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evelyn_bWhat I Didn't Finish
Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler begins with an eerie tableau of decay: "We watched our dirt go white, our crop fields blacken. Trees collapsed against the night. Insects masked our glass so thick we couldn't see." All right, I thought, tell me more. Then the chapter closes and opens on another eerie tableau etc., then another, and another. One litany of fucked-up shit is a strong opening, three or four in a row begins to pall, and sixty straight pages of fucked-up-shit litanizing is a massive cloud wall of boredom I no longer have the will to stagger through. By that time it was clear there would be no middle, only endless beginnings of the end. Butler likes maggots, Poetry Vocab Words and body horror, so there are whorls aplenty and tinctures for days and everybody's hair either grows way too much or falls out in slimy hanks, ditto fingernails and skin, but what with the same three hiply leaden sentence structures being thunked down one after another with no respite, I was too bored for horror. As for pity, forget it. Named or epitheted characters stumble or drag themselves into the frame only long enough to do something nightmarish or turn into soap. I made it all the way to page 90; the whole book is only about 150 pages, half of which are blank, so I could have powered through if I'd wanted to make a point of it - but life is too short.
What I've Finished Reading
I was right about the killer in Appointment With Death, but not about the motive – since I allowed myself to be distracted by an atfully placed anecdote. This one is very nicely put together. I was delighted to see a bit of subtle literary criticism: one of the hapless would-be murder plots fails because they use an unscientific murder method out of Dorothy L. Sayers. I'm not going to spoil you for two books at once by telling you which one.
Going Postal is about a con-man with the impressively limp name Moist von Lipwig, who is saved from execution by Patrician fiat and given a second chance as postmaster of a cursed post office. Can he use his scamming powers for good? This is the same Moist who will invent paper money in Making Money, so I knew going in that his post office project would be more or less successful.
Here the high-tech competitor for the mails is an elaborate visual telegraph relay like the one in The Count of Monte Cristo (and it gets abused in much the same way, to even more dramatic effect). Lots of exuberant worldbuilding and the usual range of Prachett characters - one-joke, unexpectedly heartwrenching, and everything in between.
What I'm Reading Now
I don't know if you can count The Internet Yellow Pages as "reading" in the traditional sense, but I have been wasting many minutes a day paging through this completely earnest directory of Usenet groups and Gopher pages from the far shores of 1994. It's completely earnest in that it's meant to be used as a directory of things one might find on the Internet, though the writing style is full of jokes - most of them labored - and the pages are sprinkled with ugly cartoons and tongue-in-cheek ads meant to look a little like the ads in a phonebook. It's about a third as thick as the average 90s phone directory, printed on yellow paper for extra authoritativeness, and lists Usenet bestiality forums in three separate places but coyly asterisks out the F-word. It's a walk down memory lane if you were an Internet user a little while before I was (my own teenage chat garden, Prodigy BBS, isn't even mentioned, despite existing since at least 1993), and full of interest if you want to know what a couple of guys from Osbourne thought a representative cross-section of Internet use in 1994.
Project Gutenberg is already on the scene. "Internet is for porn" jokes are already abundant here, and, I suspect, already a little old.
Also reading some other things, but I'm putting them off til next week due to laziness/work pileup.
What I Plan to Read Next
Last week I got two beautiful books in the mail: Six to Sixteen, an early 20th century tale of writing and friendship by Juliana Horatia Ewing (with beautiful faded inscription by previous owner Miss Lousie Fischer of Indianapolis, IN) and To Be or Not to Be, a choose-your-own-adventure Hamlet by Ryan North. Will I get to them this week? Maybe!
Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler begins with an eerie tableau of decay: "We watched our dirt go white, our crop fields blacken. Trees collapsed against the night. Insects masked our glass so thick we couldn't see." All right, I thought, tell me more. Then the chapter closes and opens on another eerie tableau etc., then another, and another. One litany of fucked-up shit is a strong opening, three or four in a row begins to pall, and sixty straight pages of fucked-up-shit litanizing is a massive cloud wall of boredom I no longer have the will to stagger through. By that time it was clear there would be no middle, only endless beginnings of the end. Butler likes maggots, Poetry Vocab Words and body horror, so there are whorls aplenty and tinctures for days and everybody's hair either grows way too much or falls out in slimy hanks, ditto fingernails and skin, but what with the same three hiply leaden sentence structures being thunked down one after another with no respite, I was too bored for horror. As for pity, forget it. Named or epitheted characters stumble or drag themselves into the frame only long enough to do something nightmarish or turn into soap. I made it all the way to page 90; the whole book is only about 150 pages, half of which are blank, so I could have powered through if I'd wanted to make a point of it - but life is too short.
