in a week where the two new novels I read are Knausgaard vol. 2 and Joe Hill's Nos4A2. Uncanny the extent to which that book both does and doesn't resemble a novel by Stephen King - it is at once intensely and allusively indebted and very much its own thing. I think Heart-Shaped Box is perhaps slightly more exactly to my taste, but this one is extremely good too (very appealing scene where iPad FBI agents are using to try and locate kidnapped child's iPhone eerily represents alternate universe!).
Also just as good as everybody said: Lawrence Wright's Scientology book, Going Clear. Gripping, indispensable; has also caused me to obtain a copy of Murakami's book about the Japanese subway attacks, which I've been meaning to read for a long time.
Showing posts with label cults. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cults. Show all posts
Monday, May 06, 2013
Saturday, May 08, 2010
Light reading miscellany
Slightly procrastinating on getting out for my long run, so will instead do the roundup on recent reading. (Have to log 'em so I can return 'em to the library!)
Belatedly realized that actually there is an earlier Inspector Winter book by Ake Edwardson, Death Angels, only translated into English after the later ones. Quite good, but returning to the earlier installment in a series gives the sense of decreased subtlety due to the character development that has in the meantime happened in subsequent installments.
James Thompson's Snow Angels. Quite striking, and yet also wildly implausible!
Gladys Mitchell's The Rising of the Moon, left for me by a visitor. Billed by Edmund Crispin (an old favorite of mine) as "One of the dozen best crime novels that I know" - certainly I would not endorse that statement, but I found it worth my while - curious and interesting narrative voice, at any rate.
Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin. Very good indeed, but I stalled on it because it is perhaps bleaker than I really want even in my crime fiction reading...
Deon Meyer's Blood Safari, really the best of this bunch I'd say (at least in terms of immediate reading satisfaction - Fallada, as I have suggested, is a bit more complicated) - I am really blown away by Meyer's books, how come I didn't read 'em sooner?!?
Finally an odd one out - it arrived on my doorstep from FSG and I pounced upon it immediately. It is a physically lovely book (a particularly attractive dust-jacket, texturally as well as visually!) and I found the essays all very compelling - it is John Waters' Role Models. I especially enjoyed rereading last year's Huffington Post essay about his friendship with Leslie Van Houten, but it's a high-quality collection throughout (I think my other favorite was "Outsider Porn," but the essays on Johnny Mathis and Little Richard are stand-outs as well).
Finally, on a related note, Tony Barrell profiles the founder of Taschen Books in last week's Sunday Times.
Belatedly realized that actually there is an earlier Inspector Winter book by Ake Edwardson, Death Angels, only translated into English after the later ones. Quite good, but returning to the earlier installment in a series gives the sense of decreased subtlety due to the character development that has in the meantime happened in subsequent installments.
James Thompson's Snow Angels. Quite striking, and yet also wildly implausible!
Gladys Mitchell's The Rising of the Moon, left for me by a visitor. Billed by Edmund Crispin (an old favorite of mine) as "One of the dozen best crime novels that I know" - certainly I would not endorse that statement, but I found it worth my while - curious and interesting narrative voice, at any rate.
Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin. Very good indeed, but I stalled on it because it is perhaps bleaker than I really want even in my crime fiction reading...
Deon Meyer's Blood Safari, really the best of this bunch I'd say (at least in terms of immediate reading satisfaction - Fallada, as I have suggested, is a bit more complicated) - I am really blown away by Meyer's books, how come I didn't read 'em sooner?!?
Finally an odd one out - it arrived on my doorstep from FSG and I pounced upon it immediately. It is a physically lovely book (a particularly attractive dust-jacket, texturally as well as visually!) and I found the essays all very compelling - it is John Waters' Role Models. I especially enjoyed rereading last year's Huffington Post essay about his friendship with Leslie Van Houten, but it's a high-quality collection throughout (I think my other favorite was "Outsider Porn," but the essays on Johnny Mathis and Little Richard are stand-outs as well).
Finally, on a related note, Tony Barrell profiles the founder of Taschen Books in last week's Sunday Times.
Sunday, September 06, 2009
The Unlikelies
I read an amazing novel this weekend - I absolutely loved this book! It is so rare that I find something that really appeals as much to my light-reading side as to my wanting-books-to-be-really-smart side - but this is an absolute page-turner, and also one of the most interesting and stimulating books I've read all year. It is Victor Lavalle's Big Machine, and I found it spectacularly good - funny, scary, surprising, spiritually astute - I couldn't put it down.
(Why haven't I read more great novels about cults? What is there out there? Laurie King's A Darker Place was very good. I still remember, as a child, feeling the shock of the story of the Jonestown massacre - were pictures published in Newsweek, or am I just imagining it?)
Here is a WSJ profile of Lavalle, because I am too lazy to write a proper review myself; and here is Lavalle on his sex life during his years as a very fat man.
On a lazier note, I add that in the bookstore at 30th St. Station in Philadelphia this evening I seized upon Even Money. It lasted me pretty much exactly all the way home to the 116th St. subway stop, so I consider it money well spent; it is slightly more readable than its predecessor, but I think that the collaborative father-son team continues to misunderstand the extent to which the traditional Dick Francis hero steps over the line dividing the legal from the illegal only because there is a gap between the legal and the just, whereas the protagonists of these last couple books have a blithe disregard for the law that makes them considerably overstep the bounds of what the Franciscan reader is likely to find acceptable!
[ED. A quick search post-blogging leads me to the Largehearted Boy Lavalle playlist, with links - in fact it must be that Ed Park's Astral Weeks coverage is what led me to buy the book in the first place!]
(Why haven't I read more great novels about cults? What is there out there? Laurie King's A Darker Place was very good. I still remember, as a child, feeling the shock of the story of the Jonestown massacre - were pictures published in Newsweek, or am I just imagining it?)
Here is a WSJ profile of Lavalle, because I am too lazy to write a proper review myself; and here is Lavalle on his sex life during his years as a very fat man.
On a lazier note, I add that in the bookstore at 30th St. Station in Philadelphia this evening I seized upon Even Money. It lasted me pretty much exactly all the way home to the 116th St. subway stop, so I consider it money well spent; it is slightly more readable than its predecessor, but I think that the collaborative father-son team continues to misunderstand the extent to which the traditional Dick Francis hero steps over the line dividing the legal from the illegal only because there is a gap between the legal and the just, whereas the protagonists of these last couple books have a blithe disregard for the law that makes them considerably overstep the bounds of what the Franciscan reader is likely to find acceptable!
[ED. A quick search post-blogging leads me to the Largehearted Boy Lavalle playlist, with links - in fact it must be that Ed Park's Astral Weeks coverage is what led me to buy the book in the first place!]
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