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I had two reading goals for this year: blog at least one sentence for every book, and read more nonfiction. I haven't failed either - YET. But it's only a matter of time.

*dutifully posts*

Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito
Where to begin. First of all, this book is on crack. Cross between Christopher Moore (improbable madcap adventures, but with less focus on character POV) and Mark Leyner (nonstop jokes between the writer and the reader, but with less focus on author POV). It's very funny and, with a million literary and cultural references, very hip. More than either of those, though, it's very American, despite being set primaily in Laos.( Read more... )

Mark Fainaru Wada and Lance Williams, Game of Shadows
Nonfiction. A compulsively readable book. I opened to a random page halfway through, and couldn't stop reading until I got to the end -- despite having no real interest in the topic. If you watch ESPN or other major sports news shows, you'll probably have heard of this book: it's the one that blew the cover off mid-nineties steroid abuses in Major League Baseball. ( Read more... )

James Meek, The People's Act of Love
Gave up after one chapter. The summary was promising -- Siberian work camp escapee stumbles into small town, causes havoc -- and I was hoping this book would mix what I think of as a male genre, poitical suspense, with what I think of as a female genre, small-town romantic intrigue. Unfortunately, The People's Act of Love doesn't live up to 1) its summary 2) its hype as an "international literary sensation" 3) its title (I am such a sucker for Red titles, it's not even funny). ( Read more... )

Celestine Vaite, Frangipani
Wonderful. Marvelous. Refreshingly direct. As many kind words as I had for Tom Robbins, I actually prefer prose like Vaite's -- at no point does it kick the reader out of the narrative to admire itself. It's just as idiosyncratic, but it works with the narrative. Another compulsively readable book. Here's the first paragraph: When a woman doesn't collect her man's pay she gets zero francs because her man goes to the bar with his colleagues to celebrate the end of the week and you know how that is, eh? A drink for les copains! Then he comes home with empty pockes, but he's very happy. He tells his woman stories that don't stand straight to make her laugh, but she doesn't feel like laughing at all. She's cranky and she just wants her man to shut up.( Read more... )

Emily Ruete b. Sayyida Said, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar
Nonfiction. Although my goals are to read more nonfiction and to blog about everything I read, it's hard, because I don't really know how to discuss nonfiction. Normally with books I talk about the author's style, or the central themes, or whatever, but all of that seems sort of irrevelent with an historical work like this; as a history student, I know that the flaws actually enhance the value of the work rather than detract from it. ( Read more... )

And! I bought manga! There was this going-out-of-buisness sale -- not at the bookstore, at the CD store, but I felt so good about saving 75% that I went and blew all of the money I'd saved on manga I wouldn't otherwise have bought. XD

Yun Kouga, Earthian (vol 1)
My feelings are mixed. The first volume is very episodic, which is cool, but a lot of the episodes are cliched, which isn't. Yun Kouga has a very stong design sense, which is cool, but there almost no backgrounds, which isn't (this reminds me of Clover, although Earthian is not as overdesigned as Clover). What's really getting to me, though, is the sense of mounting dread. ^^; Starting from the very first chapter, and definitely by the second, you get the feeling that something is VERY VERY WRONG here. The plot is that Angels, who come from a planet called Eden, are sent down to Earth in pairs. One member marks down everything good that humans do (plusses), and the other marks down everything bad (minuses), and if the score ever reaches -10,000, the earth will be destroyed. And this has been going on for five billion years. ( Read more... )

Lee Young You, Kill Me, Kiss Me (Vol 2)
The art continues to be good, in an exaggerated BRATZ fashion-doll kind of way that reminds me of OEL manga. But WHAT THE HECK, THIS IS NOT THE MANGA I WANTED TO BUY. The author says it best, in this note at the end:

Because the story is completely different from volume 1, many of you might be saying, "What a betrayal! I want more crossdressing!"( Read more... )


Also read:
-Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (memoirs, told backwards like Momento! Grrrreat stuff, the writing is hodgepodge but briiliant. Like Sylvia Plath with a dash of screwball family comedy.)
-Haruki Murakami, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (completely bizarre and totally great, obviously the inspiration for this fic)
-Haruki Murakami, Norweigian Wood (surpringly normal! I think this fic draws from it)
-Jasper Fforde, The Eyrie Affair (I don't think I like the Thursday next series, too many clever parts that, if you stop to think about them, don't make sense)
-The Complete Letters of Arthur Rimbauld (I love his letter-writing style, he's so bratty and demanding XD)
To-read:
-Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
-David Sosnowski, Vamped
-Amitov Ghosh, The Hungry Tide

Leaving for the weekend, see you guys Monday. Uploaded these elsewhere, here's a copy-paste before the files expire:

20th Century Boys (edit: taken down)

Manga by Naoki Urasawa, who also did Monster. Like Monster, it's meant for an older audience, has an adult protagonist, and deals with dark psychological themes. Unlike Monster, it has giant robots and psychic powers.