What I've Finished Reading
I was right about the killer in Appointment With Death, but not about the motive – since I allowed myself to be distracted by an atfully placed anecdote. This one is very nicely put together. I was delighted to see a bit of subtle literary criticism: one of the hapless would-be murder plots fails because they use an unscientific murder method out of Dorothy L. Sayers. I'm not going to spoil you for two books at once by telling you which one.
Going Postal is about a con-man with the impressively limp name Moist von Lipwig, who is saved from execution by Patrician fiat and given a second chance as postmaster of a cursed post office. Can he use his scamming powers for good? This is the same Moist who will invent paper money in Making Money, so I knew going in that his post office project would be more or less successful.
Here the high-tech competitor for the mails is an elaborate visual telegraph relay like the one in The Count of Monte Cristo (and it gets abused in much the same way, to even more dramatic effect). Lots of exuberant worldbuilding and the usual range of Prachett characters - one-joke, unexpectedly heartwrenching, and everything in between.
What I'm Reading Now
I don't know if you can count The Internet Yellow Pages as "reading" in the traditional sense, but I have been wasting many minutes a day paging through this completely earnest directory of Usenet groups and Gopher pages from the far shores of 1994. It's completely earnest in that it's meant to be used as a directory of things one might find on the Internet, though the writing style is full of jokes - most of them labored - and the pages are sprinkled with ugly cartoons and tongue-in-cheek ads meant to look a little like the ads in a phonebook. It's about a third as thick as the average 90s phone directory, printed on yellow paper for extra authoritativeness, and lists Usenet bestiality forums in three separate places but coyly asterisks out the F-word. It's a walk down memory lane if you were an Internet user a little while before I was (my own teenage chat garden, Prodigy BBS, isn't even mentioned, despite existing since at least 1993), and full of interest if you want to know what a couple of guys from Osbourne thought a representative cross-section of Internet use in 1994.
Project Gutenberg is already on the scene. "Internet is for porn" jokes are already abundant here, and, I suspect, already a little old.
Also reading some other things, but I'm putting them off til next week due to laziness/work pileup.
What I Plan to Read Next
Last week I got two beautiful books in the mail: Six to Sixteen, an early 20th century tale of writing and friendship by Juliana Horatia Ewing (with beautiful faded inscription by previous owner Miss Lousie Fischer of Indianapolis, IN) and To Be or Not to Be, a choose-your-own-adventure Hamlet by Ryan North. Will I get to them this week? Maybe!
no subject
Date: 2018-01-25 05:27 pm (UTC)I'm glad you enjoyed Going POstal. It's a fun one! (And where the "GNU Terry Pratchett" thing comes from - sending his name down the line.)
I was delighted to see a bit of subtle literary criticism: one of the hapless would-be murder plots fails because they use an unscientific murder method out of Dorothy L. Sayers.
Ha, that's great.
To Be or Not to Be, a choose-your-own-adventure Hamlet by Ryan North.
LOL, and probably like most Choose Your Own Adventures, you'll keep dying, only in this case by taking the right turns?
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Date: 2018-01-25 05:44 pm (UTC)I expect there will be many, many ways to die in To Be or Not to Be - but the back cover promises that there will also be one or two ways to live.
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Date: 2018-01-26 09:01 am (UTC)I expect there will be many, many ways to die in To Be or Not to Be - but the back cover promises that there will also be one or two ways to live.
Yes, but can you find them, that is the question! (I may be still bitter about one CYOA book I had as a child in which I never ever worked out how to die. And I owned it and tried and tried and always died about three entries in. I eye CYOA stuff with much suspicion.)
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Date: 2018-01-26 03:43 pm (UTC)I think I'd have added the Internet yellow pages to Scorch Atlas for not finishing!
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Date: 2018-01-31 04:47 pm (UTC)I would have found Internet Yellow Pages pretty tedious if I'd read it in the original 1994 - but the passage of time has given it a modest dusting of charm.
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