with spelling errors (there for their, your for you’re and, my personal favorite gauche for gotcha), fragmented sentences, truly random capitalization, shifts from first to second to third person and back again—sometime all in the same paragraph, and odd punctuation (my favorite happens shortly after the passage I quoted above which reads: “They have also been trying to get David to join the crew on the U.S.S. Lunar Base 1 for about 2 years. Which is one of the base stations that is almost completed?”). Yet, there is a certain charm and jouissance that comes from reading Moon People: The Age of Aquarius.

This is not to say that the book is perfect, far from it, but then, neither is Robot Monster or Pod People. You don’t read a book like Moon People and expect the literary version of Canard à la presse. This is not Moby-Dick or Hamlet. Dale M. Courtney’s book is the literary equivalent of a bologna sandwich on white bread with mayonnaise. It’s not nutritious but it is filling, and dammit every once in a while you just want to eat something crappy. I will say that Moon People is not a book for everyone … hence the asterisk after the ACQUIRE rating … you buy this book with the understanding that it is like owning Plan 9 from Outer Space, it is a book to have for the camp value not for the deep lessons or scientific accuracy. (It might also make you feel better about that novel you have languishing in a box in the back of your closet.)

Better yet … there are two more!

Musing Mondays: Into the Wee Small Hours...

2011-06-13T00:50:00.000-06:00

Today’s Musing Mondays (hosted by Should Be Reading) is as follows: What’s the last thing you stayed up half the night reading because it was so good you couldn’t put it down?

So, I’m easing back into this whole blogging about books thing with a Musing Mondays, and of course it has to be a tough question because, honestly, the last book I remember staying up and reading into the wee small hours of the morning was Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park when it came out in paperback. We were in Southern California for a family reunion … this must have been in August of 1991 and one of my Dad’s cousins was talking about a movie he was working on. He was a Hollywood carpenter and helped construct sets for Always, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Hook (which thinking about it now he must have been a carpenter at Amblin).

Anyway, he was talking about a new set he had been building in Hawaii—a large King Kong-style gate—for the new Spielberg film about dinosaurs. It was a film based on a book by a fellow named Michael Crichton and was supposed to be real good. Well, that evening, when we stopped by the store for some goodies, I wandered into the book section and found the book that my Dad’s cousin had been talking about. It looked cool, what with its white cover and black Tyrannosaur skeleton on the cover, and so I picked it up and started reading in the car on the way back to my grandparents, where we were staying. I proceeded to spend the next couple of hours reading and was up until two or three in the morning finishing the book. The next day, it was all I could talk about, and had to pass it off to my Mom, Dad and brother, and they all read it really quickly too. That might be because of the fact that Crichton’s prose is not too terribly challenging, but I’d like to think it is because it had an amazing story.

Anyway, I’m sure that there are other books that I have read into the wee hours of the morning, but Jurassic Park is the one that stands out to me, even twenty years later. And, I still own that exact copy of the book, it is dog-eared, yellowing and a little worse for the wear, but it opens comfortably to all the good spots.

And We're Back...

2011-06-12T01:00:00.000-06:00

In the immortal words of Bender Bending Rodriguez: “I’m back Baby!” I think now that my schooling is over for the foreseeable future, and I no longer have to read and produce writing on a tight schedule I am going to get back into reading for pleasure, reviewing the books that I read, and then blogging those reviews, and so after a nine month hiatus, I am coming back to Bryan’s Book Blog, dusting off the shelves, shooing the spiders back outside, rinsing the servers, and sweeping the corners and jumping back into the online world of book reviews.

I know that I am probably writing to about three people, including myself and my wife, but it’ll give me something to do as I decide just what I can do with a Masters degree in English Studies. So, I’ll be swinging things back in to gear here over the next weeks, and there will be some changes, and we’ll see where and how far this takes us.

I just hope that after two years of graduate studies I still know how to read for pleasure…!

This Ends Our Broadcast Day...

2010-09-27T13:01:00.000-06:00

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye

2010-09-27T12:50:00.000-06:00

Well, after a lot of thought and thinking and pondering, I have decided that it is time for Bryan’s Book Blog to go on indefinite hiatus. I will not be taking any of the reviews or other items down from the blog, but neither will there be any new stuff posted in the foreseeable future. Will this change? One never knows. I will not squash the possibility that I will return to this site, but as it stands right now, I don’t think that I will be coming back and posting regularly any time soon. The demands of life, school, work and family are just too important right now, at this point in my life and something had to give, and since I have not updated this blog with anything book related in three going on four months, this is one aspect of my life where time can be recaptured. Thank you all for your support and enthusiasm for the blog, and who knows, maybe we’ll meet again one day in the wilds of the interwebs. But for now, this is Bryan’s Book Blog … ending its broadcast day and signing off.

Moira Elizabeth Terry

2010-08-15T12:40:00.001-06:00

Born: 9:41 p.m., Saturday, August 14, 2010
8 pounds 11 ounces, 20½ inches long

Mother and baby are doing fine

The Puppet Masters

2010-06-24T14:15:00.002-06:00

by Robert A. Heinlein
(New York: Signet, 1951)
Paperback, 175 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: N/A, US$1.25

ABCD Rating: BACKLIST

From the Cover: Attack from space! Lock your doors. Never enter a dark place. Be wary of crowds. A man wearing a coat is an enemy. Shoot! This is a state of emergency. Invaders from another planet have landed in a flying saucer at Des Moines. They are capable of controlling man’s every thought and action. No one is safe. The monsters must be stopped. There is no choice. It’s your life or theirs. You must kill.

My Review: For my Afrofuturism seminar, I wrote a paper on reproductive anxieties as evidenced in science fiction, using posthuman theory. I had originally planned to discuss Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Octavia E. Butler’s Lilith’s Brood and Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. It had been a number of years since I had last read the Finney, Dick and Heinlein and so I decided to pick them up again and read through them in preparation for my paper (they’re all fairly short).

As I read through Heinlein’s book, it was different than I had remembered, and I ended up not using it in my paper, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the read. I think the last time I read this novel was in either middle school or high school, so well over 20 years ago. I don’t remember much from that particular reading, other than being freaked out by the whole idea (and titillated by the notion of having to walk around naked … so I must have been in middle school). This time around, as a much more mature reader (ha ha!) I was in love with Heinlein’s terse prose and his way with a yarn.

The whole idea behind Puppet Masters is brilliant, the passive (so to speak) alien invasion is one of the best plots out there and when done right (as here and, another good example, in Finney’s novel) it is a reading experience of utter and sheer paranoia. Reading Heinlein’s novel will cause you to peer over your shoulder every couple of minutes and make you look askance at anyone who appears to be “overdressed” for the location, season or weather.

Hand-in-hand with the paranoia goes the fact that The Puppet Masters, like any good piece of genre fiction, really relays a time’s fears and concerns and anxieties (that was part of my argument in my paper) and with Heinlein’s novel, it really has a Cold War, There’s a Commie Under Every Bed, Fifth Columnists, Better Dead Than Red mentality in its battle versus the invading space aliens. But that’s what makes a book like this “timeless.” The Puppet Masters is an anti-communist story. It is a Big Brother story. It is an anti-consumer culture story. It is a story of the “war on terrorism.”

Political overtones aside, though, the long and the short of it, though, is that I thoroughly enjoyed this story.

Post #800 and Some Drooling Over Bookshelves

2010-06-22T01:15:00.000-06:00

So, 800 posts over five years. Who’d’a thunk it? So, for Post #800, I thought I’d share some fun book shelves…

I want this one…

(From dvice)

And, because you can never have too many bookshelves:

I have to echo the sentiment of Susan over at Well-Mannered Frivolity (whom I stole this from, and she apparently stole it from The Centered Librarian) when she said of this: “If you didn't just utter the words, ‘Holy freakin' crow! That's a lot of books!’ then perhaps, you're visiting the wrong blog.”

And I would add I might have to reassess our friendship.

Teaser Tuesdays: I Will Never Be Ready...

2010-06-22T01:05:00.000-06:00

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (Make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

I took a break from Android Karenina to plow through some other, shorter books, and am just pages away from finishing one of my favorites, Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs, and with that, here is my Teaser (with an additional sentence just to make things interesting):

The Silence of the Lambs

by Thomas Harris

-Hannibal Lecter Series, Book Three-

(New York: St. Martin’s, 1989)

Paperback, 367 Pages, Fiction

ISBN: 9780312924584, US$7.99

MY TEASER: “Pembry had managed to sit up and he was crying. Dr. Lecter looked down at him with his red smile. ‘I’m ready if you are, Officer Pembry,’ he said” (238).

Musing Mondays: Genres, Genres, Genres

2010-06-21T12:00:00.000-06:00

Today’s Musing Mondays (hosted by Should Be Reading) is as follows: Name your top 2-3 favorite genres (the ones you read most from).

I’ll make this one short and sweet since it is a pretty straightforward question. Number One is, without a doubt, the Horror Genre. Of the books I own the greatest percentage of them could be classified as Horror and I consistently read that genre more frequently than most others. Number Two is, probably, the Fantasy Genre. I love a good pulp-y sword and sorcery novel and the whole Dragonlance series is at the top of that list. Finally, Number Three would probably have to be—if I’m going to be honest with myself—is children’s literature. I read to my children every night at bedtime as well as at various times throughout the day, and so that genre would definitely make the list.

Father's Day

2010-06-20T17:20:00.001-06:00

I’m not a “traditional” Dad … I don’t fish, play golf, wear ties, work in an office, drink coffee or alcohol, fix cars … I’m not a complete domestic klutz, I can do laundry, cook, change diapers and take care of the kids. My father was the same, and so Father’s Day was always a challenge because all of the gifts and cards were/are geared toward a stereotypical view of Fatherhood. So, the easiest route to go for both my Dad and myself has always been books, since we are both big readers. Therefore, on this Fathers’ Day, it seems to me that it would be fun to look back on the books I have read and answer three questions:

Best Father in Literature
Worst Father in Literature
Best Book for Dads

Best Father in Literature
After a lot of consideration, I think that this “award” goes hands down to Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Now, my choice of Atticus may be colored by Gregory Peck’s masterful portrayal in the film but whether it is or not is immaterial because the Atticus in the film is, more or less, the Atticus in the book and so whether or not Peck influences my decision has no bearing on the choice. (Does that make sense?) Anyway, even though Atticus is an older dad, and a single dad, I think that he is one of the greatest dads in literature because he is one of the most loving and caring dads. He is very involved in the lives of Jem and Scout and he is a model father in that he is always teaching his children and never disciplining them in a manner that would have been consistent with the time. I love that he is gentle with Jem and Scout, and one of the best images in the novel is Atticus sitting in his chair with Scout on his lap as they read the newspaper and he reads with her and teaches her to read. It is a very loving and wonderful image that really sticks with me.

