The Princess Bride- William Goldman
Mar. 26th, 2008 10:50 am![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
I know This Much is True, Wally Lamb
I am so glad I picked this up. The story of the twin brother of the paranoid schizophrenic trying to heal his own anger issues while somehow saving his brother sounds exactly like the kind of Oprah’s Book Club thing I would avoid, but it is beautiful. It ends up all wound up with issues of race in ways I didn’t expect, and it also ends up all wound up in family histories and lies and secrets, which hit me hard. It reminds me ever so vaguely of the things I like best about Faulker, in fact. In any case, it is exactly as sad as you knew it would be- because while Dominic, our narrator, is still capable of healing and creating a life for himself, there is no salvation for Thomas. Some bits might tend toward the overwrought, but I really found this beautiful.
These shorts remind me of nothing so much as the Dubliners. They are small, self-contained, sparse and brightly polished, centering on moments of epiphany (So pretty much exactly the Dubliners). I sometimes think that they are a little too overwrought for the depth of the epiphany they are actually dealing with, and some of them are a little too concerned with being deep and obscure, I think. But thought provoking and at times beautiful.
The writing here is thoroughly mediocre. The premise is perfectly good SF. A technological singularity, when humankind simply cannot assimilate the rate of change in their culture (especially when brought on my nano-technology style stuff) is a perfectly respectable premise. The slightly surreal, dadaish feel of the later chapters is a bit of a high. Mostly I just adore his juxtaposition of Leninist revolutionaries, trying to bring about a change that is absolutely small beans, really, and completely unable to wrap their heads around the thing that they are part of now. Cute little book.
Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
This is something else. Is it a murder mystery? Historical fiction? An apocalypse allegory? A theology musing? A semiotics treatise? Damned if I know. Maybe one day I’ll be smart enough to understand this book; in the meantime, I’m just in awe. Eco plays with metatextuality in his, what, four different framing narratives. William of Baskerville is an amalgam of Occam and Holmes, and works beautifully as such. He is the mouthpiece for fascinating speculation on knowledge, what we can know, how to interpret signs, whether truth can be found. I have no words for the awesomeness of this book.
Dancers at the Edge of Time (#1, An Alien Heat), Michael Moorcock
This is one of the all-time pioneers of the Dying Earth far-future genre, which I have adored in some of its later manifestations (Songs of Distant Earth, stuff in Hyperion, etc). Our naïve childlike narrator is okay, and the actual time travel hijinks are relatively entertaining, but it’s a short book that reads more like a thought experiment than a developed novel of substance, and far future humanity is too foreign to be sympathetic or understandable without far better development, without letting us into their society and heads far better than he does.
Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman may be following in the Neil Stephenson path of “got too famous and now his editors are afraid of him.” Fragile Things has some incredible, vibrant, creepy, ingenious, imaginative stories that only Neil Gaiman could have written. The Lovecraftian ones are especially welcome, as Gaimon writes Lovecraft-style oblique horror a lot better than Lovecraft ever did. The Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft crossover (yes, I’m serious) is exactly the sort of crazy crossover done perfectly that one expects from really good fanfic. I love those moments when published sci-fi authors reveal themselves to be just big fanboys like us, you know? Anyway, that’s some of them. But there are also a