I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (AUGUST 2011 EDITION)

[defrog]

Book reports blah blah blah.

JUST FINISHED

Child Of Fortune by Norman Spinrad

I bought a copy of this book in the late 80s but never got around to reading it. It’s probably as well as I don’t think I was mentally prepared for Spinrad’s complicated, lyrical prose at the time, if only because even now I found it somewhat of a slog, with Spinrad spinning hippy-dippy psychedelic imagery peppered with Spanish, French and German phrases to the point of pretentiousness. But I’m used to Spinrad’s style by now, and as usual I’ve found it’s worth the effort to slash through it to get to the meat of the story – which is, basically, an interplanetary allegory of the 60s Flower Children movement and the hippie intellectual quest for self-discovery via travels, psychotropic drugs and free love. Whatever you think of the reality of the Flower Children, Spinrad does a great job of capturing the spirit of the ideology that drove it without ignoring the realities of where it ultimately led for a lot of people.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that last month’s book report said I was just starting this book. Well, I did say it was somewhat of a slog. And in case yr wondering where I found the time to finish the books listed in the Recent Titles section, the answer is simple: they were read in parallel, for I tend to read two or three books at a time.

JUST STARTED

The Grave Robber Chronicles 1: Cavern Of The Blood Zombies by Xu Lei

Here’s something you don’t come across every day: an English translation of a best-selling series from mainland China, written by a guy who runs a trading company and wrote it in his spare time, about modern-day grave robber Uncle Three raiding tombs and fighting vampires and zombies with his nephew. That alone was incentive enough to give this a try. We’ll see how it goes.

RECENT TITLES

Sifting Through The Madness For The Word, The Line, The Way: New Poems by Charles Bukowski

I’ve always been wary of posthumous works, particularly in the case of Bukowski, (easily one of my favorite writers and one of my biggest influences), who has been producing volumes and volumes of new poems despite being dead for 16 years. But I’ve yet to be disappointed by him, and this is no exception. His best work may have been long behind him, but Bukowski is one of those writers whose worst stuff is worlds better than a lot of other people’s best stuff, even if he is telling a lot of the same kinds of tales over and over (booze, fights, bad women, good women, playing the horses and generally being unwilling and unable to fit into Decent Society). But he tells them oh so beautifully. 

Exterminator! by William S Burroughs

This is the first Burroughs book I ever read – but I checked it out of the university library, and after that I concentrated my purchases on Burroughs books I hadn’t read yet, so I never actually owned a copy of this. Now that I’ve read almost all of his books, I went ahead and bought this with the idea of re-reading it to see how it compares now that I’m familiar with his style, versus 20+ years ago when I had no idea what I was in for. It’s admittedly a different experience in that it’s far more comfortable territory and less challenging, but it was still a delight to revisit these fractured tales of sex, drugs, violence and CIA conspiracies. 

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham

This is my second time reading Wyndham after being impressed by The Day Of The Triffids, and in many ways this one is even better – a post-apocalypse story set a thousand years after the “Tribulation”, where life appears to have gone back to an agrarian society with heavy fundamentalist Christian overtones, and where mutations are commonplace and considered blasphemy. Which becomes problematic for a young group of telepaths who only avoid punishment because their mutation isn’t physical. It’s a good story and Wyndham tells it well, especially in terms of main character David gradually discovering that there’s a lot more to the outside world than he’s been led to believe. Highly recommended. 

King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard

The first English-language novel set in Africa, and the novel that single-handedly invented the “Lost World” subgenre, featuring Alan Quatermain in search of the fabled diamond mine. It may have been groundbreaking, and it may be comparatively conversational in tone for its time, but it contains enough Victorian melodramatic corniness to make it difficult for me to take too seriously. Plus, there’s that really long, tedious civil-war bit in the middle. It’s not a bad tale, and points for originality, but I don’t know that I’ll be reading Haggard again. 

Physics Of The Impossible by Michio Kaku 

If you watch the Discovery Channel, you’ve probably seen physicist Michio Kaku apply real-world science to sci-fi and distinguish between what’s not possible now and what could be possible in the future. This book works along the same lines, looking at the scientific limitations of SF tropes like time travel, teleportation, laser guns, etc, and what advances in science and technology would be required to make them actually happen. Probably not for everyone, but for aspiring SF writers like me, it’s a handy reference guide.

Anything is possible,

This is dF