Worst Father in Literature
My inclination in this category is to name Jack Torrance from Stephen King’s The Shining as “Worst Father in Literature” and I think that that is what I am going to do, though with a bit of a caveat. Why Jack? Well, after all and if you will remember, he is the father who is a fall-down drunk who breaks his son’s arm, beats a student senseless … oh, and chases his wife and child around a deserted hotel with a roque mallet calling for them to “take their medicine.” It doesn’t get much “worst” than that, really, and in spite of Jack’s “good” moments, he really is a pretty bad father from page one and it doesn’t go anywhere but south from there: destroying the engine of the only snowmobile and blaming it on your son, smashing the only CB radio and blaming it on your son, blaming your weaknesses and peccadilloes on your wife, taking absolutely no responsibility for your own failings and always seeking to pass the blame to others … that rates you pretty high on the Worst List. That said, it is time for the caveat of which I spoke. In spite of all of this, Jack isn’t a “horrible” father. Danny genuinely loves him, Jack seems to genuinely love Danny, Jack—depending on your interpretation of the novel—may not be entirely responsible for his actions in the Overlook (it is haunted, after all, and violently so … but it does seem to amplify Jack’s emotions and feelings that he already has), he comes from a history of domestic violence (his father was a world-class wife- and child-beater, so to speak), and in the end in spite of being possessed by the hotel manages to at least redeem himself a little by giving his son and wife time to escape before it all goes up in a massive fireball. So, I name Jack Torrance “Worst Father in Literature” but hang an asterisk (*) after that title and acknowledge that his failure as a father is all the more glaring because of his prior success.

Though, to be fair to Jack, it might just be the way King (and Kubrick) have portrayed him. After all, according to this, he might not be a bad dad after all:

Best Book for Dads
So, my initial thought on this particular “award” was Sherman Alexie’s Flight which is a novel that is, in one sense, a book that is a meditation on fathers and sons and the nature of “fatherhood” and what those two words mean in relation to each other and what relationships can be passed along those lines. It really is, in the end, a wonderful and heart-warming story. However, the more I think about it, the more I think that Flight ties with Ray Bradbury’s marvellous Something Wicked This Way Comes which, like Flight, is a meditation on the relationship of fathers and sons and what goes on between them. Like Alexie’s book, Bradbury’s takes the innate closeness of a father and son and then runs all sorts of problems and complications through that relationship and sees what comes out in the end. For Alexie, that end result is hopeful, if somewhat problematic, and for Bradbury it is equal parts nostalgia and melancholy. However, whichever way you take it these two books are simple amazing pieces of fatherhood literature and so they both are my choice for “Best Book(s) for Dads.”

The Friday 56: A Hunch

2010-06-18T23:55:00.001-06:00

The Friday 56 is hosted by Storytime with Tonya and Friends

RULES

Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
Turn to page 56.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post that sentence (plus one or two others if you like).
Post a link with your post to Storytime (and here on Bryan’s Book Blog).

Robert Bloch’s Psycho is the closet book to hand here, and I want to say that if you haven’t read it yet, then you really need to. It is a simply amazing book: suspenseful, scary and absolutely terrifying. And the end, oh the end … it’s one of the best endings in literature … so understated and so chilling. So, without further ado, here is my Friday 56:

Psycho

by Robert Block

-Psycho Series, Book One-

(New York: Bantam Books, 1969)

Paperback, 137 Pages, Fiction

ISBN: N/A, US$0.60

My 56: “I was playing one hunch—that she’d stick to the highway because she was coming here” (56).

Friday Finds: June 18, 2010

2010-06-18T23:50:00.000-06:00

Friday Finds (hosted by Should Be Reading)

What great books did you hear about/discover this past week?
Share with us your FRIDAY FINDS!

Since I haven’t listed Friday Finds for a while now, I have been accumulating book titles. After culling through that list, here are my favorites of which I am most excited to get my hands on. They come from a variety of sources (many of which are now lost in the sands of time) and so I’ll dispense with that part of this and just give some blanket thanks to one and all. (Though, if I had to pick … I’d have to say that the one on this list that tickles me the most is Jeff Burk’s Shatnerquake … the premise is just too funny, and c’mon … how can you resist a cover like that?)

Bird by Rita Murphy
Claire de Lune by Christine Johnson
The Dark Lantern by Gerri Brightwell
Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King
Kicked, Bitten, and Scratched: Life and Lessons at the World’s Premier School for Exotic Animal Trainers by Amy Sutherland
Kraken by China Miéville
LEGO: A Love Story by Jonathan Bender
The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor
The Passage by Justin Cronin
Shatnerquake by Jeff Burk
Stories: All New Tales edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale
Tea Parties for Dads: A Crash Course in Daughters for New Dads by Jenna McCarthy
The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno by Ellen Bryson

Booking Through Thursday: Now, Past and Pastest

2010-06-17T23:00:00.002-06:00

Another Thursday is upon us, and that means it is time for yet another Booking Through Thursday prompt. What will it be this week, you ask? Here you go…

Prompt: Do you prefer reading current books? Or older ones? Or outright old ones? (As in, yes, there is a difference between a book from 10 years ago and, say, Charles Dickens or Plato.)

Until I got really serious about my college career as an English major, I was an equal opportunity reader. I read Current Stuff, Older Stuff and Outright Old Stuff without any rhyme or reason. I was as likely to pick up Beowulf as Alexandre Dumas as Stephen King. However, as I worked my way through my undergrad career and went through survey courses and started specializing, I leaned more and more toward contemporary literature and that is more or less where I have planted my academic flag: in contemporary lit (i.e. roughly 1950 and forward). That is not to say that I won’t pick up Bede or Alcott, there is something to be said for the predecessors of Charles Johnson, Angela Carter, and, say, Don DeLillo … after all, the postmodern movement and contemporary literature are writing in conversation with and writing against what came before it, but I lean toward books from the last 50 years before most anything else nowadays.

A-Z Wednesday: Playing Catch-Up (Again)

2010-06-16T23:30:00.000-06:00

So, here I am, once again, playing catch up on A-Z Wednesday. Hopefully, from here on out I’ll be more regular about posting these. As I’ve mentioned on this blog … one of the things that I really enjoy in my reading is what is called Weird Fiction and its descendents. That old school horror and science fiction of the 30s and 40s are some of my absolute favorites and so I’ve decided to showcase some of what I feel are the best and essential works of the Weird Fiction, Horror Fiction and Science Fiction that are on my shelves. I set 26 books aside, and actually have been able to post A-M and since this Wednesday’s letter is S, I’ll still have some back filling to do. Just in the interest of time I won’t be giving any “Thoughts” on letters N-R other than to say I endorse every single one of these books, and a few of them have been reviewed on the blog in the past, and I’m thinking of reading some of these in the near future and so will be reviewing them, probably soon. (How’s that for equivocation?)

And, just by way of fun, here are the links for the past letters: A-G, H, I, J, K, L, and M.

A-Z Wednesday is hosted by Reading at the Beach.

Here are the rules: Go to your stack of books and find one whose title starts with the Letter of the Week and post the following:

A photo of the book
Title and synopsis
A link (Amazon, B&N, etc.)
Come back here and leave your link in the comments

If you’ve already reviewed this book, post a link to the review as well. Be sure to visit other participants to see what books they have posted and leave them a comment (we all love comments, don’t we?) Who know? You may find your next “favorite” book.

So, without any further ado, here are my N-R books:

N: The Nightwalker
by Thomas Tessier
(New York: Signet, 1981)
Paperback, 184 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780451015280, US$2.50

From the Cover: Bobby never meant his lover to end his life beneath the wheels of a London bus. Yet when the uncontrollable tingling sensation began in his hands, he could only watch in helpless horror—powerless to prevent those savage, killing hands from pushing her to her doom. … He almost convinced himself it was all a bizarre accident, till the day he saw the jogger. Gazing at the man in almost hypnotic fashion, Bobby felt that same eerie power flowing into his arms and legs, found himself racing with effortless, animal-like grace to overtake the runner. He never knew when the race was transformed into a chase that signified the beginning of a devastating reign of terror, terror that would relentlessly stalk the streets of London—and, again and again, would end in the bloody jaws and rending claws of death.

O: Off Season: The Author’s Uncut, Uncensored Version!
by Jack Ketchum
also includes the bonus short story “Winter Child”
(New York: Leisure Books, 2006)
Paperback, 308 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780843956962, US$6.99

From the Cover: September. A beautiful New York editor retreats to a lonely cabin on a hill in the quiet Maine beach town of Dead River—off season—awaiting her sister and friends. Nearby, a savage human family with a taste for flesh lurks in the darkening woods, watching, waiting for the moon to rise and night to fall. … And before too many hours pass, five civilized, sophisticated people and one tired old country sheriff will learn just how primitive we all are beneath the surface … and that there are no limits at all to the will to survive.

P: Psycho
by Robert Bloch
(New York: Bantam Books, 1969)
Paperback, 137 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: N/A, US$0.60

From the Cover: She stepped into the shower stall … and let the warm water gush over her. That’s why she didn’t hear the doo open. At first, when the shower curtains parted, steam obscured the face. The she saw it. … A face, peering through the curtains, hanging in midair like a mask. A head-scarf concealing the hair, and glassy eyes stared inhumanly. The skin was powered dead-white and two hectic spots of rouge centered on the cheekbones. But it wasn’t a mask. … Mary started to scream. And then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher knife…

Q: Quicker Than the Eye: Stories
by Ray Bradbury
(New York: Avon Books, 1996)
Paperback, 294 Pages, Short Fiction Anthology
ISBN: 9780380789597, US$5.99

From the Cover: The first new collection in nearly a decade from America’s preeminent storyteller. The internationally acclaimed author of The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury is a magician at the height of his powers, displaying his sorcerer’s skill with twenty-one remarkable stories that run the gamut from total reality to light fantastic, from high noon to long after midnight. A true master tells all, revealing the strange secret of growing young and mad; opening a Witch Door that links two intolerant centuries; joining an ancient couple in their wild assassination games; celebrating life and dreams in the unique voice that has favored him across six decades and has enchanted millions of readers the world over.

R: Rosemary’s Baby
by Ira Levin
(New York: Dell, 1968)
Paperback, 218 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: N/A, US$0.95

From the Cover: Suppose you were an up-to-date young wife who moved into an old and elegant New York apartment house with a rather strange past. Suppose that only after you became pregnant did you begin to suspect the building harbored a diabolically evil group of devil worshippers who had mastered the arts of black magic and witchcraft. Suppose that this satanic conspiracy set out to claim not only your husband but your baby. Well, that’s what happened to Rosemary … Or did it…?

