Booksbooksbooks 02/2023
In which i read a lot.
I didn’t come around to read as much in the second quarter of the year as i did in the first few months, but i plugged through 14 books since April, so here they are in chronological order accompanied by teeny tiny reviews for all of them:
Sayaka Murata - Earthlings (dt. Das Seidenraupenzimmer) (★★★★★)
A small novel about sexual abuse and what follows is one of the most fucked up and beautiful stories i've read in a very long time. Definitely recommended, with the climax being like when Junji Ito and Takashi Miike made that cannibal romance movie I've once seen in my dreams. Beautiful and disgusting, sweet and disturbing, just how i like it.Thomas Halliday - Otherlands (dt. Urwelten) (★★★★☆)
A trip backwards through time to the beginnings of life on earth, starting with the Pleistocene 20000 years ago and ending with the Ediacarium in 500 Million bc. Beautifully written and with a flood of information about evolution, geology, the formation of continents, and climate. This mass of mentions of species in fauna and flora absolutely would have deserved more illustrations, and i found myself googleing images on the smartphone while reading, to look up images of those weird creatures described in the book, which was a tiny but unsatisfying. Still a wonderful book, maybe a bit dry sometimes.Delilah S. Dawson - The Violence (★★★☆☆)
I wanted to like this book, i like the prose and i dig the characters even when they are somewhat flat and cliched. But this is a story about killing someone during a pandemic of a virus that causes violent outbreaks, and the morals of this is barely explored, if at all. Every violent incident is shrugged off because the violators where abused in the past, and questions of guilt are sometimes mentioned, but mostly ignored, even when a woman kills her best friend. This is the sort of novel that can only exist in a victimhood culture. But i do like the prose and dig the characters.P. Djèlí Clark - Ring Shout (★★★★☆)
This is what happens when an author stops giving a damn and throws Horror pulp, High Fantasy, racism and the ku-klux clan, african mythology, some voodoo and slavery, and the history of cinema into a blender. A sprawling little novella that i only wish was longer - with so many interesting characters to explore, you could've easily turned this into a literary version of a tarantinioesque Epic. It's pretty good.Irene Vallejo - Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World (dt. Papyrus: Die Geschichte der Welt in Büchern) (★★☆☆☆)
A self-indulgent, chaotic mess. If it weren't for the interesting topic itself, i'd have stopped reading this and the only thing i really liked is the fact that Vallejo mentions comics and graphic novels regulary. Instead of a concisive, coherent history of books, she wildly jumps around in world history, loosely follows the history of antic greece and rome, and constantly breaks off into personal annecdotes that sometimes are sweet, more often read like random interrupts. She does this so excessively that she makes the biggest mistake of any book-writer: It's annoying.
The randomness also leads to repetition, she tells us again and again and again that books get banned and burned, or that medieval copyists had to copy books by hand, letter for letter, word for word - but doesn't mention the epochal invention and the deadly consequences of Gutenbergs printing of Luthers bible translation once.
If you want a dreamy, self-undulgent book that reads like a literary-quilt, go ahead. If you want a book about book-history, pick something else.Diane Cook - The New Wilderness (dt. Die Neue Wildniss) (★★☆☆☆)
On 400 pages nothing happens, except people running around pointlessly discussing pointless things carrying around pointless crap. There's some Rangers who are supposed to be an oppressive force, but they don't matter. The father stumbles and then is dead but it doesn't matter. Nothing matters, except for the mother-daughter-relationship which doesn't make up for the pointlessness because there is no meat to the story, just a daughter who can be annoying but also smart and a mother who sometimes is weak and sometimes strong. The ending somewhat binds this together in a coherent fashion and hints at a much better novel that actually is interested in its premise.
There is a good piece of literature in there that is experimental and references Camus, an alegory on the monotony and unforgivingness of nature and people finding a new balance within that and/or ripping it apart again, but this would require a more daring, a more adventurous writer, and Diane Cook is not that. She just wants to tell a banal, clichéd mother-daughter-story dressed as Climate Fiction. Fine. You did it.Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain (dt. Der Zauberberg) (★★★★★)
1000 pages written in the most beautiful prose about time, science, health, progress, politics, war, love and death covering seven years that lead up to the first world war. A masterpiece, not an easy read, and Thomas Mann's opus magnum regarded as one of the most important novels of the twentieth century, this is also a story about an unpolitical guy being pushed around by circumstances but unable and unwilling to do very much about them — which would be Mann himself.
In The Magic Mountain, he discusses everything that made up his time and age: The manners, language and behaviours of his peers, the scientific progress and relativity of time and space, the back then newly discoveries of biology and physics, technical innovations like the phonograph and music, the politics of liberalism and reactionary conservatism, and even occultism.
