Recent Books Read

 

Bleak House

 

I had been thinking to myself I need to brush up on some nineteenth century British literature to fill a hole in my own reading history.

I reached out to a friend and asked what the best Dickens was to him, and he said Bleak House.

So, I bought the book, and it is a big brick of a book, almost a thousand pages.

I learned some things. Like I have joked in the past that Dickens got paid by the word and you can tell. I do not think that it is really a joke. I just think the expectations about what a book looks like are different. I still remember in high school keeping a reading journal for myself reading a Tale of Two Cities because there was so much going on. I think that instead of thinking of something like Bleak House as a novel it’s more like a TV show now, where it is episodic and driven by that kind of arc even if now we talk about them as novels. Like the Soprano’s or something.

I also joked that the thing was very character driven, but not in a good way. The writer of the afterward notes that there is 48 characters, and you feel it. The first half of the book is basically a character introduction and twenty pages of focus on them and then a new character. There is not a lot of narrative momentum, and if I were editing this for adaptation to film, there’s dozens of characters who could go out the door.

Because there is really nothing that happens. People die and get married and have disfiguring illness, but it is not until page 483 that something of note really happen. And then it feels incidental to the plot. The whole overarching thing holding the book together kinds of resolves weirdly and unsatisfactorily.

The weird thing is that overall, it is not bad. It just does not cohere in a big picture, so it took me forever to read. But I did read it, so it was good enough I wanted to keep carrying through with it.

 

 

The Calculating Stars     

My library does this yearly one book celebration where the community reads a book in parallel and invites the author to talk about the book. I missed participating in it this year because I was reading something else, but I am sad I missed out on speaking to the author because I really liked the book.

The Calculating Stars is an alternate history where the space race still happens but for a slightly different reason. There was a big meteor that hit the Atlantic Ocean and it went from going to ice age to runaway global warming. The goal in the book is to build up the space program for off world habitation as fast as possible. It is a fun pro-feminist text that parallels real life examples in the female astronauts that did not get their moments of glory because the best of the best forgot half of the people.

The only real plot point that really doesn’t feel organic is the idea that people would use resources to build up for space colonization, especially at the scale that would be needed in the case of a planet killing impact. It does feel right in how people are able to go about their lives as the world around them is changing – nicely done but not too heavy handed. I would recommend this book and I am excited to read the next book in the series.

 

Runaway Horses

About eight years ago one of my friends told me I needed to read this book; it was one of the best books he had ever read. So, I bought it and put it on my shelf until recently.

 

With all the craziness that has been going on in the world, I have been turning to fiction to try to escape it all. So, I picked this off my shelf without really knowing what the plot would be. Let me tell you, if I had known it was about the fanaticism of a group of young men in the runup to the second world war in Japan, I might have not picked it up. It hit a little close to home as we are in the aftermath of the 2020 election and have nationalists in the streets.

 

I must give credit to both Mishima and his translator, since even with too timely subject matter, it is a beautiful book and amazing psychological portrait of both the leader of the young men and those in his orbit. There’s a weird structural bit where there’s a book that is important for the formation of the young men’s ideology that Mishima includes as full text in the novel that kind of interrupts the flow, but it is important for the plot.

 

One thing that I did not know at all was that this book is the second in a four-part series. It works pretty well as a stand-alone book, but there are some references to the previous text that stick out and it would work better and thought I was able to piece together context clues I think it would make more sense if I had read it first. I have ordered the book and plan on reading it as much to fill in the gap as I enjoyed this book and like’s Mishima’s style.

 

A Little History of Religion

I received this as a birthday gift this year. Though it would not be something I normally would buy for myself, as a definite atheist, it is not bad to have a look back and see what you are missing out on.

 

This book is a good survey. It hits on a lot of world religions and takes them on their own terms for the most part. The only real problem is structural in its purpose of being a survey, right there in the title is that it does not go into enough depth. I would say that it is also a little Eurocentric and too focused on Christianity as being at the center of the story. This is a quick read, and it is something I would recommend for a precocious preteen who wants to learn about the world’s religions.

 

Solaris 

I had not read it and the only real association I had in my mind was that it was a Gorge Clooney movie from a while back and the movie was not sold as one of those science fiction movies that make you think. Which is weird because it was not that long after the Matrix blew up the multiplexes and our minds.

 

Solaris is a planet that is being studied by scientist because it is a weird planet. It orbits a twin star system, and it can maintain a steady orbit somehow and there is an ocean of goo and it seems like this goo itself might be sentient. The readers get to see the arc of one visitor, Kris Kelvin, as he has his own encounter with the planet. The whole thing is a mind trip and Lem builds out this whole edifice, not just of the planet and the setting, but what amounts to several generations of what the various scientists have done in trying to understand what Solaris is and what its existence means to humankind. The book is a monumental act of worldbuilding. But as a book it leaves something missing in terms of plot. Because you read all this and you are waiting for something to happen as a reader in the 21^st century, but it is more psychological. No wonder the people who made it into the George Clooney movie focused on him in the marketing material. Well, him and the attractive woman.  

 

The Great Believers

 

I cannot remember who recommended this to me, but I should find out who it was and thank them.

The Great Believers is an amazing and heartbreaking story of a group of men coming of age in the 80s in gay Chicago. I must admit that a part of the enjoyment was recognizing areas and bars mentioned in the text, but the pull of the book is much more than that. Makkai really puts you there, living in a different sort off plague that hits close to home here in 2020. It broke my heart, several times, even though with the subject matter you know it is going to find your gut and just punch you in there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Lathe of Heaven

I have been working on an academic project about science fiction and this book kept coming up as one of these foundational books in terms of science fiction that makes you really think – science fiction but also philosophy. It is in the same ballpark as Solaris or the Foundation Books.

 

In the book, the main character is in trouble because he has been taking drugs. But the reason he has been taking drugs is that the dreams he has sometimes reshape reality, he does not know what to do with that. So, he goes to a doctor and instead of trying to cure him, the doctor tries to plant suggestions in the main character’s mind so that his dreams will improve the world. The result is that each thing he tries to do ends up with some sort of ironic side effect. For example, to create peace on earth, an alien threat is created.

 

Ultimately, it is a quick and fin read but it falls in the same sort of trap that Asimov and Lem fall into – once you create this world, just what do you do with the people you have living in it. This is so much so that references to the book hit at the idea created in the text and not the plot of the text itself.