Books: Last Book You Read and Rate It

[robertmac43]

Should we set a day for everyone to finish the Sheltering Sky so people do not come on here and see a long spoiler filled discussion?

 

[Spring in Fialta]

Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami (1979) - Re-read, albeit in English this time instead of French. Strangely enough, I liked re-reading it, albeit for different reasons than I had originally liked it. Perhaps it's the translation, but the story seemed less out-there/whimsical than it did while reading in french and singular dream-like phrases didn't seem as numerous as they had during my first reading. Felt more like a self-deprecating book and an aimless ode to women and friends the author knew/knows. You kind of get the sense that Murakami just wrote what he felt as he went along, without notes or planification and sometimes his ideas/points (if there were any, which it felt like there was) feel a bit self-satisfyingly obscure. I still enjoyed a lot, and it's a very fine and mostly charming read that is easy to read and accessible despite it's oddness, but I feel like I was more satisfied with the french translation.

 

[Thucydides]

I have been without my desktop computer for awhile now, and don’t like typing on my phone , so I’ve not been posting many reviews, but sometimes a book comes around that I feel like I have to talk about it.

Henderson the rain king is about a wealthy eccentric man who goes to Africa on a spiritual journey to find himself .

Once in Africa he decides he wants to see the real Africa so he ditches his friend and meets an African who agrees to show him the real thing.

This is where the book really starts coming to life as Henderson lives among two of the most isolated tribes in Africa and his quest for truth begins.

It is thought provoking , witty and has some of the best writing, filled w/ quote worthy phrases I’ve ever read. A book that has the rare magic to make you laugh out loud, & shake your head at the same time.

There’s a lot of self help books out there that tell you if you do this, this, and this you will better your life and if you don’t, you’re doomed. Then in the matter of literature, Saul Bellow comes along, ties a blindfold around your eyes , walking you along , slowly telling you the story of a character and a quest . At some point he pulls off the blindfold and cries “There, you see where I took you?”

And only then do you discover the meaning of the word “self discovery”.

Brilliant stuff.

10/10

 

[Spring in Fialta]

By the way, has anyone here ever checked out the Thug Notes channel? I'm not one for Youtube review channel as the delivery tends to be absolutely brutal, annoying and amateurish in the worst way but I've always found that one to be very funny and insightful. It's worth a look. The ethos of the project is admirable too.

'' but the truth is, the gift of literature is universal in meaning and should be made accessible to everyone on every plane. So, 'Thug Notes' is my way of trivializing academia's attempt at making literature exclusionary by showing that even high-brow academic concepts can be communicated in a clear and open fashion."

 

[kihei]

Uncharted: Creativity and the Expert Drummer by Bill Bruford

Bill Bruford is my favourite rock drummer, a musician who is as at home in jazz as he is in rock, very likely more so. In pursuance of his recent doctorate at the University of Surrey, Bruford created this detailed academic examination of creativity as it functions in and shapes expert drum performance. He begins with a rigorous overview of the theoretical framework that will inform his study, a study that incorporates action theory, cultural psychology, systems theories of creativity, and the insights of a host of intellects (John Dewey; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; Vlad Glaveanu; Roland Barthes; et al) who help to shed light on his perceptions and observations. At the heart of this study is a series of long detailed interviews with expert drummers who discuss the multiple variables, musical, social, cultural, mechanical, and technological, that influence and shape their creative processes.

I found this book a very difficult but rewarding read and, thus, deeply pleasurable. While I am anything but knowledgeable about drums, drummers or their experience, I got a lot from this book both in terms of insights into the subject at hand--creativity in expert drum performance--but equally so in terms of looking at broader implications than the author intends in relation to other arts. Certainly Bruford forced me to re-evaluate my understanding of creativity. I think I pretty much held the romantic notion that creativity is something that lucky individuals possess who can use it as a kind of royal jelly to create satisfying and surprising works of art. If nothing else, Bruford certainly has disabused me of this naive position. Devoid of social context, creativity either doesn't exist or takes far different form. Creativity doesn't emerge whole from a vacuum in the mind of an individual but is shaped by his/her experience, level of ability, circumstance, and notions of whom one is performing for and with. For Bruford, creativity doesn't exist in the individual in some discrete form but functions "in between" persons, its charge ignited by a vast panoply of factors, social, technical and psychological, which influence the musical experience of both listeners and expert practitioners alike.

