William S. Burroughs

My uncle always has found really interesting books for me to read. No genre could be excluded from the books he lends me: obscure sci-fi, dense fiction, or subversive texts are all expected and subsequently consumed by my “innocent” mind. I had received “Naked Lunch” for my birthday last year, but finally came to it in my reading queue. It’s something that’s hard to describe, so I won’t spend too much time talking about it, because I simply can’t put it into words that would do it justice.

This Book is Insane

Essentially, the plot is “a dude in the 60s takes far too much heroin and has all sorts of wacky and oftentimes disturbing stories to share.” But I’m not even sure of that. Some of it focuses on the depravity and desperation that “junk” addicts experience in their quest for more drugs, but “Naked Lunch” also takes frequent sidetrips into “the interzone,” which is where odd and thoroughly demonic creatures exist.

This Book is Disturbing

I don’t mean disturbing as in “OMG WE NEED TO CALL CONGRESS,” but in a “I’ve never been exposed to this kind of content” before kind of way.

Plot? What Plot.

There’s some semblance of a plot, but not really. Don’t focus too much on the overarching plot and instead narrow down to each individual story contained within. Otherwise your brain will explode.

This Book is Great

Burroughs created a masterpiece. Read it. Learn from it. Enjoy this oddly amusing and dark set of half-truths and prose known as “Naked Lunch.” You won’t regret it. Or maybe you will. But really, it’s only 200 pages. And if you hate it, you can just write a book like this and make me an evil character in it.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

A friend and I regularly swap books with each other. Although sometimes aiming to give them a book they’ll really enjoy, often we decide to share something that may be a little out of the normal topic or genre that they’re used to reading. It’s a great way to break out of our literary molds and be forced to read something that we may otherwise pass by in favor of something else. “In The Shadow of the Wind” is one of those books. Set in a slowly decaying Barcelona that has been overcome by fascism and an uncertain political climate, this book dips heavily into Gothic imagery and relies on a complex storyline to wave a complicated story about a teenage boy who finds a mysterious book from a secret book repository which his father introduced him to. Discovering this book is not what it seems, and quickly the protagonist is thrown into a quest to discover what really happened to the author of the book he found, and to discover why all copies of this text are being destroyed.

BUT OKAY LET’S NOT MAKE THIS A BORING REVIEW NOBODY READS. Here’s all you need to know about “In the Shadow of the Wind:”

It’s Gritty, and that’s a good thing.

This is a dark book. Characters are beat up. They die in terrible ways. After exploring abandoned mansions, they end up in even creepier environments. You can’t help but fall into this world Zafon creates.

The Main Character Is Unbelievable

Even WITH the reader thinking “well, this is a gothic novel, so I’m pretty sure it will be over the top and not altogether believable,” the author still had to assume we’d be paying attention to what the characters do and why they do it. I never really did figure out why he was doing anything, other than “it’s something to do, I suppose.” Even when his life was being threatened over this book, he was like “screw it. I’m going to solve this mystery! For the books!” Or something.

Story Arcs Begin, Stall, and Never Reappear Again

In this style of story, the reader should be looking out for all sorts of story arcs and be trying to figure out how they all fit together. This only happened about 50% of the time in “The Shadow of the Wind.” The first hundred pages or so of the book involve a 10-year-old character going after a much older girl, and is represented in all sorts of pre-teenage sexual angst. Then all of a sudden his heart is broken, he moves on, and we never really hear from her again. What the hell? Other characters just kind of appear, pledge their help, and then leave again. I can’t tell if this is a setup for a followup book, or just a case where the author got bored with these storylines.

Underwhelming Ending

It just kind of ends, but we probably already predicted what will happen with 20% left in the book. The only reason the reader keeps going is in hopes of clearing up why these story arcs are never mentioned again. Spoiler: they aren’t mentioned again. Reader is left unsatisfied and ultimately ends up eating a box of twinkies to fill this hole in their soul.

Read It Anyway

I’m not saying it’s a bad book or anything. When Zafon actually does address a story arc, it’s done in an over-the-top fashion and imagery that we’d come to expect from a post-WWII gothic novel. It’s gritty. It’s fun. Despite the generally angsty main character, the other figures who show up in the book are entertaining and much more fun to read about. If anything, the book is a collection of loosely assembled novellas that happen to make a larger plot. Reading each loosely defined section is great, but just don’t expect literary bliss after the author stitches these all together.

Google claims there are only 15,800 instances of the word “Oddishness” on the internet. I’ll leave it up for debate if this is a) an expected number, or b) grossly exaggerated. As previously noted, I’ve started spooling up my reading quota from the earlier production of roughly one book completed per month. I’ll start jabbering about them soon enough. For the first post, I’ll briefly go over the books I completed in the waning months of the recently departed year of 2011. After that, each book should get its own post. Unless I get lazy and start summing them up.

The Books

Dinosaur Comics: Dudes Already Know About Chickens

Ryan North

Dinosaur Comics aren’t the kind of thing that one can read for hours on end: after about ten consecutive strips, your brain will simply be too caught up in the sheer awesomeness of the previous comics it just read and completely shut down to any further thinking until it can clear the thought queue.