This brings us, finally, to this week:

THIS WEEK’S LETTER IS: S

My “S” Book is:

The Silence of the Lambs
by Thomas Harris
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1989)
Paperback, 367 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780312924584, U$7.99

From the Cover: A young FBI trainee. An evil genius locked away for unspeakable crimes. A plunge into the darkest chambers of psychopath’s mind—in the deadly search for a serial killer…

My Thoughts: While it is not strictly “weird fiction,” as has been my theme for A-Z Wednesday these past 19 weeks, The Silence of the Lambs is certainly one of the most horrifying and psychologically thrilling novels to have been published in the last 40 years. I mean, honestly, since 1970, the three scariest novels to be published have got to be William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) and Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs (1988). It also introduced the literary world to one of the greatest villains in contemporary literature: Dr. Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter. It is true, now, that Sir Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of the good doctor in the 1991 film is what people immediately go to when you say “Hannibal Lecter”, but if you truly want to get to the roots of one of the best villains in the 20th Century, then you need to pick up Harris’ novel because what Hopkins (and director Demme) have essentialized in the film (in spite of Hopkins’ nuanced acting) is so much more complex in the book, and if you thought Hopkins’ Lecter was scary, then you need to meet Harris’ original. Add to that, one of the scariest serial killers—Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb—in literary history (probably since Norman Bates in Robert Bloch’s Psycho) and a really taut plot, and The Silence of the Lambs is a real gem of a horror novel.

Doctor Who: Dead Air, An Exclusive Audio Adventure (Audio)

2010-06-15T17:05:00.000-06:00

by James Goss
read by David Tennant
-Doctor Who, Series 4-
(London: BBC Audio, 2010)
MP3 Audiobook, 33.2 MB, 1.2 Hours, Fiction
ISBN: 9781408426807, US$24.95

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

From the Cover: “Hello, I’m the Doctor. And, if you can hear this, then one of us is going to die.” At the bottom of the sea, in the wreck of a floating radio station, a lost recording has been discovered. After careful restoration, it is played for the first time—to reveal something incredible. It is the voice of the Doctor, broadcasting from Radio Bravo in 1966. He has travelled to Earth in search of the Hush—a terrible weapon that kills, silences and devours anything that makes noise—and has tracked it to a boat crewed by a team of pirate DJs. With the help of feisty Liverpudlian Layla and some groovy pop music, he must trap the Hush and destroy it—before it can escape and destroy the world...

My Review: Ahhh, Doctor Who. While I have enjoyed Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor, he cannot hold a candle to the manic and boyish Tenth Doctor of David Tennant. Luckily Tennant’s Tenth Doctor lives on in the BBC’s audiobook editions of the wider Doctor Who universe.

So, I chose this particular DW audiobook for a couple of reasons, chief among which are (1) it is read by David Tennant, and that is always a plus (I have the tiniest of man-crushes on Tennant) and (2) I am fascinated by the whole British pirate radio-BBC radio tiff in the 1960s and the prospect of having the Doctor mucking about on a pirate radio station was just too good to pass up. I am always impressed by the quality of these audiobooks … the writers of the Doctor Who print and audio universe do such an excellent job of not just making the historical contexts come to life, but they do such a wonderful job of capturing the essence of the characters and Goss has done just that in Dead Air. This audiobook is just fantastic and Tennant’s vocal chops not just telling the story but acting it out at every turn is absolutely delightful. Also, I have to say that Goss has created a great companion for the Doctor in Layla and his villain in the Hush is quite terrifying (and the truth behind the origins of the Hush is truly chilling).

Really, I have nothing but good things to say about Dead Air, it really is a lot of fun and I cannot recommend it, or any of the other Doctor Who audiobooks highly enough.

Titus Andronicus (Bantam Anthology)

2010-06-15T16:40:00.000-06:00

by William Shakespeare
edited by David Bevington
anthologized in Three Classical Tragedies: Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Coriolanus
(New York: Bantam Classics, 1988)
Paperback, 139 Pages, Drama
ISBN: 9780553212846, US$4.95

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

Why, foolish Lucius, dost thou not perceive
That Rome is but a wilderness of tigers?
Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey
But me and mine.
(Act III, Scene i, Lines 53-56)

From the Cover: This, Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, is also his bloodiest and most horror-filled. A Roman general to appease the spirit of his dead son, sacrifices the son of a captive Goth queen—and sets in motion a remorseless cycle of revenge and counterrevenge. The play’s vivid spectacle of violence stuns audiences with rape, murder, mutilation, and unmitigated cruelty.

My Review: So, this past Spring Quarter I took a seminar class titled “Shakespeare and Music.” It was an interesting course, to say the least, and it really has made me rethink the way I approach the Shakespearean play and the different voices, tones, and musicality in the various plays.

For my final paper, I decided to approach Julie Taymor’s 1999 adaptation of Shakespeare’s play Titus (starring Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange and Alan Cumming). I discussed the Bakhtinian Carnivalesque aspects of the play and how it then resists a traditional reading and rather than reaffirming any sort of social norms or values Taymor’s adaptation tears those norms and values down.

In addition to watching Taymor’s film over and over again (which I do not recommend, by the way, it is a really emotionally draining film to watch) I went back to Shakespeare’s original text so I would have some sort of basis of comparison (it has been decades since I last read Titus Andronicus). Now, all other interpretations aside Titus is a fascinating play, a real anomaly in Shakespeare’s work, which is probably why it has such a contested place in the Shakespearean canon with some scholars questioning its authenticity. There is talk that perhaps it is a play not by William Shakespeare but rather by Christopher Marlowe or Thomas Kyd, which given Faustus and The Spanish Tragedy, it is understandable, perhaps, where that sentiment comes from.

Yet, whether or not it is a Shakespearean play is immaterial, though I happen to believe that it is a Shakespeare play … many of the same themes that he deals with in later plays are here in Titus, undeveloped and a little ham-handed it is true, but this is one of Shakespeare’s firsts … his first truly popular play in fact and that fact, given the Elizabethan love of the sensational and their relationship to revenge and justice it is no wonder that Titus Andronicus did as well as it did during the Early Modern Period.

This play is, perhaps, best known for its extreme violence (including, but not limited to, human sacrifice, dismemberment, rape, cutting out of a tongue, beheadings, murder, assassination, and—most famously—cannibalism) and is often called Shakespeare’s “Quentin Tarantino Play” or described as Shakespeare “Channeling Brian De Palma” and yet those are too trite an explanation for such a complex play, and complex it really is. Because, who says revenge is a dish best served cold? (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

As with Shakespeare’s more “mature” and later tragedies—Hamlet, Othello, King Lear—Titus Andronicus deals with themes of justice and mercy, senility, the nature of revenge, martial life versus domestic life (and the inability of military men to cope with home life), the cyclical nature of violence, civilization versus barbarity, Self and Other, racism, the nature of evil, the nature of madness, infidelity, the nature of leadership … Titus Andronicus takes all of these themes and runs with them all in a wide and bloody swath (and, admittedly, it is not as sophisticated as say Hamlet or Othello) and in the end, leaves the viewer pondering all of these themes. I will grant that some of the message is lost in the delivery (there are an awful lot of bodies piling up at the end in a very short time) but that does not take away from the essential and visceral nerve that the play is able to hit.

Add to all of that the character of Aaron the Moor who one of the best Shakespearean villains since Iago and the play is worth every bit of emotional capital it takes to watch. And, in spite of this being a book blog, I would recommend you watch Titus Andronicus rather than read … Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be watched, after all, and if you’re going to watch this play then you might as well watch Taymor’s adaptation … the trailer can be seen HERE.

Blockade Billy

2010-06-15T15:25:00.000-06:00

by Stephen King
contains the chilling bonus story “Morality”
(New York: Scribner, 2010)
Hardcover, 132 Pages, Novella and Short Fiction
ISBN: 9781451608212, US$14.99

ABCD Rating: BACKLIST

This is for every guy (and gal) who ever put on the gear.

From the Cover: From New York Times bestselling author Stephen King comes the haunting story of Blockade Billy, the greatest Major League baseball player to be erased from the game. Even the most die-hard baseball fans don’t know the true story of William “Blockade Billy” Blakely. He may have been the greatest player the game has ever seen, but today no one remembers his name. He was the first—and only—player to have his existence completely removed from the record books. Even his team is long forgotten, barely a footnote in the game’s history. Every effort was made to erase any evidence that William Blakely played professional baseball, and with good reason. Blockade Billy had a secret darker than any pill or injection that might cause a scandal in sports today. His secret was much, much worse … and only Stephen King, the most gifted storyteller of our age, can reveal the truth to the world, once and for all.

My Review: So, I’ve mentioned it on this blog before, but I really do feel like I am in an abusive relationship with Stephen King, and the two stories in this new volume from King just go to prove that feeling even further. I was initially skeptical when I found out that King was releasing Blockade Billy … after all, the most recent offerings from King have been less than mind-blowing (with the possible exception of UR), and yet some of the advanced hoopla that I read about Billy hinted at a “realistic” story, one that eschewed all of King’s typical trappings of horror, the uncanny and the supernatural, and so—given the fact that King is typically better when he is writing from the heart (The Green Mile anyone?) and that his short fiction is infinitely better than his long—I was intrigued. Though only intrigued enough to put it on hold at the library and let it come with it came.

Surprisingly, I got it fairly quickly (just a day or four after its publication … yes, I am that behind in posting reviews) and given the fact that it is a fairly short read (I think it only took about 90 minutes for me to get through the whole thing) I dove right in. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by what King has managed to create in Billy, granted it is not exactly anything new in the genre of mysterious yet amazing baseball players (I have to say that in this particular genre the X-Files episode “The Unnatural” (written and directed by David Duchovny) does it best), and yet King is able to bring a certain amount of earnestness and sincerity to the story which is a touchstone of King’s novels, but it has been lacking in a lot of his recent releases and so it was nice to see it here again.

That said, however, I felt that the payoff for Billy was less than, shall we say, satisfying and in direct contradiction to my statement above, I wish King had gone the route of some sort of supernatural or uncanny explanation for what was going on in the story because the end just didn’t feel like it was worth all the build up. That is not to say it is a bad book … I just wouldn’t rush out and spend $15 on it. Buy it used, check it out of the library or get somebody else to buy it for you as a gift.

As for the short story “Morality” also contained herein … I dunno … it didn’t make that much of an impression on me, and was a little too heavy handed to be any kind of effective. It hews too much to the old “morality play” style (which I guess it implied in its title) to be really compelling. King is usually best when he is ambiguous and not laying out thick black and white moral lines.

Horns (Audio)

2010-06-15T03:25:00.000-06:00

by Joe Hill
read by Fred Berman
(New York: HarperAudio, 2010)
MP3 Audiobook, 1.37 GB, 13.8 Hours, Fiction
ISBN: 9780061768026, US$39.99

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

From the Cover: Ignatius Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke up the next morning with a pair of horns growing from his temples. At first, Ig thought the horns were a hallucination, the product of a mind damaged by rage and grief. He spent the last year in a lonely, private purgatory, following the death of his beloved, Merrin Williams, who had been raped and murdered under inexplicable circumstances. A mental breakdown would have been about the most natural thing in the world. But there was nothing natural about the horns, which were all too real. Once, the righteous Ig had enjoyed the life of the blessed. But Merrin’s death damned all that. The only suspect in the crime, Ig was never charged or tried. And he was never cleared. Nothin Ig can say or do matters. Everyone it seems, including God, has abandoned him. Everyone, that is, except for the devil inside. … Now Ig is possessed of a terrible new power—a macabre talent he intends to use to find the monster who killed Merrin and destroyed his life. It’s time for a little revenge … it’s time the devil had his due …

My Review: As I’ve said in a past post due to a difficult quarter and dealing with some depression, I’ve been behind in posting reviews on my blog and given that it’s been nearly a month since I’ve finished listening to Horns, I’m going to have to do my level best to try and recreate some of what I was thinking at the time.