To transpose all this to film (not a concern of Bruford's), I think that I have come to a much better realization of how varied and multi-dimensional creativity functions in a collaborative work, that creativity means something radically different for the scriptwriter than it does the director or the actor or the film editor, and in fact "kicks in" at different points in the process of creation of a collaborative work. While all of those expert practitioners may employ creativity as part of their experience, what they create together depends on no single vision or ability but on all their visions and abilities put together. Without all these factors working in concert at different times and in different places, there may be no opportunity for their contributions to coalesce into something satisfying and surprising. Necessarily, they are experiencing creativity differently no matter their common goals and desires.

I also learned a lot about how drummers see themselves and why they see themselves as a breed apart. All of the drummers that Bruford interviewed acknowledged two central concerns: one, a desire, indeed a necessity, to first insure functionality--the beat must be kept; and, two, the hope that functionality having been achieved, opportunities to be "compositional", i.e., the chance for creativity to arise, will arrive through some combination of their efforts, the efforts of other band members, and the situation itself (if you are in a clone band, kiss that situatioin goodbye). Also I found out that drummers are a little sensitive that they may fall on the wrong side of the Cartesian mind/body split. Because they play unpitched instruments, they often feel that they are relegated to the "body" side of the division and do not get the respect that they deserve, being seen as merely beat keepers who lay the foundation for others' creativity.

All in all, Uncharted: Creativity and the Expert Drummer offered more than I had bargained for. It opened up new horizons and excited thoughts that I had never considered before. One can't ask more from a book than that.

 

[Hippasus]

Philosophische Untersuchungen (aka Philosophical Investigations), by Ludwig Wittgenstein

I read this book in the original German. I think this book is excellent in its style of presentation. The essential points are expressed in great detail and as concisely as possible in paragraph form. Ample examples are also given. Wittgenstein tries to make up for the limitations of his earlier, other great work in philosophy, the Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Notions that are introduced in the present book under review include language games, family resemblances, the lived world, as well as the motto ‘meaning is use’. The subject matter is philosophy of language, philosophy of psychology, and even to some degree philosophy of mathematics. One of the highlights in this text for me is the private language argument. Here it is argued that a private language is impossible given the nature of how language functions. If successful, a corollary of the argument would be that language, and thus much of conscious life, is fundamentally a social phenomenon. I give the book a rating of 525.

200: distasteful and pathetic
300: mediocre or subpar
400: average, but decent
500: very good
600: superb
700: transcendental

 

[Spring in Fialta]

The Street by Mordecai Richler (1969) - Short stories which are linked together by the street on which most of the action takes place, the same street that I live on (St. Urbain in Montreal) and which Richler often wrote about. It was the first time I read him and I came away unimpressed. The stories often felt bland, rushed and never went anywhere truly interesting besides the odd cute moment. Mostly felt like I was reading a poor man's pastiche of a Philip Roth story. I've already started a re-read of The Sheltering Sky.

 

[Ceremony]

I read The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner recently and I had a hard time trying to get anything out of it. It's split into four sections with different perspectives of people within the Compson family as things happen to them and as I think about it now it's interesting that while every member of the family is dependent on the rest or is responsible for the others somehow, when we get one person's story they're very selfish, or at least inwardly focused. This varies for obvious reasons - the thirty three year old Benjy suffers a neurological impairment of some sort and is effectively four years old, while Jason is the most responsible of the children and has to support everyone else while seemingly only thinking about himself.

This was a strange book for me because as I read it I found it hard to follow. It's a sort of mixture between regular stream of consciousness and a more strictly modernist abstract sense of narration, where you can have one specific viewpoint interspersed with fleeting sentences or fragments with no or little context. Individual stream of consciousness works great because it's easy to follow, when you start mixing in other voices, and even lines from other times and locations as happens here, there's a sort of dullness to what's going on for me, I end up mentally glossing over it and not paying attention.

I'm sure further readings would reveal more but I can't really do that now, so I'll say it was both off-putting and enticing for the same reason.

