felis_ultharus

Happy (belated) Midsummer/Solstice/Litha to those who celebrate it, and happy first day of summer to those who don't.

I did my usual high-speed catch-up on LJ. Which is why some of you have spammed inboxes today :)

I keep meaning to review books I have in an ever-growing stack on my desk. One that really deserves more than the short shrift it's going to get is Douglas Coupland's Generation A. I believe this to be his best book. In fact it pretty much gathers together the best of his other work in one delicious, richly-written piece, and leaves the dross. So if you only ever read one Coupland, this is it.

It's a short, simple novel of a likely dystopian future - one where "Colony Collapse Disorder" has wiped out the bee population. Most flowers are dead. Most kinds of fruit are rare delicacies. As the novel progresses, the dystopia deepens, and even worse horrors are in the offing.

In the midst of this, five strangers are stung by the supposedly-extinct bee. They're isolated, studied, and strangely become friends. They wind up on Haida Gwaii, where they start to piece together the mystery of what happened to them, to figure out how they got there and where they're going.

After years of mid-quality and poor-quality efforts, Coupland's more than back in form with this one. He restricts his obsession with ripping plotlines from the headlines to just the bee extinction, so it doesn't feel like he's just cribbing Yahoo News to flesh out his books. The iciness and callousness of his later work isn't here. This one is sensitive, intelligent, and the themes and plot and character are all rich and engaging.

More than that I couldn't say without giving too much away. Except that it's highly recommended.

So in the vein of reviewing books, I don't think I ever talked about The Gum Thief, by Douglas Coupland - though I finished it months ago.

I liked it. I was told it was his best book in years, and that's true, though it's really two books. The first is an epistolary novel about a washed-up middle-aged man and the daughter of an old high-school friend of his who both work at Staples. The other novel is the one the main character is writing - a story called Glove Pond, about the world's worst dinner party (the name is the first thing he Googled that came up with no real hits).

( Review continues )

In other news, there's a lot to look forward to this month - starting with return from em_fish and sassysairs from Down Under, crossing both date line and seasonal divide to return home after the better part (or really, the worse part) of a year. I'm looking forward to seeing them again ^_^

So I just finished Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart Kauffman. Kauffman is a biochemist and biophysicist at the University of Calgary with a master's in philosophy from Oxford -- impressive credentials for the author of this book, which argues for the non-deterministic complexity and creativity in nature as an alternative both to deterministic/atheistic science and religion.

It's an interesting introduction to some of the weirder and more wonderful aspects of science. And I sincerely do hope that he manages to make a dent in determinism and reductionism, which have done so much damage to the world. Here he follows in the footsteps of giants like John Ralston Saul and David Suzuki here.

But, largely, it's a failed book. If he'd taken an additional degree in military history, he might have known not to open up a war on two fronts, especially if you only understand the enemy on one flank.

( I'll try to make this as un-dense as possible, and hope it's of some interest to some of my readers. )

My next read is Apuleius's Golden Ass I suspect my review of that will be a lot shorter, and I hope that the above wasn't all that bad.

So I finally finished The Dark is Rising series, one of those Harry Potter precursors that have been returning to the limelight in the reflected glory of its famous progeny.

(I read one book of it when I was a kid, and enjoyed that. My sister and infinitecomplex got me the whole series for my birthday.)

It's a good series overall, and generally got better. The first entry is a bit lacklustre, but her writing improves throughout.

( Review continues )

Right now, I'm reading a book called Reinventing the Sacred, which is one biologist's attempt to refute reductionism and recuperate concepts like free will in scientific terms. It's rather disappointing so far, I'm afraid.

However, it is impossible to hate a book that includes the sentence, "I will try to show that a tiger is both epistemologically and ontologically emergent with respect to physics."

I've been on a bit of a reading binge this week. I've finished two books and I'm about to finish a third, which is rare since I'm a slow reader.

It's helped that they've been entertaining.

On that note, I just finished JPod by Douglas Coupland, a book set in the video game industry. On the level of pure entertainment, I think it's one of the funniest books ever written.

And it's got all the Coupland strengths -- brilliantly-crafted, well-defined quirky characters, easy prose, and highly original figurative language. Also, Coupland is one of the few novelists who can actually write an office environment well, probably because he's one of the few who's been there.

But I found as I got farther into it that I began recommending it to fewer and fewer people. The book has some serious flaws.

The first of these is the filler. Most of this is built around the games played around the office as part of their daily procrastination -- "Write a love letter to Ronald Mcdonald" or "Write an ad for yourself on eBay." Those two were funny. But when they play pick-out-the-one-non-prime-number-in-ten-pages-of-primes or find-the-one-wrong-digit-of-pi-calculated-to-ten-million-digits -- and actually reproduce those numbers -- I honestly wonder if he was just trying to up his page count.

