Books Brought Back

Before leaving Vermont I grabbed a number of books that I wanted to have back in South Carolina.  Over the course of the years I spent living in Vermont (and New Hampshire partially while I was in college) I accumulated a vast number of books.  I hope to someday have a house where I can set up a giant bookcase and then get all the books that I have to fill it (I love books!) but I don’t know when that will be, so for the time being I am just slowly collecting books that I want around.  This time the two books that I am really excited to have brought back were Jonathan Safran Foer’s novels Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.  I’ve read both novels before, junior and senior year of college respectively, and loved them both.  I have really wanted to reread Everything is Illuminated for some time now because I feel like there is a lot that I missed the first time through.  I’ll probably pick it up after I finish Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I also brought back a book of science fiction short stories, a collection of Philip K. Dick writings entitle Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (the man was an absolute genius by the way), Charlie Papazian’s vital The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing, and a number of cookbooks.  All great things to place on my small bookshelf that I keep in my room (it really is very tiny, but for now, as a renter, it is appropriate).  I am excited to have these various reads available to me at my whim now.  I plan on doing some major room cleaning an organizing on my days off on Thursday and Friday, and I will probably devout a good amount of time on the bookshelf.

New Read: Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”

Well I am back from Vermont and back from the land of non-reading.  Up in VT I picked up my brother’s copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s very popular, semi-autobiographic work Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  I had originally read the first three or four chapters of the book several years ago but forgot to take it with me when I left for wherever I left to (I distinctly remember leaving somewhere to go elsewhere) and thus did not finish it.  It is cool to pick it up agian and has been providing me with a pretty entertaining read.

The thing about Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is that it really reads like some kind of bad drug trip, which, if you believe even half of it’s contents, it likely was.  Now I don’t feel like disclosing my personal acts of deviance here (beyond admitting to a particular fondness for any alcoholic beverage) but it seems to me that heavy drug use is not always really the best process for the creation of good writing.  I don’t want to knock Thompson or Fear and Loathing too much, especially considering that I enjoy both the book and the author’s other works, but I question the degree to which the story should really be catagorized as “good” writing.  I guess it all falls into the realm of subjective value of writing but I feel that to a certain degree Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has been highly driven by popular culture more so than actual literary worth.  Don’t get me wrong, it is a fascinating book, but feel like a lot more of the interest lies in the subject matter rather than the writing style and literary aspiration (of which often strike me as a bit too chaotic and somewhat conveluted).

All and all a pretty good read, which should keep me well occupied over the next week or so.  My brother doesn’t have to worry about missing it too much condsidering that I bough himtwo other Hunter S. Thompson books for Christmas; The Rum Diary and Fear and Loathing in America.

A Man Without a Book

Somehow, as is occasionally the occurrence, I have found myself without a book to read.  How this happened is that I was reading a book (Harry Turtledove’s Into the Darkness) which I just couldn’t get into.  The book wasn’t horrible, and it had some interesting concepts for a fantasy novel (the basic premise is a world war in a land of magic that parallels WWII Europe).  Ultimately my problem with it was that it just jumped around between too many characters which made it hard for me to feel invested.  I don’t mind books that have a big cast, but it needs to be presented in such a way that I don’t feel like I am just jumping from person to person.

So I put the book down.

I can’t remember who told me this (possibly several people) but I have heard it said that you should try to commit yourself to at least 100 pages before you put a book down (I got about 145 into Into the Darkness).  I think this makes sense in most cases because by 100 pages you should probably have a pretty good idea if you like the book or not.  There have been other books that I haven’t even made it through the first chapter and that seems like a very clear sign for me to move on.  but point is, give a book a shot, if it doesn’t give you what you are looking for don’t be ashamed to put it down.

But what this comes to is that I am currently without a book to read.  I haven’t taken anything out of the library because I don’t really want to bring a book to my parent’s house with me when I head up to Vermont this weekend (well a loan book that is, if it was my own it would be a different story).  Also, currently I do not feel like rereading any of the books I have in my house (I often do reread personal favorites but I am not in the mood currently).  I have an idea that there are some books in Vermont, either at my parent’s place or my grandmother’s, that I would like to grab.  So I am in a current state of patience.

The thing is that I am itchy to read.  Fortunately I just got two browsing books from a friends during a White Elephant gift exchange this weekend.  Strangely, not necessarily unfortunately, one of the books is an Encyclopedia of Karma Sutra (the whole White Elephant joke thing).  What is actually interesting about the Karma Sutra book is that a few years ago I wrote a paper about Eastern Tantric practices which play a very important role in Karma Sutra (beyond that I guess the book just provides a good conversation piece).

I also have a few magazines lying around that I haven’t read all the way through.  Further this gives me some time to focus on writing and drawing, two things that I consider on equal enjoyment level with reading.  Hoping to find a new book soon though.  Will report back when I got one.

Time’s 10 Best of 2008

Time Magazine has compiled a vast and comprehensive list of the Top 10 of Everything from 2008.  Of course you can’t have a category of “everything” and leave out books . . . so here, according to Time, are the top fiction books of 2008.

1. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
2. Lush Life by Richard Price
3. American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
4. Anathem by Neal Stephenson
5. Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
6. Personal Days by Ed Park
7. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
8. When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
9. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
10. The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike

If you are curious of reading the Time quick reviews of each you can find them starting here.

Time also offer the Top 10 Non-Fiction Books of 2008.

And, in similar fashion, check out the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2008.

I have found several books on all these lists that I would really like to check out.  Personally really want to get a 8hold of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem because I have read a number of glowingly positive reviews of the novel (also, I am slightly ashamed, as a self avowed SciFi fan, of never having read any of Stephenson’s works).  Bolaño’s 2666 intrigues me also, it seems to have gotten a lot of attention since its publication and I would like to pick it up for no other reason just to see what the heck it is all about.

Well if I get any gift cards to Barnes & Noble or Borders for Christmas I will definitely make sure to grab some good reading material.

Praise of Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman”

A bit late on noting that the 20th anniversary of Gaiman’s epic comic creation (which occured a few weeks past) but not so late that I cannot lint to a great post on the 5 Ways That Sandman Changed the World.

I did not grow up as a lover of comic books.  Sure I read some here or there, but ultimately I was never really terribly interested in them until around Junior year of college.  It was that year that I picked up Alan Moore’s great comic, which some regard as the greatest comic of all time, Watchmen.  I will put my reaction simply as having been blown away (I’m also proud to report that my brother has recently had a similar reaction to Watchmen).  From there I went on to read other great comics (or Graphic Novels depending on your semantic preference — I still owe a post on my views of the use of Graphic Novel versus Comic Book) such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, and Jeff Smith Bone amongst others.  Interestingly I had been curious of Gaiman’s Sandman books before beginning my real comic reading mostly because I had greatly enjoyed his novels Neverwhere and American Gods (both wonderful pieces of urban fantasy).  After having read the above mentioned comics and finding myself enjoying this form of literature, I made it a personal goal to pick up The Sandman at some point.  I was lucky when I got a job at the Greenville County Library System that the main library had all the comics available.  I made my way through the series in about a month’s time.  All around The Sandman comics rank up there with Watchmen and Maus as the favorites that I have read.  If you like comics or are interested in trying reading some I would suggest checking out Neil Gaiman’s works, they are very good.