 

[kihei]

Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami (1979) - Re-read, albeit in English this time instead of French. Strangely enough, I liked re-reading it, albeit for different reasons than I had originally liked it. Perhaps it's the translation, but the story seemed less out-there/whimsical than it did while reading in french and singular dream-like phrases didn't seem as numerous as they had during my first reading. Felt more like a self-deprecating book and an aimless ode to women and friends the author knew/knows. You kind of get the sense that Murakami just wrote what he felt as he went along, without notes or planification and sometimes his ideas/points (if there were any, which it felt like there was) feel a bit self-satisfyingly obscure. I still enjoyed a lot, and it's a very fine and mostly charming read that is easy to read and accessible despite it's oddness, but I feel like I was more satisfied with the french translation.

He can have that kind of meandering effect on me, too. But I always keep coming back for more.

 

[MetalheadPenguinsFan]

4/5

 

[Ceremony]

Kill Your Friends by John Niven is a book written about the music industry in the UK in the 90s by a man who worked in the music industry in the UK in the 90s. It's the story of Steven Stelfox, a complete degenerate who 'works' as an A&R man spotting and recruiting new talent, a task he carries out by going to various places in the world and consuming impossible amounts of drugs and prostitutes in the company of other music industry people.

Although the story of Stelfox's rise, decline and rise is obviously fictional it's undoubtedly rooted in first-hand experience of a period of excess. Niven has a column in one of the Sunday papers here which I usually enjoy, and it's interesting to see his writing extended in a much more manic, sprawling way. The novel's in a standard format, it's not experimental or anything, but Stelfox consumes so much cocaine there's a need for the narrative to be rushed, breathless, constantly moving from one thing to the next. Fortunately it does this just well enough to cover up any shallowness in the characterisation or descriptions of what's going on.

Beyond the self-indulgence of the narrator I like this purely for all the references to British culture from 1997. The book is loosely divided into twelve parts for the months of the year and there are enough references to contemporary events to place the madness into some sort of context. This helps ground what's going on and allow the reader to connect the unimaginable excess to things they know of themselves (Diana dying, Blair being elected, Radiohead at Glastonbury, that sort of thing). As the story progresses and Stelfox has to trick a police officer investigating the death of a colleague (who Stelfox killed) there's a more pronounced sense of the self-importance he feels - representing the music industry as a whole - in the face of the ordinary public (who's 28 and thinks he's Noel Gallagher in this case) and this briefly brings the novel back to some sort of relatable reality. It does this often enough throughout to remain funny and never drift into self-congratulatory.

What I enjoyed more than anything else in this book is the contempt the people in the music industry hold the public in. While I'm quite sure Niven himself didn't do 99% of the things described in this book the stories, the attitudes, all of those things are probably rooted in genuine experience and these are probably the most sincere parts of the book. How easy it is to sell shit to people, the work that has to go in to manufacturing these things, they're all there. The sort of things you imagine something like the music industry would do but have never been able to know for certain.

All in all, the doses of reality balance out the pained descriptions of unbearable excess well enough that the book remains charming and funny, rather than slipping into self-congratulation and vulgarity. An enjoyable blast over a few hours.

 

[kihei]

The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles

Shortly after World War II, Kit and Port, an American couple from New York, and their more-or-less friend Tunner, travel to North Africa for an extended stay. They do not see themselves as mere tourists, but as travelers, citizens of the world. Kit and Port's relationship is strained. Ostensibly they love each other, but they sleep in separate rooms, a couple, yes, but seemingly one currently without sexual intimacy. Kit believes in omens; she is a complex woman, but not necessarily in Port's class intellectually. She is committed to Port but often seems to not like him much. It's easy to see why. Port tends to be arrogant and articulate in a way that can be grating on the nerves. He assumes the world is his oyster, but he is naive in that assumption. Tunner is sort of the comic relief but he is not very amusing and both Kit and Port tire of his presence. But with Port off on one of his self-imposed walkabouts, Tunner and Kit have a brief drunken one-night stand. It means not that much to either one of them though Kit does see it as an act of betrayal on her part. While the tension Kit feels and the ambivalence Port feels complicate their already troubled relationship, neither seems to realize just how far over their heads they are traipsing about North Africa trying to navigate a culture that they don't understand even though they think they do. Their ignorance and presumption will eventually cost them dearly.