Also i want to mention that, and this line might have never been written by a living soul up until now, Thomas Mann is effing psychedelic, man. He can send you on a trip through fifty densely written pages about space and time and then return you to a mundane dinner at a mountain ressort, just to start a worldwide war that will kill millions. Quite a trip, quite a trip, and one of the most beautiful ones i ever had.Richard Bach - Jonathan Livingston Seagull (dt. Die Möwe Jonathan) (★★☆☆☆)
Neat parable on buddhism. Too kitschy for my taste, and while this is a kids book, it's message is still too banal and shallow. Yes sure freedom be yourself you're special yada yada. Kids can take a little more complexity than this, i think. Also, the christian Jesus-motif doesn't sit well with me.
Also, i read an Ullstein Edition that was a typographic crime, made worse by the fact that they tried to jazz it up with arty farty black and white seagull pics, some of them printed on translucent paper for more design karmapoints, while i was able to count more than five widows and orphans, which is an achievement on only ninety pages and is something any typographer learns to avoid in his first year of training. A so-so book with terrible typo, perfect fit, so to speak.Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front (dt. Im Westen nichts Neues) (★★★★☆)
Gut-wrenching account of the first worldwar and the meaningless battles fought over few meters back and forth. A lot of gore, and sheer desperation. Should be mandatory reading in all schools.Sabine Hossenfelder - Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions (dt. Mehr als nur Atome: Was die Physik über die Welt und das Leben verrät) (★★★☆☆)
I love Sabine Hossenfelders dry humor with which she tackles the big questions: What is consciousness? Are multiverses possible? Is there a god? Her main answer to these is simply, that these are question outside of the scientific realm and can't be answered by researchers, so: Maybe. This is a bit frustrating at times, but she makes up for it with wit and the occasional insight into scientific process.Quentin Tarantino - Cinema Speculation (★★★☆☆)
Tarantino writing about the movies of the seventies, a collection of thirteen essay-like chapters that freely talk about everything from movie criticism to production notes to gossip and personal stories.
I liked this book, but Tarantino clearly is not an author of books. The sloppy, 'cool' language works on a screen, but not really for a nonfiction book, at least not for me. Still, i can recommend this to any fan of exploitation cinema, the list of movies i didn't know is long and was alone worth it, and the ending chapter about a former friend of his mothers who insipired teenage Quentin to write movies is just sweet.Carl Nixon - The Tally Stick (dt. Kerbholz) (★★★★★)
Excellent small novel about the destruction of a family through accidents, evil and nature. The ending is a mean reminder that not all evil is resolved and some get away with it, while others arrange with their unjust fate. In the Seventies, John Boorman would've made an fantastic movie out of this and critics would compare it to Deliverance.Lee Child - Echo Burning (Jack Reacher #5) (dt. In Letzter Sekunde) (★★★★☆)
My sixth Reacher and while i enjoyed it a lot, this one was a bit too slow and predictable for my taste. Its a Reacher still, bad Reacher stories do not exist, and i liked the clever plot that is well constructed and surprises you until the end.Lee Child - Blue Moon (Jack Reacher #24) (dt. Die Hyänen) (★★☆☆☆)
”Bad Reacher stories do not exist”, i wrote, and then i read Blue Moon. What happened to the guy?
I've read a whole bunch of Reachers by now, early ones mostly, and this is my first of the newer ones, being published in 2019. I loved the early Reachers for their precise detailed and often times clever action scenes. This was not that and it seems to me that Lee Childs is getting sloppy these days.
While i did like the basic premise of Reacher fighting a city of Mafia crooks, the text craft here is bad at times. There's repeatedly confused dialogue where people seem to talk beyond each other, even sounding randomly. Some action scenes are just straightforward and too much on the nose, lacking the detailed and precise descriptions that gave other stories a unique punch. Also, Reacher sometimes comes around as a violent asshole which he was not in the earlier novels.
On top of that there are some plotholes with stuff that would never ever work in real life, and this time Reacher just gets the right ideas from the top of his head and he always succeeds at first try, where before he sometimes got things wrong and struggled to get to the climax.
I would take all of this from a better writer with better prose, but let’s not forget that this is mainstream Thriller pulp, and Lee Child is not exactly famous for being a virtuose textsmith, but for a good, solid craft depicting precise and detailed action. In this one, he fails at both.
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2022 in books
Booksbooksbooks 01/2023
i must say i totally love the booksection on your blog!! always something to learn, fun and something familiar.
saving up Earthlings for someone i know will love, i'm looking into Otherlands , love the description of der Zauberberg, might be my next read. this time i only match with im Westen nichts Neues.
And here comes my recommendation: the awakened ape - jevan pradas, it's mostly about paleolithic lifestyle and how we act dysfunctional paired with a self-help attitude(i notice you ain't a big fan of tthis kind of lit, but if you would try it, give this a chance), you would love the dry humorous writing style. the ending part on biddhist mediation is so amazingly straight fotward that is just seems natural.