Sort of.

And some chibi icons! From the new FMA OAV.

01. 02. 03.
( Sum More Icons )

FMA OAVS:
1. CHIBI PARTY 6 MINS.
2. MODERN AU 3 MINS.
3. AT ADVENTURE 10 MINS.

Not subtitled (though #2 is wordless anyway). AT = Alternate Timeline.

I was going to wait until I'd at least made it halfway through The Apprentice by Lewis Libby before I blogged about it, but I don't think I can make it that far. This book is really bad. Not that I hadn't known it would be -- the author is Scooter Libby. (Yes, that Scooter Libby.)

Plot: a raging blizzard forces half a dozen travelers (I refuse to call them "wayfairers," Libby uses that word six times in the first six pages) to spend the night together at a small mountain inn. Suspicion! Intrigue! In other words, it's a locked-room mystery. (Also, it's set in 1903 Japan. I mention this fact last (and in parentheses) because if I hadn't read the back of the book, I wouldn't have been able to tell the setting was Japan until halfway through the first chapter, and then only from the names.)

The Apprentice is absolutely horrifying. At first I thought I'd have a good time laughing at Scooter Libby's expense, and the writing is bad enough to be funny. It's terrifying, though, because I recognize the style. Scooter Libby writes...like me. (Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!)

He does! Or maybe I write like him, I'm not sure which would be worse. The resemblance really is amazingly creepy. Below the cut are some excerpts, so that you can see what I mean. I'm going to explain what I think is wrong with them, because this will hopefully keep me from making the same mistakes.

( Read more... )

General problems with the prose are:
1) sense of temporal disconnect. I don't know what's going on until the sentence after it happens. Alternately, I'm told a fact as if it's already something I know, even though this is my first time hearing it.
2) details included without any thought of how they are adding to the atmosphere. Libby can obviously picture the scene, and his details are specific if somewhat confusing, but he describes physical things without cluing the reader in to their emotional or other significance. There are quite a few emotions that go along with figures struggling into an inn from a storm: isolation, annoyance, relief at having avoided death by exposure. Just describing the scene is not enough. Libby doesn't have to go overboard with the exposition, but more consistently isolating (I think that's what he's going for here) adjectives would definitely help, as would his sticking to details that enforce isolation.
3) Similarly, a laugh or a shrug can mean more than one thing, and Libby should do a better job of informing us which one it is. If Libby told us enough about the characters that we could figure out the meaning of their actions based on their personalities, that would be one thing, but he doesn't and we can't. (That's why this story reminds me of fanfiction! Although there is also the part where it is supposedly set in 1903 Japan *cough*.)

Put most simply, the fact that there is a lot of detail in this story does not make it any easier to understand what is going on.

As seen in Yasmin's journal, ( Works in Progress Meme )

Two more things!

1. Via annnimeee:

Save streaming video from youtube, google video, etc using this site
To convert the video from VLC-compatible to something else, check out the webmaster's blog

2. [Poll #697408]

• Posted some Band AU fic recs to fanthology and you should too, because damn if I haven't been having way more fun reading these than the fairytale fics.

• I bet McCauley Culkin has a blog.

• A short lesson in How To Use the Internet: internet image formats (summary: photos = use jpeg, cartoons = use png, animation = use gif)

• Techonrati: the next generation in vanity searches. (It seems that people with technorati profiles show up in search results more regularly than people without profiles, so if you do a search on yourself and the first three results are me, ummm, I'm really sorry about that.)

SEE ALSO: GOOGLE BLOGSEARCH

• Greatest invention ever. (Well, no, but the story makes you go awwwww!)

***

Good Night, and Good Luck:

God, the writing on Murrow's show. It almost feels cheap that Clooney should get the credit for this, when the words were there and the footage was there and in many cases spliced into the movie unedited. I liked what he did with the spies, though, they way they weren't targetted while innocent people were. Emphasizes how much McCarthy's actions were a power trip rather than an effective strategy.

Marginally related: a friend of the family is about to publish a book about fear in the fifties. (She said at dinner that people have forgotten how idotic Civil Defense was and how much protest there was against it, but I don't think that's true: there was that episode of South Park with the volcano, wasn't there?)