At 8/30/05 06:33 PM, MasterStalker wrote:
Stephen Kink's "Everything's Eventual". It's a collection of short stories incluing one based of his series "The Gunslinger".
Stephen Kink, you say. Sounds racy. But no, I've actually read that. Ages ago, while I was still in my Crichton phase, as a matter of fact. And as I recall, not all the stories were that great. For instance, for every 'L.T.'s Theory of Pets' or 'Lunch at the Gotham Café', there was a '1408' or 'The Road Virus Heads North'. In fact, the only short story that I really liked turned out to be the book's title story, 'Everything's Eventual'. It had a fun protagonist, not just another middle-aged male writer who seems to appear in every third short story King writes, only under different names. I'd look for examples, but King doesn't really interest me anymore. Same goes for Ludlum. That having been said though, don't just skip the first two Bourne novels just because you've seen the movies. Trust me. They're so different, I don't even know why they didn't create a new character entirely. Completely different storylines as well. So don't do it.
So it seems that no one liked my little website idea either. Maybe I'll just keep my mouth shut from now on? Oh well.
I'm starting college tomorrow, by the way. So unless you guys want textbook reviews, I'm probably not going to be around for a while. I'm also reading a 655-page book, so it'll probably be a month before I set foot in here again. But that's just fine. It's not as if this thread moves rapidly or anything. Either way, I've actually completed two books since "Tuesdays with Morrie". The far superior one, "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood, is the one I shall discuss first. I first heard about Atwood in my Lit 12 class when we were doing this poem of hers called 'Disembarking at Quebec'. Personally, me being more of a sonnet kind of guy myself, the free verse didn't really grab me at the time but the poetry of it was very lyrical and very easy to understand. So, knowing her to also be a novelist, I eventually picked up on what to read from my fellow lit geeks. And, well, they were all reading "Oryx and Crake". So I picked up a copy. My first impression was that 'Disembarking' was a far cry from the futuristic dystopia of "Oryx and Crake", but Atwood obviously has a knack for it. Without missing a beat, she describes creations of genetic engineering in vivid detail and then, almost facetiously, fashions portmanteau sobriquets for all of them, such as the rakunk or the pigoon. The same wry humour that appears in the novel's nomenclature is also present in the prose, with Snowman, the novel's protagonist, reflecting on his near-apocalyptic situation with unadulterated pessimism, such as follows: "These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency." (p. 48). Yet, as with 'Disembarking', there are at times true poetry in the text. Snowman's old addictions, no longer at their apogee due to the difficulty of, say, locating a cigarette with 98% of the world's population dead -- for reasons that I'll leave you to find out -- are described as "lying dormant like flowers in the desert." (p. 333). Atwood jumps back and forth masterfully between the two registers, going from colloquial to eloquent with such ease as to make an aspiring writer like myself feel like snapping every pencil in the house into a thousand tiny pieces so as to scatter them into the ocean. But it is the combination of her evident mastery of the language and her science-fiction brilliance that ascend "Oryx and Crake" to high art. For instance, one of the unpleasant factors that seem to afflict the future world as Atwood sees it is the media's obsession with sex and violence. In Crake's world, this now seems to be all the media has to offer; Videodrome-esque executions and sex shows playing online around the clock. The arts are dead. All that remains is no longer gratification of the mind, but gratification of the body. And as Atwood puts it, "the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance." (p. 104). Beautifully, beautifully written. In fact, quite possibly the best book I've read all year. I recommend it to all. Just for future reference, I'll be picking up more Atwood very soon.
Now normally, with a book as awesome as "Oryx and Crake", I'd just never shut up about it and keep talking until I used up all 6,500 characters allowed to me in this post. I still have an entire page of notes on the book that I was prepared to discuss -- I mean, I haven't even mentioned the BlyssPluss Pill yet -- but unfortunately, that character limit actually does cause a few problems when I have more than one book to talk about. Which brings me to "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah" by Richard Bach. And no, I didn't pick up this book myself. A girlfriend's father -- that's a girlfriend, not my girlfriend; there's a difference -- recommended it to me and told me to take a look because he knew that I liked and read philosophy every now and again. "Illusions", I guess, was his idea of a philosophical book. Don't even get me started. At 192 pages, just like "Tuesdays with Morrie" -- what is with inspirational books all being 192 pages? -- at least it's a mercifully short read. Nothing new to see here, just a 1970's offering from the realm of fortune-cookie philosophy. The characters, all two of them, are bland as all hell and the conversations that they have are more aphoristic than dialogue. Throw in the fact that half of it makes about as much sense as a quadriplegic mime -- "You're always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past." (p. 63) -- and the other half is just plain wrong -- "[T]he whole motion of our time is from the material toward the spiritual." (p. 50) -- and you have 192 pages that I never want to touch again. Granted, the premise of an ordinary man meeting a messiah, miracles and all, is intriguing, but the book's really just too dull to make a person think. Like all bad books I read though, I must admit that it does have its moments, but as always in these cases, it was too little too late. However, it was good for a laugh. Yet, that probably was due more to the book's quality than its contents.
![The Book Club]()