I am in awe of this novel. I have seldom felt so "inside" a novel before, and so both curious and apprehensive to know the eventual fates of his two central characters. Bowles uses words brilliantly to plug into not just ideas, but feelings, important, difficult-to-articulate ones. He captures concepts that are almost fleeting, yet speak to an undeniable truth. For instance, here is one of Port's speeches:

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away form the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or fie times more. Perhaps not even that . How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

Bowles who spent much of his life in North Africa seems fully cognizant of how pitiless the culture can be for unprepared strangers who stumble upon it, especially those with a mistaken sense of their own inherent superiority. He creates indelibly believable characters, but he does not feel the least sentimental towards them. In the end, everyone in the novel is a victim of their own limitations, and Bowles expertly and succinctly describes their fate. He shifts perspectives brilliantly. Port in his death throes is frightening; Kit lost in her hysteria is heartrending. It is a cruel fate that each receives and Bowles spares the reader none of their agony as though that agony was just another natural wonder to be explained on paper. The desert, the sky and time itself are also central characters. The desert is described with its own ageless implacability; the sky is described with something between awe and menace (or maybe it is what's behind the sky, waiting for recognition, that is menacing); time is the most dangerous of all because it is so easy to take for granted. It is as if Bowles sees things in more dimensions than a normal writer and can write about them in a way that constantly surprises the reader. Port's "travels" in his head during his illness capture a dementia that is truly frightening and truly other. Bowles is able to explain the inner realities of his characters in a way that provides perceptions that I never had before, never thought before. Passage after passage amazes. There doesn't seem anything that the author can not find words to describe.

There is a line in the Bertolucci movie of The Sheltering Sky that I did not notice (or maybe just missed) in the book. Tunner, referring to Port and Kit and Tunner's one-night stand, asks Kit: "Does he know?" and Kit replies, "I think he knows but he doesn't know that he knows." Even though that is made up, it's actually a pretty good Bowles line. The responses of an individual's psyche, especially in worlds with which we are unfamiliar or beyond our understanding, can be very contradictory and very much like a labyrinth. Paul Bowles had a gift for apprehending those worlds and explaining them with lucidity and insight.

 

[Spring in Fialta]

I think Kit does say that in the book - or the movie is at the very least barely paraphrasing it. I'm currently two-thirds through and while I hate to use quotes, Nabokov's " You can never read a book. You can only re-read it. " rings spectacularly true to me right now. I don't know that I love it as much as you do - I have some minor reservations - but I'm getting much more out of it this time. While I didn't dislike it the first time around, it didn't enthrall me the way this current reading does. I had never gotten the itch to pick it up like I sometimes do now.

 

[Thucydides]

Great review. I haven’t read this book in years and I’m getting more out of it now than the first time around.
I’m about 2/3s into it, Port is fevered and Kit seems to be slowly unwinding . Should finish it sometime tomorrow.

 

[Thucydides]

Finished it late last night. It’s been a long time since the end of a book has taken the wind from my sails like that.

 

[Spring in Fialta]

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles (1949) - Eum...where to start, where to start. This one leaves me stumped, and at odds with how I want to review it, as compared to the - usually - few furious minutes I take to write a review of a book. Well, I certainly loved it, although it was hard at times to explain why. Often, and it hasn't happened to me very often while reading a book, I would be breathing heavily while having unknowingly stepped into some gorgeous pond of prose, which even when separated from the storytelling, streamed along so well as if part of the natural order in spite of the chaos presented by the author and which complemented the book's beneath the surface aesthetic superbly. This quality also accompanies the jarring contrast Bowles creates between the scope of the vast setting and the magnifying glass Bowles uses to present and delve into the rich inner-life of a limited number of characters, the two of them supported and accentuated so well by a considerable number of interesting supporting characters who weave in and out of the story without the pace of the story ever missing a beat - and additionally, about the book's pace, like Kihei said, Bowles's continuous alternate takes between Port and Kit is handled with care and precision, never faltering at which moment to switch.

Bowles also treats his characters the way a first-rate writer usually will: without overt judgment of their person and their interactions. No position is taken, and their development feels organic and without it ever feeling contrived. Not so much with the constant description of the physical setting. While some are perfectly detailed, inspired and Bowles catches the feeling of (at times) gorgeous North Africa with great talent, it did sometimes feel like overkill and pulled me into a slight lull- I'm a minimalist at heart when it comes to the description of surroundings in a book. I like the idea of presenting a few carefully sentence(s) and let the reader interact with his mind and have a hand in creating the surroundings. A bit like Camus and Hemingway do. - and in the same vein, while I thought the character's reflections were enthralling and thoughtful, they were a couple of moments where they felt repetitive and hard to grasp, at least for me. And selfishly - because this isn't so much as a strike against the book since I believe the creative decision was the correct one - I was sad to see Port die, as I felt he was the more interesting character, and the events which follow his death feel slightly wacky in a more overt way than previously.