So, I am an unrepentant fan of Joe Hill, and have been ever since I got my grubby little mitts on Heart-Shaped Box. He is a masterful storyteller and his ability to craft a gripping tale definitely surpasses his father’s ability to spin a yarn … at least recently. Given all that Hill’s most recent novel, Horns, is a very interesting story and, I have to say, highly original. Hill deftly manages the fine line between the horrific and the philosophical quite nicely treading just enough in both realms to make the story equal parts compelling and thought-provoking (and, just like his father, Hill doesn’t shy away from going for the jugular and gross out when the story requires it).

If I had to say what I enjoyed the most about Horns, I’d have to say it was the way in which Hill doles out the information and plot points in the story. He gives his Readers (and in this case Listeners) quite a bit of information up front regarding who did what, and then a lot of the suspense comes from how the resolution is going to work itself out, because in a story like this, you know that it might not have a happy ending, but then it could, but then again … they sometimes don’t. What, you ask, is the outcome? Well, I can’t tell you that … that’d be cheating. (And, that is one of the key reasons I love audiobooks so much … the compulsion to turn to the last page(s) has to be thrust aside because there is no way one can “turn to the last page” in an audiobook … at least not easily.)

As for this particular audiobook edition, I enjoyed everything about the story, but I’m still not sold on reader Fred Berman. There was something about his voice that didn’t sit with me and with the tenor of the story. Personally, I would have preferred Stephen Lang (who read the audiobook of Heart-Shaped Box) or Campbell Scott (who reads The Shining) or even Raúl Esparza (Under the Dome’s reader). Berman just didn’t seem to have the weight behind his voice that a book like Horns needs.

Other than that, though, Horns is a brilliant book in every way, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. (I’ll avoid any “devilishly good” or “helluva good read” puns at this point…)

For other reviews of Horns, check out reading & writing by pub light and The Novel Bookworm.

The Joy of Comps

2010-06-15T02:45:00.000-06:00

So, after having completed my first year of grad school, and being a year closer to getting my Masters in English Studies (also known as Literary Studies elsewhere) I get to spend my summer reading books for my Qualifying Exams. Theoretically the “exam offers the opportunity to develop a body of knowledge in two historical periods and to demonstrate [my] ability to think theoretically across authors, genres, and periods. More broadly, this exams offers a unique opportunity in [my] graduate career to perform the kind of sustained and self-directed work required of faculty and scholars in the field. Unlike the work that [I] do in [my] seminars, which is supported and shaped by [my] professors and the course materials they have organized for [me], this exam asks [me] to demonstrate intellectual independence and self-motivation in [my] reading and writing.” So, hooray for me, right?

We are given six “Historical Period Reading Lists”—Pre-16th Century, 16th-18th Century, 18th-19th Century, Second Half of the 19th Century, First Half of the 20th Century and Second Half of the 20th Century—and then have to pick two of the time periods (only one of which can be from the 20th Century) and then craft two reading lists of the equivalent of twelve books and a minimum of ten authors from each time period as well as at least three critical tests from each time period to create a “scholarly context.”

We had to turn our Reading Lists in around the end of May, and get them approved by our Committee Chair … and once they were approved, we were off to the races. We spend the summer reading the books, steeping ourselves in our time periods, the texts and the scholarly work so that in the Fall Quarter we can submit a handful of potential essay questions based on all of our reading and once our Committees pick the two questions/prompts they like the best, we spend a weekend fast and furiously writing the two essays which then get judged, for lack of a better word, and we then find out if we pass or not. Loads of fun.

As anyone who knows me could have guessed, my chosen time periods were Second Half of the 19th Century and Second Half of the 20th Century (in fact, a number of the other grad students were able to easily guess what lists I had chosen when we were discussing them). Big surprise, I know, but there you go, and my reading lists are as follows:

Second Half of the 19th Century
PRIMARY TEXTS
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Behind a Mask, or, A Woman’s Power by Louisa May Alcott
Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Dracula by Bram Stoker
“Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Dubois
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
“The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James
“The Yellow Wall-paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

SCHOLARLY TEXTS
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism by Richard Dellamora
Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism by Patrick Brantlinger

Second Half of the 20th Century
PRIMARY TEXTS
Angels in America, Parts I and II by Tony Kushner
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Libra by Don DeLillo
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
The Shining by Stephen King
Watchmen by Alan Moore
Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros

SCHOLARLY TEXTS
America by Jean Baudrillard
Mythologies by Roland Barthes
Postmodern Literature by Ian Gregson

I made some changes to the list and so I had to submit a rationale for said changes since I have an overall reasoning for the two lists I crafted:

I have attempted to craft two reading lists across two time periods that run roughly parallel to each other in terms of content and critique. There are a number of reasons for this, but chief among them is my belief that literature reflects and is a reaction to the social changes that were occurring during its time. I find this to be especially true for the late Victorian Period and the last half of the Twentieth Century, especially since both those time periods are dealing with many of the same issues: gender roles, societal violence, burgeoning sexuality, reactionary politics, immigration, etc.

I have tried to craft two reading lists that are not only coherent in their internal rationale, but also that run parallel to each other in terms of the issues that the books are dealing with. To that end, I have made a handful of changes: I have included Henry James’ novella “The Turn of the Screw” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to the Second Half of the 19th Century reading list because it is my belief that the role of Gothic literature in exposing societal anxieties is indispensible and, while this genre was somewhat represented in the 19th Century reading list (with Stoker and Wilde’s novels and Gilman’s short story) I felt it stood to be augmented by the inclusion of James’s novella and Stevenson’s story as these to works serve to amplify Victorian concerns of the mental/inner self as well as working intertextually with many of the other books on my list.

In terms of the Second Half of the 20th Century, I have included Stephen King’s novel The Shining and Ira Levin’s novel Rosemary’s Baby to the reading list because, as with the 19th Century, is my belief that the role of Gothic literature in exposing societal anxieties is indispensible and felt that the genre was under-represented in the Master Lists (with only Carter’s short story and Morrison’s novel representing the genre). I feel that both King and Levin’s novels, critically speaking, are their most complex in terms of relaying the social anxieties of their respective times: King’s dealing with issues of gender roles and the changing face of masculinity, and Levin’s dealing with the anxieties of urban living and the shifting views of religion in the 1960s (culminating in the April 8, 1966 (a year before Levin’s novel was published) cover of Time reading “Is God Dead?”).

As for the substitution of DeLillo’s White Noise with his 1988 novel Libra, I made that change chiefly because I have read (and written on White Noise) a number of times in my undergrad career and am, quite frankly, sick of the book. However, I recognize that DeLillo is an important writer of the time period and to that end, I made the substitution of Libra, which not only serves to replace White Noise but also fits with my overall rationale for my two reading lists which is I believe that Libra brings certain elements—plot-wise—to the discussion of literature’s ability to reflect on and react to the social anxieties of its time, specifically the “unknowability” of history and how a violent act (the assassination of JFK) can create a point in history where so much is known and yet nothing is known at all. This simultaneous knowing and unknowing is, as I see it, a major concern of both time periods I have chosen.

So, this is how I’ll be spending my summer vacation. That and I’ll be prepping to start my Masters Thesis, my proposal for which reads thus: I am interested in exploring the intersections of sex, violence, gender and race in contemporary horror (specifically horror written in the 1970s (with a major focus on Stephen King's The Shining)) and how this genre at this specific moment in time and its recurring themes both reflect and are a reaction to the social changes that were occurring during this era (i.e. Affirmative Action, The Men's Movement, the ERA, Gay Rights, etc.).

Oh, and there will be another little Reader coming into the family some time in August, so I’ll be having a busy busy Summer!

Teaser Tuesdays: Ain't That the Truth...

2010-06-15T01:05:00.001-06:00

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (Make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

So, this week’s teaser comes from yet another of Quirk’s brilliant mash-ups:

Android Karenina

by Leo Tolstoy and Ben H. Winters

translated by Constance Garnett and The II/Englishrenderer/94

illustrated by Eugene Smith

(Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2010)

Trade Paperback, 541 Pages, Fiction

ISBN: 9781594744600, US$12.95

MY TEASER: “Functioning robots are all alike; every malfunctioning robot malfunctions in its own way. Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house” (14).

Musing Mondays: Reading Reading Everywhere...

2010-06-14T23:55:00.000-06:00

Today’s Musing Mondays (hosted by Should Be Reading) is as follows: Who in your family (both immediate and extended) are readers, and who are not?

I actually come from a big family of readers. We always have books on us wherever we go. Bring books on vacations, to the restaurant, wherever. I married a reader, and both of my children (ages four and two) love to sit with books and read with the rest of us and/or be read to. My mother, my father, my brother and my youngest sister are all avid readers, even in my extended family my grandmother and my late grandfather are/were big readers. All branches of the family have shelves and shelves of books in their houses and apartments. In fact, it is just my older younger sister that isn’t as big of a reader. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t read, she’s just not as in to books as the rest of us.

Back in the Saddle ... Again

2010-06-14T17:25:00.001-06:00

Okay, after a bit of a hiatus caused by a tough quarter of Grad school and some bouts with depression, it is time to get this Book Blog back to where it should be. I plan on getting back on track with the various memes I used to participate in and I also have a backlog of reviews to get through:

A number of books:
Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare
The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein
The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: Redux by Philip K. Dick
Blockade Billy by Stephen King
The Three Little Pigs Buy the White House by Dan Piraro

And two audiobooks:
Horns (Audio) by Joe Hill
Doctor Who: Dead Air, An Exclusive Audio Adventure (Audio) by James Goss

My ARC of Quirk’s new book by Leo Tolstoy and Ben H. Winters—Android Karenina—finally came in the mail (too late to participate in the blogsplosion that they were holding … stupid snail mail) but I am anxiously looking forward to diving into that one later today. (Look for a teaser tomorrow.) And I am currently listening to Scott Westerfeld’s brilliant reimagining of WWI: Leviathan (read by Alan Cumming) so it is going to be a steampunk June for me.

Also, and I’ll devote a whole post to this at a later time, I have my Qualifying Exams (unaffectionately known as Comps in the corridors of the English Department at WWU) coming up in the Fall Quarter of 2010, and so I have a reading list of 24 books plus six critical texts from two time periods that I have to find time to blast through over the next three months or so, which ought to at least give me some kind of direction for my reading.

I guess the bottom line here is that I am hoping to jumpstart this blog (again) and get everything back on track. At least until the baby comes in August…

The Pop-Up Book of Nightmares

2010-05-12T15:15:00.000-06:00

by Gary Greenberg

illustrated by Balvis Rubess

pop-ups by Matthew Reinhart

(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001)

Hardcover, 22 Pages, Pop-Up

ISBN: 9780312282639, US$29.95

ABCD Rating: CHECK OUT

All your worst nightmares come true in this hilariously macabre pop-up book.