The second is that his knowledge of organized crime seems to come entirely from TV news reports. Even I could tell that.

But the worst problem by far is the Mary-Suing. And yes, it still counts as being a Mary Sue if you insert yourself into your novel as a sociopathic monster, especially if you're an evil business genius, though I admit I laughed out loud when the narrator described the experience of looking into Coupland's "cold, dead eyes" as like looking into "a well of drowned toddlers."

Again, it's still worth the read, especially if you're looking for something easy and not too serious, and if you like video games. But I'm disappointed because he used to be so interesting. Coupland used to be finding soul and beauty into the the unlikeliest corners of the modern world. Now he's tipped over the ledge of postmodernism, and doesn't seem to care.

The world celebrated in JPod is the shallow and empty world Margaret Atwood's Crake destroys in Oryx and Crake. I kept expecting the characters to be popping BlyssPluss.

So I just finished reading Fences and Windows, a collection of short articles and speeches by Naomi Klein.

Klein never set out to be spokeswoman for the anti-corporate, pro-democracy movement that gets mislabelled "anti-globalization." She considers herself a journalist documenting a movement that was there before her, and doesn't consider it right for such a diverse movement to have a single spokesperson. But with the publishing of No Logo, she's been thrust into that role anyway.

The book is overall excellent, spanning her writings from the "Battle in Seattle" to just after the terrorist attacks in New York. Mostly, it's an expansion and update of No Logo, but there's enough in the way of new ideas here to make it worth the read.

( Review continues, with criticism )

Malcolm Ross -- the man who almost single-handedly invented Canadian literary studies -- said that after 1967, every novel he'd read was influenced by either Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers or Scott Symon's Combat Journal Place d'Armes.

They're similar books. Both feature a member of the Canadian respectable classes who descends into into a kind of schizophrenic animism to deal with all the things he'd held back about himself -- largely sexual. Both books are written in stream-of-consciousness.

And Ross was right -- for about five years after, Canadians wrote nothing but this style. Margaret Atwood wrote this kind of novel twice -- her Surfacing is the only actually enjoyable book in the genre.

(Her Journal of Susanna Moodie is to be avoided -- it's a narrative whose speaker purports to be Susanna Moodie's subconscious, though it sounds suspiciously like Margaret Atwood.)

Cohen's book had managed to survive Canadians tendency to forget everything Canadian, mostly piggybacking on his fame as a musician. Even Cohen fans, though, wince when the book is mentioned.

Combat Journal Place d'Armes was just as influential at the time, and it was the first explicitly gay novel written in this country -- but it's been largely forgotten.

Well, I've read it now, and let me say, it's a very strange book.

( Review Continues: Spoilers for a book you'll never read. )

I finished Beowulf last week. It really has stood the test of time, and I'm now able to read enough Anglo-Saxon to get the gist of things, so I can better appreciate the work of the anonymous master (or, more likely, series of masters) who first crafted the poem.

There are odd notes -- like when the poem slips in and out of the original local faiths and the Christian one, and you can see the stitches were the monk tried to graft his worldview onto the Pagan one. And I wondered at times if the author had some sympathy for Grendel, as Milton seems to have for Satan in Paradise Lost.

I used to wonder sometimes why the last part of the story -- the dragon's awakening -- rarely makes it into most modern retellings, but when I read it in Seamus Heaney's translation and the original, it seemed very familiar to me. Then I realized that J.R.R. Tolkien had stolen it and embellished it and fashioned it into the second half of The Hobbit. So it's made its way to the modern world too, though by a more secret route.

There are words in Beowulf I'd love to give a second life -- etonisc, for instance, which in modern English would come out to something like ettinish, and which means related to trolls, giants, or ogres. Or féondschipe -- fiendship -- which is the opposite of friendship, being the bond of hatred you have with your enemies.

("We come in fiendship," would be a great thing for an envoy of an approaching army to yell to a hard-of-hearing gatekeeper.)

I read the graphic novel version of Beowulf that the Royals gave me, bringing to three the versions of that poem I read last week. The art was good, and the adaptation was actually very faithful. This week, I've taken a break from Anansi Boys to re-read The Sandman. So it's really been a month for gods and monsters.

I came very close to simply giving up and stopping in the middle of David Nimmons' The Soul Beneath the Skin. I'm glad I kept with it, though. It got better after that chapter.

Some thoughts:

( Review continues )

I'm now reading Gentleman of the Road by Michael Chabon. I'm only a tenth of the way through it, but it's already a brilliant novel. No one does historical fiction like Chabon.