In all seriousness, when I need an intellectual stimulant with a heavy dose of humor, Dinosaur Comics is usually the answer. Read it; enjoy it. And my version has a hand-drawn T-Rex wearing a Starfleet Uniform (TNG-era, of course) from Ryan himself. It’s that awesome.

The World Without Us

Alan Weisman

Weisman is a journalist, and it shows. This book showed a lot of promise, but it often fell short of truly being great: it’s better described as a collection of short stories which focus on a different aspect of humanity’s influence on the environment. Just when each story starts to become interesting, he suddenly cuts it off and shifts to something completely different. It wasn’t a bad read and is an interesting thought experiment, but just don’t expect anything mind-blowing here.

The Sacrifice and Other Steam-Powered Stories

Valve Software

Valve is one of the few game companies that still cares about creating back story, exploratory texts, and creating a universe besides that presented during the course of the game. This book is the printed form of the work by their very talented graphic novel team.  Tracing the story of the four main “characters” from Left 4 Dead, The Sacrifice is a great zombie comic. Following it up is a series of short comics based off the Team Fortress 2 classes. I have nothing but unbridled rage for TF2, but these comics were entertaining, original, and ultimately kept me amused for far longer than the Hat Store Simulator TF2. Wrapping it up is Lab Rat, which was everything Portal 2 should have been, but wasn’t.

Literary Journals

I also pick up literary journals, collections, and magazines. Occasionally I’ll talk about exceptional stories or poems. Most aren’t available online, and I’m more than willing to let you borrow my copy to read! Please! I promise they’re awesome stories!

The Seattle Review

Read this simply for the wonderful story Elegy on Kinderklavier by Arna Bontemps Hemenway. Seriously. It’s unflinchingly human. Do it. Do it now.

McSweeney’s 38

The JPEG by Rachel B. Glaser is the standout here. It’s not very long, but explores friendships, cellphone contacts, and what it means to be a social being in a technological society.

Since graduation from college a couple of years ago, I’ve focused on getting up to speed with the popular culture centered around these things known as “moving pictures.” I watched a bunch, wrote about them, and generally had fun feasting my eyeballs upon all that the motion picture industry had to offer.

Then I totally got bored with movies, and haven’t seen a new one in months. It’s been that bad. But don’t worry: I’ve filled that void with Star Trek. Lots of Star Trek. Specifically, Deep Space 9. But I’ve also started shifting my time resources elsewhere: towards my reading and finally making real progress on my reading list rather than just treading water while bookstore sales continued to stymie any real progress.

Reviews Inbound

This means, my dear readers, that I shall be offering my opinion on whatever text happens to fly past my eyeballs. You have been forewarned. However, there’s a significant difference between my book reviews and movie reviews:

Books won’t be rated on a scale

I find it difficult to give a book a numerical rating, as it’s also difficult for me to find a book that I absolutely detest. Rather than using an arbitrary scale that I’d just abuse, there won’t be any scale.

When Alexander Theroux wrote Darconville’s Cat, he wove a story of forbidden love and despair while savoring unusual words, multiple methods of narrative, and interspersed bits of humor in the midst of a spiral into oblivion. It’s a highly under appreciated literary work, and if you’re looking for something that most likely nobody else you know has read, I highly suggest picking up a used copy of this novel somewhere. You won’t regret it.

And there’s a cat in it too.

Here is a review.

The following is a list of what I got, and a short explainiation on why I choose it. Keep in mind I might not have known then why I was buying it, so the chances of me thinking of a reason now are slim to none. :)

Listed from largest book (in length by height, not by thickness) to smallest.

1. Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. This has been in my reading list since it first came out, and I finally remembered to get it when I chance encoutered it while looking for Black’s Law Dictionary.

2. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson. You see Che shirts, belt buckles and posters everywhere. But I basically know something about him. This was on a recommended book section, so I grabbed it.

3. Artemis Fowl: The Graphic Novel by Colfer Donkin, Rigano and Lamanna. Another that has been on my list since it first came out. I love all things about Artemis Fowl. He’s everything Harry Potter isn’t–and I love the series for it. The newest one I purchased last week, but I’m still reading The Power Broker. So when that’s done, I’ll start on the newest Artemis Fowl novel before beginning this book.

4. American Beyond Our Grandest Notions by Chris Matthews. It’s Chris Matthews. The only one I cound find there. He’s always fun to read.

5. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is a douche, and I love it. This is a glorious troll resource book. Not to mention I probably agree with everything he says, and I like reading books that I agree with.

6. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris. I make it a point to always get a Sedaris book when I go to Powell’s. I didn’t have this one yet, so I got it!

7 Lost in Austen: Create Your Own Jane Austen Adventure by Emma Campbell Webster. Remember those old Goosebumps books that you were able to choose what to do next? Think of this book like that. Except with the beginning of Pride and Prejudice. Sound amazing or what.

As mentioned before, I’m reading The Power Broker, and even though I’m only 400 or so pages into it… I can highly recommend it to anyone looking at politics, success, power, or urban planning. Check it out.