A resonating story though, as well as a crowning achievement for its author along with American literature, if it can even be considered a part of it. One of those books I wouldn't be surprised to see shoot up amongst my favorites as I continue reading more books. There always will be some that I love more, but I don't think I'll be getting the heavy, lifting sentiments I've been the victim of with many other books either. If so, well let it be said again that literature's the greatest form of art there is, and books like The Sheltering Sky justify it so. I can't think of a single art form where its greatest works and its greatest practitioners can make you doubt it all so much - whether it's your life, the world or your own adequacy - and subsequently make you love it all the more.

 

[kihei]

I agree Bowles takes a huge chance killing off Port and sending Kit on what certainly is a leap-of-faith adventure, but that's one of the moves I love in the book, a move that takes the book further away from the norm and the ordinary (say, Tunner rushes to the rescue; Kit demurs on being rescued; eyes stare off into the desert night--that sort of thing). I also think it is a necessary move so as to give the "other," the specifically North African "other," its full due. To me this "Kit" section reads like a demented erotic Harlequin fantasy, with all the excitement of "adventure," basically what Port anyway had been seeking, turned into a delirium nightmare for Kit, one that leads to escape certainly but also to the obliteration of the self. Just my two cents, though.

 

[Spring in Fialta]

I agree Bowles takes a huge chance killing off Port and sending Kit on what certainly is a leap-of-faith adventure, but that's one of the moves I love in the book, a move that takes the book further away from the norm and the ordinary (say, Tunner rushes to the rescue; Kit demurs on being rescued; eyes stare off into the desert night--that sort of thing). I also think it is a necessary move so as to give the "other," the specifically North African "other," its full due. To me this "Kit" section reads like a demented erotic Harlequin fantasy, with all the excitement of "adventure," basically what Port anyway had been seeking, turned into a delirium nightmare for Kit, one that leads to escape certainly but also to the obliteration of the self. Just my two cents, though.

What do you mean by this?

 

[Ceremony]

Following on from the last almost Scottish entry we have the debut of Christopher Brookmyre, Quite Ugly One Morning. The about the author section tells me he lives near Glasgow with his wife, his son and his St. Mirren season ticket, although it doesn't tell me why after a few books his name changed from Christopher to Chris. This is annoying me a lot and I've only read one of them.

In this case however we have Jack Parlabane, a freelance journalist who's just moved to Edinburgh from LA after someone tried to kill him. The only problem is he ends up locked out of his new flat, so tries to get back in by going through his downstairs neighbour's flat and out the window and up the wall. The next problem he discovers is the downstairs neighbour with his throat cut, his fingers removed from his hands jammed up his nose and a giant turd lying on the mantlepiece. Oh and the police are downstairs. And he's only wearing a t-shirt.

What follows is an investigation into a corrupt NHS trust in late 90s Britain, partly with the help of the police, partly with the deceased's widow. It's a good read. The characters all come out fully formed but with room to grow, as if there are stories or details we don't know. The amount of books Brookmyre has written since this certainly suggest he was planning on expanding which is good. It means the story doesn't need to get bogged down in erroneous detail. I like the reality of the setting too, it's a murder with a motive and an underlying reason behind it, which is extended to a social commentary about corporate greed and corruption. I also enjoyed Parlabane telling the resident Edinburgh residents that while they maintain a seething inferiority complex towards Glasgow, Glaswegians are sort of... meh. Hopefully if he stays in the capital in later books he continues this non-commital means of winding people up, because it has great potential.

There are a few weaknesses you might expect from a first time writer. People know or are able to do things which are wildly convenient for the story. Similarly there are occasions where things just happen a bit too easily. I can't criticise these too much though because even if I hadn't known it was someone's first book I would've got the feeling that there was a lot more to come, and that what was already here was promising enough to justify anything else. Good characters, good humour, and a varied and dense setting with lots of factors to explore in later works. What more do you need? The influence of classic crime writing like Chandler is evident, so hopefully by the time I get to more of Brookmyre it follows a similar trajectory.