From the Cover: Forgetting to study for a final exam. Standing stark naked in front of thousands of spectators. Falling down a seemingly endless staircase. … This is the stuff of nightmares, and The Pop-Up Book of Nightmares puts you face to face with ten of your most unsettling dreams—while you’re wide awake.

My Review: So, yesterday I reviewed The Pop-Up Book of Phobias (the companion book to this one) and I told the story behind finding these books there, so rather than rehash that, I’m going to get straight to the point: The Pop-Up Book of Nightmares is inferior in every way (except for art and pop-ups) to The Pop-Up Book of Phobias.

There is none of the visceral and primal fear in this book that Phobias manages to elicit from the reader. My kids enjoyed this one … they did not like Phobias. Then there is the fact that this one is full of psycho-babble and pseudo-Freudian definitions of the symbols of dreams that sound like they come from Wikipedia. (I for one detest the knee-jerk Freudian interpretation of psychology and dreams; Freud was a pervert in my opinion … a very intelligent pervert … but a pervert nonetheless.)

Anyway, couple that with the fact that many of the nightmares just are not “scary,” per se and it all just falls flat … in spite of the fact that it is a pop-up book. This is not to say that it is not aesthetically pleasing … it is. The pop-ups and artwork are every bit as wonderful as Phobias (in fact, the only squirm-worthy entry in this book is the rats in the refrigerator under “Infestation”) but other than that, I would recommend you skip this one (maybe check it out at the library) and save your time and money for The Pop-Up Book of Phobias, you’ll have a much more rewarding reading experience with that book.

The Pop-Up Book of Phobias

2010-05-11T02:10:00.003-06:00

by Gary Greenberg

illustrated by Balvis Rubess

pop-ups by Matthew Reinhart

(New York: Rob Weisbach Books, 1999)

Hardcover, 22 Pages, Pop-Up

ISBN: 9780688171957, US$29.95

ABCD Rating: BACKLIST

All your worst nightmares made frighteningly, hilariously real…

From the Cover: Fear of heights, fear of spiders, fear of flying, fear of death—everyone is afraid of something. And these pop-ups place you in the hot seat, whether it’s the dentist’s chair as the drill come spinning toward you; the edge of a skyscraper whose sheer face plummets hundreds of feet to the sidewalk below; or the window seat of a plane as the oxygen mask deploys, your drink spills, and the horizon shifts to an angle that is suddenly, terribly wrong. … Brought to life by outrageously macabre artwork and startlingly innovative pop-ups, The Pop-Up Book of Phobias is an engineering marvel and cult classic in the making—the perfect gift for every neurotic in your life.

My Review: I first came across this book (and its companion The Pop-Up Book of Nightmares (review to follow)) on the wonderful blog Judge a Book by its Cover. (I’ve mentioned Maughta’s blog here before, but it deserves mentioning again) Anyway, I have seen these books before, but never picked them up … at least not that I can remember. Perhaps I have blocked the experience from my memory? So I went straight to my local library’s website, was thrilled to see that they had them (though oddly, they did not carry The Pop-Up Book of Sex … I’ll let you Google that one … this is (ostensibly) a family blog) and so requested them immediately.

When I went to pick them up, the librarian laughed and said “Oh, we were having fun laughing over these when they came in. They’re great!” And really, what more can I say about this book then that? They really are great and actually are quit good and inducing a small amount of anxiety. My wife won’t even look at them and my pulse speeds up ever so slightly on the coulrophobia page.

The pop-ups are absolutely brilliant and the artwork is wonderful, and I think what is most amazing here is that no one thought of doing this before 1999. It is an ingenious idea and is a book that I recommend you find as soon as you can, you’ll be amazed what some strategically placed paper coming up out of a book at you can do.

A-Z Wednesday: The Manitou

2010-05-05T23:50:00.000-06:00

A-Z Wednesday is hosted by Reading at the Beach.

Here are the rules: Go to your stack of books and find one whose title starts with the Letter of the Week and post the following:

A photo of the book
Title and synopsis
A link (Amazon, B&N, etc.)
Come back here and leave your link in the comments

THIS WEEK’S LETTER IS: M

My “M” Book is:

The Manitou
by Graham Masterton

-Manitou Series, Book 1-

(New York: TOR Books, 1982)
Paperback, 216 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780523480701, US$2.95

From the Cover: A tumor. That’s what pert little Karen Tandy had, a tumor. A strange growth that puzzled her doctor. In fact, it as so unusual that he recommended a specialist and hospitalization. Dr. Jack Hughes looked at it, a smooth round bulge. He ran his fingers over it, and it seemed to have the normal texture of a benign fibrous growth. He gently squeezed it; it was firm and hard. “It only seems to grow at night, doctor. Every morning I wake up and it’s bigger,” Karen said. Dr. Hughes studied the X rays. The little knot of tissue and bone was too formless to make any sense. There was only one thing to do, operate and cut it out. Then it moved… And a chain of events began which would soon baffle medical science and terrify all who came in touch with Karen Tandy. An American Indian sorcerer would erupt into the twentieth century after being dead for four hundred years. He was the Manitou, Misquamacus, seething with rage, returned to wreak vengeance upon the conquering white man. It would be a test of our science and his magic … a war of medicine men!

My Thoughts: So, this is another in my Weird Fiction series that I have not read in a while … like since middle school (a good twenty years ago) but I remember being terrified by it. I read this during my Being-Fascinated-with-(Faux)-Native-American-Mythology Phase (this was also about the same time that I first saw John Frankenheimer’s film Prophecy). I don’t know how accurate Masterton’s mythology is—I suspect “not very”—but that doesn’t change the fact that this is a very scary and very strange story. I don’t remember much of it beyond that … beyond staying up late into the wee hours on a Friday night (yes, I had a boring childhood) reading this story, and then being scared beyond belief and falling asleep with the light on. I haven’t done that often in my life … after I first saw Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining comes to mind (I watched that one at my aunt and uncle’s house from a secreted place as my aunt, uncle and parents watched it (they didn’t know I was there)) … but this memory certainly earns The Manitou a place in the pantheon of the New Weird Horror. (I’ll also have to keep my eyes peeled now, because what I have only found out recently is that this is the first in a series … something I didn’t know twenty years ago.)

The Iron Man: A Story in Five Nights

2010-05-03T14:20:00.000-06:00

by Ted Hughes

illustrated by Andrew Davidson

(London: Faber Children’s Books, 2005)

Paperback, 81 Pages, Children’s

ISBN: 9780571226122, US$5.50

ABCD Rating: BACKLIST

From the Cover: A mysterious creature stalks the land, eating barbed wire and devouring tractors and plows. The farmers are mystified—and afraid. And then they glimpse him in the night: the Iron Man, taller than a house, with glowing headlight eyes and an insatiable taste for metal. The hungry giant must be stopped, at any cost. Only a young boy named Hogarth is brave enough to lead the Iron Man to a safe home. And only Hogarth knows where to turn when the earth needs a hero—a giant hero—as never before...

My Review: Just as with Hellboy, I recently introduced my son and daughter to the brilliant Brad Bird film The Iron Giant. They instantly fell head-over-heels in love with the film, and as I was watching it with them, I noticed that it said on the credits that it was based on the book by Ted Hughes. (Yes, that Ted Hughes … the Ted Hughes who was married to Sylvia Plath.) Well, imagine my surprise that this wonderful film was based on a book … and, being who I am, I needed to get my hands on that book. Luckily, our local library had a copy and it was in!

I picked it up thinking it would make a great bedtime story for my kids (since, after all, they loved the film) but that fell flat, mostly because it’s a book that is a little above the heads of a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old. (If pressed, I would say that the target age for this book is six and up.) As for me, though, I loved the book. It is a delightful little story, full of fantasy and whimsy … just what you’d expect from a children’s book … and yet it is more than just a children’s story. There are elements of the fairy tale in Hughes’ story—the lonely child, the magical friend/guardian, the … dragon—and there are elements of science fiction (science fiction, though of the Ray Bradbury kind, not the Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke … Hughes never explains his Iron Man, he just is), and in the end it is a story of friendship and heroism.

I won’t recommend the book unreservedly. This is not a “One-Size-Fits-All-Children’s-Book” and so it is not for every child … I would say ages six and up (or a very advanced five) and those who have the patience to sit through a book that can be slow at times. Also, if your child is expecting the same adventure as in Bird’s film … be aware that other than the fact that there is a giant iron robot from space that likes to eat metal, and a child name Hogarth, there is little resemblance between the two. (And I just realized that the Hogarth in the book never has a surname, whereas in the movie, his name is Hogarth Hughes.)

Hughes’ book isn’t perfect, but it is delightful, and that makes up for a lot, in my book.

FYI: There is a “sequel” of sorts, titled The Iron Woman which deals with environmental issues.

Booking Through Thursday: Restrictions

2010-04-29T14:50:00.000-06:00

Another Thursday is upon us, and that means it is time for yet another Booking Through Thursday prompt. What will it be this week, you ask? Here you go…

Prompt: God* comes to you and tells you that, from this day forward, you may only read ONE type of book—one genre—period, but you get to choose what it is. Classics, Science Fiction, Mystery, Romance, Cookbooks, History, Business … you can choose, but you only get ONE. What genre do you pick, and why?

(*Whether you believe in God or not, pretend for the purposes of this discussion that He is real.)

I think that my response would be—surprise surprise—HORROR. Why, you say? First of all, because I enjoy it immensely. There is nothing better than a good scare. Second because it is, as I have argued over and over again in papers during my undergrad and grad careers, a genre that deals with topical social issues and is a genre that both reflects and reacts to social change. You want to understand what made up urban American anxiety in the late 1960s, read Rosemary’s Baby, or the mid-1970s? Read The Shining. Or even in 2010? Read Under the Dome or Horns. Third, “Horror” is such a wide net to cast as a genre that I would get all kinds of books! The Genre Masters: Stephen King, Ira Levin, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Joe Hill, Ramsey Campbell, H.P. Lovecraft. The more literary: Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe. The lesser-knowns: James Herbert, Charles Grant, F. Paul Wilson, Graham Masterton. The Science Fictioners: Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Jack Finney, Harlan Ellison. The Non-Fictioners: Wade Davis, Jay Anson. Pop Fiction, Haute Littérature, Pulp Fiction, Allegory, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly … it’s all there under the horror umbrella. So, yeah, I’d tell God I want to read horror from this day forward.

A-Z Wednesday: The Little People

2010-04-28T23:50:00.003-06:00

A-Z Wednesday is hosted by Reading at the Beach.

