Book Round Up

[brigid]

Mirrored from brigidkeely.com/wordpress.

Since my LJ Friendslist seems to be expressly designed to enrage me today and I’m thrumming with Anxiety, I’m going to post a quick round up of books I’ve read recently. And then I’m going to toast up the bread I baked yesterday and eat it.

First off, I read Crooked Little Vein: A Novelby Warren Ellis, recommended by my youngest brother. I’ve known about this book for awhile and I like a lot of Ellis’ comic book writing. However, I’m glad I didn’t pay for this book. I don’t regret reading it, but it wasn’t that great. It reads like Ellis mimicking Ellis, channeling a low-rent version of Spider Jerusalem, with some Chuck Palahniuk and Douglas Adams thrown in for good measure. It also reads like someone sent Ellis a bunch of ewwwwww grossssss internet links and he wrote about them, but seriously, saline injection is NOT that freaky. Granted, it’s reversible… which a penilectomy isn’t… but still. There is worse stuff online. The book also reinforces that old meme that it doesn’t matter how ugly a guy is, how poorly dressed, how foul smelling, how homeless, how poorly socialized, how broke, etc he is as long as he can MAKE A HOT WOMAN LAUGH she is willing to overlook every other negative thing about him and supply him with lots of super hot sex. “Good” Women Care About The Inside, No Matter How Revolting The Outside, amirite?

So, yeah. I don’t regret reading it, it was a quick read with some nice turns of phrase, but eh.

It lead me to re-reading Fight Club: A Novel by Chuck Palahniuk. I actually had wanted to read Survivor: A Novel, but it was already packed up (we are moving). Fight Club is better than I remembered it being. It’s a tightly written, compelling book about being stupid and severely over valuing The Glory Of Being A Dude. The ending is FANTASTIC and creepy. It’s really depressing how many people take the book at face value and don’t realize it’s a dark satire, but eh. I adore the movie, which I saw before I read the book. For all the visuals of the movie are great (and it’s a really good movie, straight up) the book is much more complex and layered, with a much better ending. I’m really glad that I own this book, because it’s worth reading more than once.

Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon by Zack Parsons is kind of what Crooked Little Vein wanted to be, in that it explores a lot of the creepy, freaky, whacked out stuff from TEH INTARWUBS. It also features a road trip. It’s very well written, extremely funny, and all around awesome. I’ve been fooling around on Something Awful for over a decade now, but the forum community has changed so much that I don’t visit it very much any more. I’m glad the folks involved in the website are still producing such great content. I highly recommend this book. I borrowed it from a friend, but will probably purchase it for myself.

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis is a classic. It is an unflinching look at a very narrow slice of time, place, and people. It captures the mindset of a certain social/cultural group during a very sharply defined time and place, and also brilliantly captures madness and losing control of one’s sense of self, trying to define one’s self. It’s a very good book. I’ve enjoyed everything Ellis has written so far, although I haven’t read Lunar Park yet. It sounds like it’d be right up my alley, though.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks is the most recent book I’ve read. I came of age in the 90’s and was a voracious reader, devouring pretty much every SciFi and Fantasy book I could get my hands on. A lot of these books–a LOT– were post-apocalyptic fiction, usually dealing with the after effects of nuclear war. As a lot of these fears were dismissed (we are no longer at the brink of nuclear war; we better understand what exactly WILL happen if atomic bombs are used) fall out has been replaced with Zombies. I really really like Zombies. Seriously. World War Z is post-apoc literature done right. It focuses on the people involved, it’s tense and suspenseful even though we know the Zombies are handled in the end and humanity survives, and it addresses stuff like people turning to cannibalism to survive, wales being wiped out, weather being changed by the amount of ash in the air from cremating the infected. It’s an awesome book and I really recommend it. The voices of the different people interviewed are a bit too similar– they are from different countries, cultures, social classes, social GROUPS, etc but they mostly don’t sound like it. However, as they are “translated” that could be the affect of translation. That’s really the only quibble I have with this book.

Nick is practicing sitting up, so I sit behind him and read a book so he can’t fall over and bash his brains out and I don’t get bored. He’s also starting to go through separation anxiety, so when he’s tired of sitting up and wants to play on the floor, he prefers that I’m in the same room with him. Hence the recent ability to actually, you know, read books.

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