 

[kihei]

What do you mean by this?

To me on a basic level the novel is about two American travelers (three counting Tunner) who are in North Africa but are in way, way over their heads. Part of the reason is that they think they understand the culture, but they really don't have a clue. The North Africans they run into along the way see the couple as naive, but the North Africans come across more as relatively bland public officials with a job to do and the presence of Kit and Port just complicates it. I think Bowles wanted a greater contrast between cultures, and that is why Belquassim gets introduced into the equation--as someone who will seem totally on a different wavelength than anything Kit or the reader has experienced or imagined. To me, he and his differences in terms of values, world view and behaviour symbolize how wide the distance is between the culture of the Bedouins and the culture of Kit and Port and how fraught with unexpected peril that leaves vulnerable Kit.

 

[kihei]

The Long Way Home: A Personal History of Nova Scotia, by John DeMont

This work of non-fiction combines history and personal reminiscences of the author's experience of Nova Scotia. So I learned a lot about everything from Champlain in the very early days of the territory to the Acadians to joining Confederation to the Halifax disaster (barely touched upon, though) to the present day state of the province. DeMont, a former newspaperman in Halifax, has a very specific point of view. He loves the province, loves its beauty, loves visiting its tiny towns and coves and sparsely populated places, but he has a clear eye about its strengths, weaknesses and place, or lack thereof, in Canadian history. He makes the province sound like a bridesmaid who never quite got to the altar. A lot of "history" has happened since the time when Shelburne, Nova Scotia was the fourth largest city in North America, and much of it has been downhill as Nova Scotians have known more than their fare share of poverty and loss. DeMont's vote for greatest Nova Scotian ever falls to Joseph Howe, a newspaper man who later became an important wheeler dealer in the province's political history. Howe campaigned against Nova Scotia joining Confederation because he feared Nova Scotia would get the short end of the stick which is pretty much what happened. Since joining Confederation Nova Scotia has often been ignored, unacknowledged and basically perceived as a kind of backwoods, a place where hope springs eternal but where when the good times arrive, they don't stay for very long. But overall the book is not an exercise in sour grapes, but a valuable examination of a place that is too often misunderstood or simply taken for granted by the parts of Canada that lie west of its border.

 

[Ceremony]

(I posted this last night but HF is a bin and it didn't work)

Irvine Welsh's wikipedia page tells me he is a writer of novels and short story collections. His first two works, Trainspotting and The Acid House, fall under these two categories respectively and I'm not really sure why. Trainspotting is an assortment of different stories. They feature some of the same characters but they're all distinct stories. So is The Acid House, albeit a few are ~3 page musings and there's a lot less character crossover.

An assortment of 90s Edinburgh-based junkie lowlifes, it's quite jarring to go from story to story so quickly and read people who are fully formed in a few lines, so diverse yet so similar. The persistent quality of Welsh's characters is how immediately recognisable they are, even with the lingering veneer of chronic drug use. There's one case in particular where he subverts this to good effect, as in Where the Debris Meets the sea which imagines Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Kim Basinger and Victoria Principal sitting in a Hollywood mansion reading magazines about removal workers from Leith, but with the personalities and voices swapped as well. Where there's humour there's poignancy as well, as in the tumultuous life of a transsexual in Eurotrash, or when an old boy who's widowed relives his last holiday with his wife before throwing himself off the boat at the same place where she killed herself on that cruise. The Last Resort on the Adriatic takes on new meaning when you read the last paragraph.

With this many stories coming at you so quickly the switch from this darkness to humour is pronounced and both aspects of the collection benefit for it. One story sees a guy get kicked out of his parents' house, dumped, sacked and beaten up before he meets God in a pub and is turned into a fly. It's impossible to not laugh when you see him turning up at a mate's house and living there for a while, dipping himself in ketchup and writing C*** OF A SPIDER IN BATHROOM on the wall.

Ironically the story which lends its title to the collection is strong in idea if poor in execution, as an all-round scumbag body swaps with the child of a posh couple as lightning hits the former while the latter is being born. It's obviously a good idea in showing the contrast between two ways of life in the same city, but there's loose ends sticking out which are never really tidied up - the mother's hatred of her partner, the seeming acceptance of how strangely the two subjects behave. Rather than questions for the reader to interpret they seem more like ideas not properly explored, which is to its detriment. It's a shame, because the other longish stories here all work well, it just seems odd thinking about that one now.