Here are the rules: Go to your stack of books and find one whose title starts with the Letter of the Week and post the following:

A photo of the book
Title and synopsis
A link (Amazon, B&N, etc.)
Come back here and leave your link in the comments

THIS WEEK’S LETTER IS: L

My “L” Book is:

The Little People
by John Christopher

(New York: Avon Books, 1968)
Paperback, 224 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: N/A, US$0.75

From the Cover: The Little People—Elves? Demons? They speak German. They carry whips. And they are connected in some mysterious way with Nazi experiments carried out in the charming old Irish castle during World War II. When members of the vacation party are found to be missing from their beds, and when pleading cries ring through the halls of the great house, terror grips hearts and minds, and the vacationers are brought face to face with the unknown…

My Thoughts: I haven’t yet read this book, I just got it for Christmas from my sister-in-law, and what I wrote then was “This book first came to my attention through the blog The Groovy Age of Horror back in March 2007, and it’s been on my Wish List since that time, but it was only this Christmas that my patience was rewarded. How can you not want a book with such an awesome/awful/groovy cover on your bookshelf? I cannot wait until it makes its way to the top of my To Be Read pile!” and that sentiment hasn’t changed even though Grad School has conspired to keep me away from this book for the moment.

That said, I wouldn’t necessarily call this a “foundation book in the genre of weird fiction” like, say, The Body Snatchers or I Am Legend or anything by Lovecraft … but it certainly is a child of that movement. How successful it is in continuing that legacy I couldn’t say, but The New York Times in the cover blurb says that The Little People is “carefully laid-on horror” so … it can’t be too bad, right?

I think what draws me to this book is that as someone who is exploring the ways in which the horror genre is a reactionary genre to social changes (horror is inherently political) the trend in the 60s and 70s to lay the root of horror and the horrific at the feet of Nazi scientists is an interesting one (another book that comes to mind in the trend is Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil) and so Christopher’s choice to couple Irish legends of fairy folk with Nazi experiments is, to say the least, intriguing to me.

Teaser Tuesdays: Watch Out There...

2010-04-27T19:30:00.000-06:00

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (Make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

This week, my teaser comes from a book that I didn’t even know existed until just recently.

The Iron Man: A Story in Five Nights

by Ted Hughes

illustrated by Andrew Davidson

(London: Faber Children’s Books, 2005)

Paperback, 81 Pages, Children’s

ISBN: 9780571226122, US$5.50

MY TEASER: “Hogarth’s father slowed, peering up to see what the lights might be, up there in the treetop. As he slowed, a giant iron foot came down in the middle of the road, a foot as big as a single bed” (16).

Doctor Who: Ghosts of India (Audio)

2010-04-27T00:50:00.001-06:00

by Mark Morris

read by David Troughton

-Doctor Who, Series 4-

(London: BBC Audio, 2009)

MP3 Audiobook, 68.9 MB, 2.4 Hours

ISBN: 9781408410240, US$11.95

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

From the Cover: India in 1947 is a country in the grip of chaos—a country torn apart by internal strife. When the Doctor and Donna arrive in Calcutta, they are instantly swept up in violent events. Barely escaping with their lives, they discover that the city is rife with tales of “half-made men,” who roam the streets at night and steal people away. These creatures, it is said, are as white as salt and have only shadows where their eyes should be. With help from India’s great spiritual leader, Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi, the Doctor and Donna set out to investigate these rumors. What is the real truth behind the “half-made men”? Why is Gandhi’s role in history under threat? And has an ancient, all-powerful god of destruction really come back to wreak his vengeance upon the Earth?

My Review: So, as you may or may not have already figured out based on the audiobook reviews on this blog, I am a Doctor Who fan, especially a fan of David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor. Now, we have started watching Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor and his adventures in the TARDIS with companion Amy Pond, and while I’m willing to give Smith the benefit of the doubt, and he’s not necessarily disappointed me, I still find myself comparing him to Tennant, and all-too-often I find myself needing a Tenth Doctor fix. That’s where these audiobooks come in … I can always get my Tenth Doctor fix in just about two hours and can enjoy every minute of it. Ghosts of India is no exception.

Author Mark Morris does an incredible job of conveying the madcap and manic energy of Tennant’s Doctor and counterpoints it with the elfin joie de vivre of Mohandas Gandhi, both of whom are perfectly balanced by the character of Donna Noble. Morris does an expert job of recreating all three characters and making them come alive on the page. Add to that a story that takes advantage of the confusion and chaos of the withdrawal of the British Raj and institution of India Home Rule is brilliant. I also loved the aliens in the story, all too often, the aliens in Doctor Who have their zippers showing (granted that that is more a symptom of the older series, and not as much of a problem in the recent Christopher Eccelston-David Tennant-Matt Smith revival) but these aliens were truly menacing. Truly.

I really cannot get enough of these Doctor Who audiobooks and won’t be giving them up any time soon. These audiobooks are absolutely perfect. They are the perfect mix of writers and readers, and in the case of Ghosts of India, reader David Troughton has a double connection to the Who franchise: not only did he portray Doctor Hobbes in the Season 4 episode “Midnight” but he is also the son of actor Patrick Troughton who portrayed the second incarnation of the Time Lord from Gallifrey.

Musing Mondays: War, What is it Good For? Absolutely Nothing! HUH!

2010-04-26T23:50:00.001-06:00

Today’s Musing Mondays (hosted by just one more page…) is as follows: With yesterday being Anzac Day, I thought I’d ask a theme question this week. Are you a reader of war books? And if so, do you have any favorites?

Well, after having to look up what Anzac Day is (and don’t I feel chagrined … I should have known what Anzac Day was, after all I bloody taught WWI to seventh graders for three years) … anyway … I have to say that while I’ve read a few here and there but I wouldn’t say I’m a fan. Especially as of late I have become less and less “enamored” of war and all its trappings and I guess that means reading less and less “war books.” It is a weird double-standard, though, because I have no problem reading horror novels and fantasy novels of the sword-and-sorcery kind (like the Conan stories and Dragonlance, etc.) so I guess I’m a hypocrite.

Danse Macabre (Audio)

2010-04-26T23:40:00.000-06:00

by Stephen King

read by William Dufris

(Grand Haven: Brilliance Audio, 2010)

MP3 Audiobook, 498.1 MB, 18.1 Hours, Nonfiction

ISBN: 9781441831071, US$24.99

ABCD Rating: BACKLIST

From the Cover: From the author of dozens of number-one New York Times best sellers and the creator of many unforgettable movies comes a vivid, intelligent, and nostalgic journey through three decades of horror as experienced through the eyes of the most popular writer in the genre. In 1981, years before he sat down to tackle On Writing, Stephen King decided to address the topic of what makes horror horrifying and what makes terror terrifying. Here, in 10 brilliant chapters, King delivers one colorful observation after another about the great stories, books, and films that comprise the horror genre—from Frankenstein and Dracula to The Exorcist, The Twilight Zone, and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers. With the insight and good humor his fans appreciated in On Writing, Danse Macabre is an enjoyable entertaining tour through Stephen King’s beloved world of horror.

My Reveiw: I am getting ready to start researching and writing my Masters Thesis this coming summer and fall—it’s going to be on the intersections of sex, violence, gender and race in contemporary horror (specifically horror written in the 1970s) and how those books and themes reflect the social changes that were occurring at that time—and given that topic, I felt that it was necessary to do a little bit of preliminary research. I won’t say that Stephen King’s Danse Macabre is perfect for such research, but it is definitely a good place to start.

Danse Macabre is King’s attempt to come to terms with 30 years of horror (from roughly 1950 to 1980) and while he does a good job of it, I found his tone to be somewhat condescending (especially towards academics) but all things considered, his overview of the genre is very comprehensive and is certainly useful to both the newbie to the genre and the old hat in the genre. What I like most about Danse Macabre, though, is learning about little known gems in the horror genre—Harlan Ellison’s Strange Wine, or Thomas Tessier’s The Nightwalker or Ramsey Campbell’s The Doll Who Ate His Mother—along side of such genre luminaries as Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives or Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes or Robert Bloch’s Psycho, and King’s discussion of Dracula, Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde is not to be missed.

This is a very useful book both in print and in audio format, especially for someone like me, who is researching and writing on the genre (and the updated Forenote in this 2010 edition is not to be missed as King discusses the state of horror in the years since first publishing this book), but my one complaint in this audiobook edition is that this is the kind of book that it would have been more effective had King himself read the book, rather than having William Dufris do the job. Not that I minded Dufris’ reading, he does a wonderful job of portraying King’s intimate and confessional tone … but had King read the audio edition himself, it would have been that much more effective.

Hellboy: Oddest Jobs

2010-04-26T15:55:00.000-06:00

edited by Christopher Golden

illustrated by Mike Mignola

-Hellboy Odd Jobs Series, Book 3-

(Milwaukie: Dark Horse Books, 2008)

Trade Paperback, 245 Pages, Short Fiction Anthology

ISBN: 9781593079444, US$14.95

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

From the Cover: In 1994, Mike Mignola created one of the most original and visually arresting comics series to ever see print: Hellboy. Tens of thousands have followed the exploits of the World’s Greatest Paranormal Investigator in comics form and novels. In 2004, writer/director Guillermo del Toro made Hellboy the number one movie in the country, reaching millions more fans, and in 2008, the character and the acclaimed filmmaker united again for Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Now, see Mike Mignola’s creation through the eyes of some of today’s best writers in prose.

This collection contains the following stories: “Jiving with Shadows and Dragons and Long, Black Trains” by Joe R. Lansdale, “Straight, No Chaser” by Mark Chadbourn, “Second Honeymoon” by John Skipp and Cody Goodfellow, “Danny Boy” by Ken Bruen, “Strange Fishing in the Western Highlands” by Garth Nix, “Salamander Blues” by Brian Keene, “The Thursday Men” by Tad Williams, “Produce” by Amber Benson, “Repossession” by Barbara Hambly, “In Cupboards and Bookshelves” by Gary A. Braunbeck, “Feet of Sciron” by Rhys Hughes, “Monster Boy” by Stephen Volk, “Evolution and Hellhole Canyon” by Don Winslow, and “A Room of One’s Own” by China Miéville.

My Review: A month or so ago my son (who is four-years-old) and I were flipping through stations looking for something to watch while my wife and daughter slept and we happened on the first Hellboy film. My son fell instantly in love with the film and character and was soon playing Hellboy, assigning his sister the role of the pyrokinetic Liz Sherman and myself the role of merman Abe Sapien. We checked Hellboy II: The Golden Army out at the library and that was all he watched for the nearly three weeks that we had it out. He’s still passionate about Hellboy (he loves the two animated films and we even got him a Nerf gun that he calls “Big Baby”) and I am working on making him and his sister a B.P.R.D. shirt (something like THIS but in glow-in-the-dark). Anyway, while we were at the library looking for Hellboy graphic novels, I cam across this little collection of short stories, and since I too am a fan not only of the films but also the graphic novels (and have been for a while now, well before the films made it trendy … sorry, was that defensive?), and since I am also a fan of the horror genre, the chance to read Hellboy adventures written by some of the best in the genre was something to jump at!

When it comes right down to it, what I really want to talk about in regards to this collection are my four favorite stories in the collection. That is not to say that they all aren’t incredible, they are—Joe R. Lansdale’s “Jiving with Shadows and Dragons and Long, Black Trains” or Tad Williams’ “The Thursday Men” or Garth Nix’s “Strange Fishing in the Western Highlands” are absolutely mind-blowing—but there are four that really stood out to me: “Salamander Blues” by Brian Keene, “Produce” by Amber Benson, “Monster Boy” by Stephen Volk, and “A Room of One’s Own” by China Miéville. These are the stories that stand out among stand outs.