The final story is in fact a novella, A Smart C***, which to an extent follows the same pattern. Most of the themes of this collection and Trainspotting are laid bare at length here, which a mixture of thieving, drugging, dossing and general scumminess see one young man try to balance his inherent sense of intellectual superiority over his peers with the fact he's as degenerate as the rest of them. One good thing about this story is derived from its title, as Brian is frequently challenged for being a smart c*** and as his drug use spirals it forms a central part of his paranoia. Welsh is really good at capturing something uniquely Scottish, which I could best describe simply as a conflict between a complete certainty of the nation's superiority and an instinctive desire to beat down anyone who shows any indication of it. There's a point when a self-deprecating culture goes too far and folds in on itself, and it's something I've seen in what little other Scottish literature I've read (see: James Kelman and Limmy). This is best explored in this final novella, and I think it's more effectively achieved in a longer form.

Still, since the stories are so short and so engaging it's easy to both read this collection quickly or just dip in and out. There are some experiments with format as well as language, but for the most part the stories here are fully formed, and there are more hits than misses.

 

[Ceremony]

In order to compensate for Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror series jumping to Netflix and managing to confound the notion that you can have too much of a good thing, Channel 4 recently teamed up with Sony Pictures to create Electric Dreams, an anthology series of ten episodes based on Philip K. Dick short stories. Because what better replacement for a contemporary series about the invasiveness of technology is there than the king of science fiction doing the same thing fifty years ago?

Despite some of the big names attracted to the individual episodes, the quality varied. Steve Buscemi, Bryan Cranston, Terrence Howard, a guy from Game of Thrones, Timothy Spall, all these and more featured in stories which as it turns out were adapted with varying degrees of faith to the source material. Around the time I was watching the shows I looked for an anthology of Dick's short fiction (is it any wonder his fans refer to him as PKD?) and seemed to come up short in finding something comprehensive. Luckily some enterprising soul somewhere catered to my needs by bringing the ten stories together, complete with a short foreword from each of the people responsible for putting them onto the screen.

Here are the stories: Electric Dreams (2017 TV series) - Wikipedia

For obvious reasons I'm not going to go into detail on every story on screen and page. I'm not exactly a big science fiction reader even though I've always enjoyed dystopian literature. There's a lot of overlap between those two genres which is evident in these stories, as the perfected future technologies the era Dick was writing in expected are challenged. Perhaps it won't be perfect, having robots to do everything. Maybe people aren't perfect now and aren't going to be in the future just because we think we'll have things easier.

More than one of the introductions cites the present day as an inspiration they took into their adaptations. When I wrote here about Nineteen Eighty-Four earlier in the year I quoted a 2003 introduction to my edition by Thomas Pynchon and that was relevant in the same way here. The best literature which holds up as a social critique is one which remains timeless regardless of its setting. There's stories about the Cold War, stories firmly set in 50s/60s/70s stereotyped small town American Dream perspectives which you read and see around you, right now.

Some of the stories are a bit too... involved. You're thrown into a world you don't understand for fifteen pages and it can be slightly jarring if it's a world especially different from ours. Someone who works on Jupiter and commutes back to Earth on a rocket like it's nothing. Maybe it comes easier if you read more in the genre but with ten stories in quick succession like this it can be a bit overwhelming. That's about all I have in the way of criticism, because the stories are all still thought-provoking enough to overcome any of their deficiencies.

As an introduction to science fiction it's probably a good place to start with one of the most accessible writers in terms of the works which have been adapted into things popular in the mainstream. Go with that, then start questioning if your family have been replaced with insects.

 

[kihei]

Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders

Last year’s Man Booker Prize winner Lincoln in the Bardo is a work of great imagination. The focus initially is on a grieving President Lincoln who has just lost his beloved son Willie to typhoid fever. In an attempt to deal with his grief, Lincoln visits his son at his graveside on two occasions, once right after the boy’s interment, once a day later. Little does the President realize that his son is still “there,” not yet able to move on to the next plane of being. In fact, Willie would be trapped forever if it were not for the intervention of a bunch of kindly older ghosts who for various reasons are unable to move on either. The story is told almost entirely from their point of view as the narration shifts back and forth principally among three ghosts, a gay suicide, an unfulfilled man, the victim of a very ill-timed accident, and a minister who knows what the rest of his cohortsdo not—that they are all really dead.