“Produce” and “Monster Boy” both captured my attention because Hellboy is not the primary character. His role in both stories is secondary (yet key) and at the heart of both are children. The perception of such an apparition as Hellboy through the eyes of a child is something fascinating. In both stories, these are children who are still young enough to be fascinated by monsters and not realize that sometimes the monsters bite back. However, in “Monster Boy,” the young protagonist (if this isn’t too clichéd for you) learns that while there are in fact real monsters in the world (he witnesses Hellboy battling a dragon-like beast) sometimes it is the monsters that masquerade as men and boys that are often the most dangerous … and if you are not too careful, you might become one yourself. That is the crux of innocence, is it not? That teetering point between total belief and total realization, and Volk in particular captures that very well.

I guess it was inevitable that “Salamander Blues” would hold a special place in my heart. I am a sucker for alternate explanations for the disappearance of the Roanoke Colony in 1587 (Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter had a good one) and throwing Hellboy into the mix is simply sublime. I don’t want to give it away, so I’ll leave it at that. Finally, that brings us to “A Room of One’s Own” which is, hands down, a masterpiece of homage and pastiche. China Miéville has my eternal respect for taking Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and throwing him square into the center of one of my favorite pieces of gothic fiction: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and casting the eight-foot-tall, red and muscular Hellboy (regaled in one of Liz Sherman’s dresses) in the role of Gilman’s unnamed narrator. The conceit of the story is absolutely brilliant.

This is a fabulous collection of stories, and if you do no more than pick it up and read the four I have singled out, you will be richer for the experience … if you stick around for the others, then you will enter a universe unlike any other, one that is richly populated and wonderfully described by some of the best authors in the business. I now need to get my hands on the two predecessors: Hellboy: Odd Jobs and Hellboy: Odder Jobs.

Lovecraft: Tales

2010-04-26T15:15:00.000-06:00

by H.P. Lovecraft

edited by Peter Straub

(New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2005)

Hardcover, 838 Pages, Short Fiction Anthology

ISBN: 9781931082723, US$35.00

ABCD Rating: BACKLIST

From the Cover: A 20th-century successor to Edgar Allan Poe as the master of “weird fiction,” Howard Phillips Lovecraft once wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is far of the unknown.” In the novellas and stories that he published in such pulp magazines as Weird Tales and Amazing Stories—and in the work that remained unpublished until after his death, including some of his best writing—Lovecraft adapted the conventions of horror stories and science fiction to express an intensely personal vision, cosmic in its ramifications and fearsome in its pessimistic view of human destiny. This volume brings together 22 tales, the very best of his fiction. Early stories such as “The Outsider,” “The Music of Erich Zann,” Herbert West—Reanimator,” and “The Lurking Fear” demonstrate Lovecraft’s uncanny ability to blur the distinction between reality and nightmare, sanity and madness, the human and the non-human. “The Horror at Red Hook” and “He” reveal the fascination and revulsion Lovecraft felt for New York City; “Pickman’s Model” uncovers the frightening secret behind an artist’s work; “The Rats in the Walls” is a terrifying descent into atavistic horror; and “The Colour Out of Space” explores the eerie impact of a meteorite on a remote Massachusetts valley. In such later works as “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Whisperer in the Dark,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” and “The Shadow Out of Time,” Lovecraft developed his own nightmarish mythology in which encounters with ancient, pitiless extraterrestrial intelligences wreck havoc on hapless humans who only gradually begin to glimpse “terrifying vistas of reality, and out frightful position therein.” Moving from old New England towns haunted by occult pasts to Antarctic wastes that disclose appalling secrets, Lovecraft’s tales continue to exert dreadful fascination.

This collection contains the following stories: “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” “The Outsider,” “The Music of Erich Zann,” “Herbert West—Reanimator,” “The Lurking Fear,” “The Rats in the Wall,” “The Shunned House,” “The Horror at Red Hook,” “He,” “Cool Air,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” “Pickman’s Model,” The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, “The Colour Out of Space,” “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Whisperer in Darkness,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” “The Dreams in the Witch House,” “The Thing on the Doorstep,” “The Shadow Out of Time,” and “The Haunter of the Dark.”

My Review: H.P. Lovecraft is one of the icons of the horror genre. He stands as a bridge between such greats as Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King. His work stands as one of the lasting testaments of Weird Fiction and if Poe is the Patron and Stoker is the playwright, then Lovecraft is the Master of Ceremonies at the Grand Guignol that is the horror genre. However, I didn’t have to tell you any of that now did I?

I have read a number of Lovecraft’s short stories in the past in various anthologies and for various classes, but I have never sat down and made a concerted study of what the man had to offer. So, when I had a little bit of reading time on my hands between Quarters here, I picked up a collection of his stories from my local library (choosing this one in particular over others due to the fact that it contained the story “Herbert West—Reanimator” which is one I had not read previously and in which I was particularly interested). Little did I know what I was in for…

To say that Lovecraft is an “interesting” man is an understatement. He is a study in contradictions. His stories are thoroughly modern and yet are written in a way that evokes a language and a time before his own. They are bloody and horrific in the extreme, and yet so thoroughly Puritanical as to be written by Cotton Mather himself. They are extraordinarily otherworldly and yet so rooted in our own world. What this all comes to are some of the most striking and disturbing pieces of fiction written in English.

My personal favorites were “Herbert West—Reanimator,” “The Horror at Red Hook,” “Pickman’s Model,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” and “The Thing on the Doorstep.” In these stories, I feel, Lovecraft is at his best. He is working fast and tight in these stories, and in spite of the natural verbosity of Lovecraft’s language, he is using a real sense of economy in presenting his Reader with the horrors that await them. The devotee of HPL will notice that I skipped over such über-Lovecraftian-classics as “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror” and “At the Mountains of Madness” and this is because while I enjoyed these stories and they are the colossi of Lovecraftian horror, I feel that their reputation overshadows their actual impact and Lovecraft is at his best when he is working in a more intimate setting than the non-Euclidian geometry of R’lyeh or the abandoned stone city of the Elder Things and Shoggoths in Antarctica. Though I have to say that Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” is a better Antarctic adventure tale than Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket … but perhaps that is because it is shorter. Both Lovecraft and Poe work best in a shorter format. (The one “novel” of Lovecraft’s career, included here and titled The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is a lumbering, cumbersome creation that perhaps should have been left alone. (It was published posthumously by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei.))

All-in-all, this is a great collection of Lovecraft’s work and one that I would recommend to the serious Reader because, after all, 838 pages of dense prose is not something one undertakes lightly.

The Friday 56: Psycho-Analyzed

2010-04-23T23:45:00.000-06:00

The Friday 56 is hosted by Storytime with Tonya and Friends

RULES

Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
Turn to page 56.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post that sentence (plus one or two others if you like).
Post a link with your post to Storytime (and here on Bryan’s Book Blog).

The closest book to hand today is one I’m using for the paper I’m writing for my Music in Shakespeare class. The paper is on the use of music, sound and noise in Julie Taymor’s film Titus and how those elements work together to make an already disturbing play even more disturbing and unsettling. Naturally, some theory on how sound and music and noise work in horror films is essential. So, without further ado, here is my Friday 56:

Terror Tracks: Music, Sound and Horror Cinema

edited by Philip Hayward

(London: Equinox, 2009)

Trade Paperback, 286 Pages, Nonfiction

ISBN: 9781845532024, US$29.95

My 56: “The prelude music [in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho] that includes presentations of both the ‘Psycho chord’ and the ‘Psycho theme’ are used for three scenes of Marion in her car” (56).

Friday Finds: April 23, 2010

2010-04-23T23:00:00.002-06:00

Friday Finds (hosted by Should Be Reading)

What great books did you hear about/discover this past week?

Share with us your FRIDAY FINDS!

I’ve just got three for this week. I came across Black Hills at my local library (I didn’t realize Dan Simmons had a new book out) and the other two are books that I have discovered (and are assigned reading) for my Afrofuturism class.

Black Hills by Dan Simmons

Lilith’s Brood: Dawn, Adulthood Rights, and Imago by Octavia E. Butler

Nova by Samuel R. Delany

The 50 Best Author vs. Author Put-Downs of All Time

2010-04-23T02:25:00.002-06:00

Taken from Examiner.com

April 16, 2010, 4:36 a.m.

by Michelle Kerns—Book Examiner

One man’s Shakespeare is another man’s trash fiction. Consider this pithy commentary on the Great Bard’s work: With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare. ... But, of course, there must be SOME writers we can all agree on as truly great, right? Like Jane Austen. Or not: Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone. Robert Frost? If it were thought that anything I wrote was influenced by Robert Frost, I would take that particular work of mine, shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes. John Steinbeck, surely? I can’t read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up.

Oh, dear. But don’t think these pleasantries were penned in a frolicsome hour by dilettante book critics with an unslaked thirst for a bit of author-bashing. The Shakespearean take-down was George Bernard Shaw, the Austen shin-bone basher was Mark Twain, the anti-Frost poet was James Dickey, and the quick!-bring-me-the-bucket-it’s-Steinbeck was James Gould Cozzens. Yes, hell hath no fury like one author gleefully savaging another author’s work. And, lucky for us, there’s plenty to be had where that came from. Cast your eye on these, the 50 most memorable author vs. author put-downs (in no particular order; though if you’ve got a favorite, by all means, comment on it, below).

1. Ernest Hemingway, according to Vladimir Nabokov (1972): As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.

2. Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote, according to Martin Amis (1986): Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846—the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do.

3. John Keats, according to Lord Byron (1820): Here are Johnny Keats’s piss a-bed poetry ... There is such a trash of Keats and the like upon my tables, that I am ashamed to look at them.

4. Edgar Allan Poe, according to Henry James (1876): An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.

5. John Updike, according to Gore Vidal (2008): I can’t stand him. Nobody will think to ask because I’m supposedly jealous; but I out-sell him. I’m more popular than he is, and I don’t take him very seriously ... oh, he comes on like the worker’s son, like a modern-day D.H. Lawrence, but he’s just another boring little middle-class boy hustling his way to the top if he can do it.

6. William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, according to Samuel Pepys (1662): ...we saw Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.

7. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, according to Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851): Bulwer nauseates me; he is the very pimple of the age’s humbug. There is no hope of the public, so long as he retains an admirer, a reader, or a publisher.

8. Charles Dickens, according to Arnold Bennett (1898): About a year ago, from idle curiosity, I picked up The Old Curiosity Shop, and of all the rotten vulgar un-literary writing...! Worse than George Eliot’s. If a novelist can’t write where is the beggar?

9. J.K. Rowling, according to Harold Bloom (2000): How to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.

10. Oscar Wilde, according to Noel Coward (1946): Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.

11. Fyodor Dostoevsky, according to Vladimir Nabokov: Dostoevsky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity—all this is difficult to admire.