Lincoln in the Bardo has the makings of a fine movie with lots of special effects and a mise en scene worthy of Beetlejuice, as many of the ghosts take wildly different shapes, and there are, for lack of a better word, furies who bedevil them, some comic, some not. Saunders uses this creative framework to examine many things including love, loss, mourning, moving on, and the uncertain, possibly malignant nature of whatever it is that is masquerading as a god. It’s a real page turner with even a dollop of suspense along the way. Is it a great book? I don’t think so. It relies too heavily on sentimentality for some of its principle effects, and in terms of its ultimate influence on the President, it falls victim to a kind of simple-minded wishful thinking that I could have done without. That being said, Lincoln in the Bardo is an exceptionally clever book and a good summer read.

 

[Ceremony]

Somewhere in The Game by Ken Dryden he describes being on a bus or in some other location with his teammates where he's working on his book, writing or reading something. Someone asks him what he's doing and he tells them. (I'm not au fait enough with the Canadiens' last period of relevance to know all of the players and their characters off by heart.) When Dryden tells him, he responds with something to the effect of "hey, maybe I'll write a book! heh heh heh"

While reading Thunder and Lightning by Phil Esposito I wondered what the book written by that player would have been like. Mainly because I felt I was reading it at the time. Much like The Game I found it interesting to read about a period of the NHL I know little about. The book was published the year after I started watching games. I know a lot of the names and some of the events in books like this but the insight from someone who lived it at the time is lost on me, which is partly why I've enjoyed reading these books.

The personal perspective from Esposito when he's traded to the Rangers is good. So is his time spent managing them. The stuff in the book about the Tampa Bay Lightning forming, that's really interesting. I'd always had this half-baked notion that the Yakuza owned them at some point but it was just normal unanswerable Japanese business interests. Probably. His experience of the Summit Series, that's good too.

The problem with this book, which seems especially pertinent in a week where an NHL player was apparently traded because he went to museums on his own rather than go for a liquid lunch With The Boys, is that Esposito is a bit of an idiot. He's not literary, that's fine. He's straightforward, that's fine too. Even allowing for that mindset, even allowing for the I'm sure completely genuine story of his Bruins teammates taking him and his hospital bed out of the hospital to a bar amid many other ludicrous tales, there's a strange sense that this is a wonderfully engrossing life being described to you by a drunk vagrant at a bus shelter at half eleven at night.

It's honestly hard for me to describe a book written this badly because there's no reasonable comparison I can make of the style with anything else I usually read. Stuff happens. Man, if I could tell you! Then more stuff happens. Then he gets married. Then stuff happens. Then he wins a Stanley Cup. That was really a good feeling. Then he scores a goal. For every interesting anecdote like playing Gordie Howe for the first time there's reams and reams of utter nonsense. Pages of self-serving dreck briefly interspersed with something threatening to be an interesting perspective. The one positive of this is that it reads quickly. 280 pages and you could read it in about three hours.

The stuff about his wives and family is strange. There's several pictures of various grandchildren and children-in-law included in the book with absolutely no mention of them. Come to think of it the only times he mentions his children is when they're in the background crying as he's leaving his wife of the time. I was too taken aback by the speed of the book to really reflect on this but it's strange how these events seem to fade into the background, especially so when you realise there's not much in the foreground to cover them up.

Based on the introduction and the general sense I got of Esposito from reading this I think there was a concerted effort on the part of him and Peter Golenbock to be, or to seem, 'honest' in a way which translated to just saying everything he thought or felt at once in a conversational style. I think some of the things written in the book would have benefitted from expansion and a bit more consideration. There are times when you can read autobiographies - hell today you could even consider social media in this vein - where there are nods to the reader, winks and slight moments of self-deprecating humour. Esposito doesn't so much go for the wink and the nudge, rather he leaps out of the book, knocks you to the floor with a punch to the arm and yells WHAT A GUY, EH?! He does this every other page.

Clearly I was spoiled for hockey books by reading Blood Feud and then The Game first, but I think the best I could say for Thunder and Lightning would be "mixed" - I found the things I didn't know interesting, but the presentation was beyond me.