12. John Milton’s Paradise Lost, according to Samuel Johnson: Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.

13. Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, according to Mark Twain (1897): Also, to be fair, there is another word of praise due to this ship’s library: it contains no copy of The Vicar of Wakefield, that strange menagerie of complacent hypocrites and idiots, of theatrical cheap-john heroes and heroines, who are always showing off, of bad people who are not interesting, and good people who are fatiguing.

14. Ezra Pound, according to Conrad Aiken (1918): For in point of style, or manner, or whatever, it is difficult to imagine anything much worse than the prose of Mr. Pound. It is ugliness and awkwardness incarnate. Did he always write so badly?

15. James Joyce’s Ulysses, according to George Bernard Shaw (1921): I have read several fragments of Ulysses in its serial form. It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilisation; but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon around Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it; and ask them whether on reflection they could see anything amusing in all that foul mouthed, foul minded derision and obscenity.

16. George Bernard Shaw, according to Roger Scruton (1990): Concerning no subject would he be deterred by the minor accident of complete ignorance from penning a definitive opinion.

17. Jane Austen, according to Charlotte Brontë (1848): Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written Pride and Prejudice ... than any of the Waverly novels? I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.

18. Goethe, according to Samuel Butler (1874): I have been reading a translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Is it good? To me it seems perhaps the very worst book I ever read. No Englishman could have written such a book. I cannot remember a single good page or idea. ... Is it all a practical joke? If it really is Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister that I have been reading, I am glad I have never taken the trouble to learn German.

19. John Steinbeck, according to James Gould Cozzens (1957): I can’t read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up. I couldn’t read the proletariat crap that came out in the ‘30s.

20. Herman Melville, according to D.H. Lawrence (1923): Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like Moby Dick. ... One wearies of the grand serieux. There’s something false about it. And that’s Melville. Oh dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!

21. Jonathan Swift, according to Samuel Johnson (1791): Swift has a higher reputation than he deserves ... I doubt whether The Tale of a Tub to be his; for he never owned it, and it is much above his usual manner.

22. Gertrude Stein, according to Wyndham Lewis (1927): Gertrude Stein’s prose-song is a cold black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through and all along.

23. Emile Zola, according to Anatole France (1911): His work is evil, and he is one of those unhappy beings of whom one can say that it would be better had he never been born.

24. J.D. Salinger, according to Mary McCarthy (1962): I don’t like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn’t a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don’t like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and it’s so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egotism. I simply can’t stand it.

25. Mark Twain, according to William Faulkner (1922): A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.

26. Marcel Proust, according to Evelyn Waugh (1948): I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.

27. William Faulkner, according to Ernest Hemingway: Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes—and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he’s had his first one.

28. E.M. Forster’s Howards End, according to Katherine Mansfield (1915): Putting my weakest books to the wall last night I came across a copy of Howards End and had a look into it. Not good enough. E.M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea. And I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella.

29. Voltaire, according to Charles Baudelaire (1864): I grow bored in France—and the main reason is that everybody here resembles Voltaire ... the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siècle.

30. Charles Dickens, according to George Meredith: Not much of Dickens will live, because it has so little correspondence to life ... If his novels are read at all in the future, people will wonder what we saw in them, save some possible element of fun meaningless to them.

31. Jane Austen, according to Mark Twain (1898): I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

32. Gustave Flaubert, according to George Moore (1888): Flaubert bores me. What nonsense has been talked about him!

33. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, according to Gore Vidal (1980): He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the U.S.

34. Ernest Hemingway, according to Tom Wolfe: Take Hemingway. People always think that the reason he’s easy to read is that he is concise. He isn’t. I hate conciseness—it’s too difficult. The reason Hemingway is easy to read is that he repeats himself all the time, using “and” for padding.

35. James Joyce’s Ulysses, according to Virginia Woolf (1922): I dislike Ulysses more and more—that is I think it more and more unimportant; and don’t even trouble conscientiously to make out its meanings. Thank God, I need not write about it.

36. William Shakespeare, according to George Bernard Shaw (1896): With the exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of understanding any less obvious form of indignity.

37. Charles Lamb, according to Thomas Carlyle: Charles Lamb I sincerely believe to be in some considerable degree insane. A more pitiful, rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering tomfool I do not know. He is witty by denying truisms and abjuring good manners. His speech wriggles hither and thither with an incessant painful fluctuation; not an opinion in it or a fact or even a phrase that you can thank him for. ...

38. Edith Sitwell, according to Dylan Thomas (1934): Isn’t she a poisonous thing of a woman, lying, concealing, flipping, plagiarising, misquoting, and being as clever a crooked literary publicist as ever.

39. James Jones, according to Ernest Hemingway (1951): To me he is an enormously skillful fuck-up and his book will do great damage to our country. Probably I should re-read it again to give you a truer answer. But I do not have to eat an entire bowl of scabs to know they are scabs ... I hope he kills himself. ...

40. Sir Walter Scott, according to Mark Twain (1883): Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks ... progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the silliness and emptiness, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote.

41. Jane Austen, according to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1861): I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world.

42. Robert Frost, according to James Dickey (1981): If it were thought that anything I wrote was influenced by Robert Frost, I would take that particular work of mine, shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes. ... a more sententious, holding-forth old bore, who expected every hero-worshipping adenoidal little twerp of a student-poet to hang on his every word I never saw.

43. Tom Wolfe, according to John Irving (1999): He doesn’t know how to write fiction, he can’t create a character, he can’t create a situation ... You see people reading him on airplanes, the same people who are reading John Grisham, for Christ’s sake. ... I’m using the argument against him that he can’t write, that his sentences are bad, that it makes you wince. It’s like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine. ... You know, if you were a good skater, could you watch someone just fall down all the time? Could you do that? I can’t do that.

44. Bret Harte, according to Mark Twain (1878): Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward, a Jeremy Diddler, he is brim full of treachery, and he conceals his Jewish birth as carefully as if he considered it a disgrace. How do I know? By the best of all evidence, personal observation.

45. Thomas Carlyle, according to Anthony Trollope (1850): I have read—nay, I have bought!—Carlyle’s Latter Day Pamphlets, and look on my eight shillings as very much thrown away. To me it appears that the grain of sense is so smothered up in a sack of the sheerest trash, that the former is valueless. ... I look on him as a man who was always in danger of going mad in literature and who has now done so.

46. Henry James, according to Arnold Bennett: It took me years to ascertain that Henry James’s work was giving me little pleasure. ... In each case I asked myself: “What the dickens is this novel about, and where does it think it’s going to?” Question unanswerable! I gave up. Today I have no recollection whatever of any characters or any events in either novel.

47. James Fenimore Cooper, according to Mark Twain (1895): Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in Deerslayer, and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.

48. Gore Vidal, according to Martin Amis (1995): Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice—registry offices, Romeo and Juliet, the disposable diaper—is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket, or sheer propaganda.

49. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, according to Edward Fitzgerald (1861): She and her sex had better mind the kitchen and her children; and perhaps the poor; except in such things as little novels, they only devote themselves to what men do much better, leaving that which men do worse or not at all.

I did say at the start of this unending Marah that these snippets of snarkiness weren’t necessarily in order. I have, however, saved my absolute favorite for the end:

50. Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full, according to Norman Mailer (1998): The book has gas and runs out of gas, fills up again, goes dry. It is a 742-page work that reads as if it is fifteen hundred pages long. ... At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred pound woman. Once she gets on top, it’s over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated. So you read and you grab and you even find delight in some of these mounds of material. Yet all the while you resist—ho you resist!—letting three hundred pounds take you over.

Now, that’s a non-clichéd review for you.

Booking Through Thursday: Earth Day

2010-04-22T10:30:00.000-06:00

Another Thursday is upon us, and that means it is time for yet another Booking Through Thursday prompt. What will it be this week, you ask? Here you go…

Prompt: It’s Earth Day … what are you reading? Are your reading habits changing for the sake of the environment? What are you doing for the sake of the planet today?

I don’t know that I’m doing anything terribly different today than I do normally. We try to live pretty earth/green/eco-conscious in our day-to-day lives—reduce, reuse, recycle, compost when we can, etc., etc.—and so in terms of what I’m doing for the sake of the planet today I am taking the bus to campus, but I do that every day, so I don’t know that it counts, per se. I dunno.

As for reading habits … unfortunately, right now my reading habits are being dictated by my grad school curriculum, so Shakespeare, Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler are the order of the day. I can’t deviate too much there. However, in the English 101 class I am teaching, the basic over-arcing theme through the program is one of sustainability (our primary text is Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma with the secondary text being a collection of essays that all deal with the question of sustainability in one way, shape, form or another), so there is that.

Otherwise, I’ll probably try to read an eco-themed book to my kids tonight for bedtime (if they let me … they have their favorites, especially my daughter, and deviation from those is, shall we say, frowned upon) … but Earth Day is every day in our house or at least we try to make it every day, so I don’t know that I am doing anything terribly different than my normal routine. I know, a boring answer, but you asked, so there you go.

Happy Earth Day Everyone!

2010-04-22T10:15:00.001-06:00

A-Z Wednesday: The Keep

2010-04-21T23:05:00.000-06:00

A-Z Wednesday is hosted by Reading at the Beach.

Here are the rules: Go to your stack of books and find one whose title starts with the Letter of the Week and post the following:

A photo of the book
Title and synopsis
A link (Amazon, B&N, etc.)
Come back here and leave your link in the comments

THIS WEEK’S LETTER IS: K

My “K” Book is:

The Keep
by F. Paul Wilson

-The Adversay Cycle, Book 1-
(New York: Berkley Books, 1982)
Paperback, 406 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: 9780425053249, US$3.50

From the Cover: The message is received from a Nazi commander stationed in a remote castle high in the Transylvania alps: “Something is murdering my men.” Immediately an elite SS extermination squad is sent to destroy whatever enemy dares challenge the might of the Third Reich. And the battle is joined. A battle more awesomely terrifying than anything ever experienced. Between the ultimate evil created by man … and the unthinkable, undreamed of, undead horror it has awakened from centuries of darkness to suck the life from living souls again.

My Thoughts: This is a book that, like some of the others I have posted this go around in the A-Z Wednesday meme, I haven’t read in a number of years. I think the last time I picked it up was either in eighth or ninth grade, so a good twenty years ago. However, it is one of those books that has always stayed with me, and one that I remember. Interestingly enough, though, for all the “history” I have with the book, it was not until I was putting this post together that I discovered that it was not a stand-alone title, that in fact it was the first book in a series of six! Go figure.

Anyway, in terms of “New Weird Fiction,” F. Paul Wilson’s little tale of Nazi’s getting picked off by an ancient evil is reminiscent of that Grandmaster of the Weird, H.P. Lovecraft. I say this because there is an intricate background of elder races and ancient beings that predate humankind that is at work in The Keep and this is very much like Lovecraft’s Elder Gods and the nightmare city of R’lyeh. (Wilson himself has acknowledged HPL’s influence and even adds Robert E. Howard and Robert Ludlum to the mix of influences on the novel.) The Keep is a tight, claustrophobic book and Wilson is one of the best of the new (using the term to loosely describe American horror from about 1970 on to the present day) cycle of American horror writers.