Booksbooksbooks 09/24
Booksbooksbooks 09/24
Tiny reviews for books from Percival Everett, Iain Banks, Herman Melville, Frank Herbert, Adrian Tchaikovsky and many more.
Ned Beauman - Venomous Lumpsucker (dt. Der gemeine Lumpfisch) ★★★★ I’ve grown a bit suspicious about “award winning scifi-books”, but this is a good one. Beauman sets his story in a world where corporations can buy extinction certificates, say, if their mining operation kills of the last population of some rare fish. From here he throws in all kinds of weird ideas but which are not too far off to sound impossible. The book has some clever prose and wit, but i couldn’t shake the feeling of being a tad put off by the more cynical stances of the main characters.
Lauren Groff - The Vaster Wilds (dt. Die weite Wildniss) ★★★★ Great book about a girl running away from an early settlement in 17th century America, told in poetic prose telling it’s story about hunger, cold, loneliness, dreams and hope and survival like a fever dream. Imagine The Revenant minus a bear plus a little girl running endlessly into snowy landscapes.
Alexander Pechmann - Die Bibliothek der verlorenen Bücher ★★★ Neat collection of short essays on lost books and texts which have never been written. A great idea that surely works well for widely read literature nerds, but a tad boring and self-indulgent too to be honest.
Adrian Tchaikovsky - Eyes of the Void (The Final Architecture #2) (dt. Die Augen der Galaxis) ★★★★ Tchaikovsky writes the best space operas these days. Dense Infodumps followed by action rich space scenery in which whole planets get worked up by giant moon sized alien overlords manipulating matter into sculptural dead artifacts. The only criticism for me is that there is not much subtext here — the book says not much about the world we, the readers, live in. But Tchaikovskys novels are hands down the most entertaining scifi around, and that’s quite an achievement.
Frank Herbert - Dune Messiah (Dune #2) (dt. Der Herr des Wüstenplaneten) ★★★ Given the monumental and effing weird first Dune novel, i have to admit i was disappointed reading this second entry in the series. The book often feels like an add-on, some explainer making way for the rest of the series. I haven’t read Children of Dune yet, but i’ve heard that Messiah is supposed to be like this and Children is a return to form. Let’s see when i’m in the mood to return to Arakis after this mediocre epilogue.
Grégory Salle - Superyachten: Luxus und Stille im Kapitalozän ★★★★ A french sociologists meditation superyachts and their absurdity, given the political, economical and environmental realities in “late stage capitalism”. I’m a social-democratic capitalist and i think some people earn to be rich, but it’s simply obscene to own a boat that’s as large as 2 football fields and merely serves a hedonist display of power. The best sociological study about the penis enlargement industry i've ever read.
Iain M. Banks - Consider Phlebas (Culture #1) (dt. Bedenke Phlebas) ★★★★ Maybe the first novel i read where the appendix is more interesting than the story. Its a nice plot, but its a pretty off the shelves sprawling and entertaining space opera, and the ending drags quite a lot (200 pages where people and aliens run around in an underground train complex to find an AI, and it goes on and on and on and on and on, which is quite a contrast to the first fast paced half). The appendix finally explains how the Culture relates politically to AI, albeit its only a few pages, then going on to explain other things and all that stuff is a bit irrelevant for the novel itself. Don’t get me wrong, i liked it and loved some of the more weird ideas, but i also don’t get why this is considered such a classic. A good novel, but not as groundbreaking as the praise wants to make me believe.
Fabio Stassi - Die Seele aller Zufälle (Vince Corso #2) ★★★ Vince Corso is a bibliotherapist (using book suggestions to help his clients with various unpleasantries and his latest adventure sends him on a detective story about a deceased dementia patient using his library as a mnemonic device. This sounded great when i read the blurb and it sounds great when you summarize it, but it also was a bit of a bore and one of those books that is just too playful, too quirky, too self-absorbed for my taste. I think i’m very much done with “books about the love of books”.
Herman Melville - Moby Dick: or, the White Wale (dt. Moby-Dick oder Der Wal) ★★★★★ Moby Dick blew me away on quite a few levels i did not expect. I was really surprised by how readable this was and how fast i was able to pace through this mid-19th-century prose, all while being highly innovative (not just) for it’s time. The plot we all came to know — Ahab hunting the wale —, makes half of the book at max, maybe even less. The rest of the book are essays and musings on pretty much everything related to wale hunting: The ships, economics, ropes, planks, occupations and, ofcourse, the animal itself, it’s evolution and anatomy and character too. This makes this not just a highly entertaining read, but also a wild ride through all kinds of styles. Moby Dick truly deserves to be considered the classic that it is.
Lee Child - Worth Dying For (dt. Wespennest) / A Wanted Man (dt. Der Anhalter) (Jack Reacher #15 / #17) ★★★ There are two Reacher novels: In the first Reacher hitchhikes into some town and stumbles upon trouble, in the other some government agents need help. Pretty much all books follow one of these lines. I’ve read 14 Reachers and while these two lack any surprises at this point (WDF follows the first, AWM the second line), they are solid, suspenseful and entertaining entries in the series featuring some explosive punches along the way. Which is exactly what you want from a Reacher-book.
Jack Ketchum - Evil ★★★★ Ketchum’s Evil is a mean entry in the literary equivalent of torture porn, it’s an uncomfortable read and it lacks the ironic contrasting that made American Psycho such a classic. While reading i was constantly shifting from “this is an ugly, terrible, mean story that should not be told that way” to “it’s a punch in the stomach and exactly how it wants to be”. Sure, this thing sticks with you for a few days after reading, and the prose and style are highly effective in putting you in a very bad place for two weeks or so. But, lets say, this will be my only “sick and disturbing thriller” for this year. I’m good with this stuff for a while.
Percival Everett - James ★★★★★ Percival Everett tackles one of my favorite literary classics and tells the story of Jim, the slave of Huckleberry Finn. Huck, in this version, is a recurring character who enters a scenes, sticks around for a while going on an adventure and then leaves again, making place for James musings about his fate as man whose grand parents where violently taken in his home country, to be abused and tortured and forced to manual labor for dumb sacks in the “new world”. I loved that Everett actually had the guts to turn his James into a vigilante hero towards the end, bordering on a pulpy slave revenge story on the last few pages, giving this great postmodern exercise an edge that elevates it above pure literary nerdism.
Johan Huizinga - Homo Ludens. A study of the Play-Element in Culture (dt. Homo Ludens. Vom Ursprung der Kultur im Spiel.) ★★★ At 80 year old, this classic of cultural studies feels a bit dated. Sure, Huizingas book is a good, very interesting read about the elements of play in human cultures throughout history, but he’s also cherry picking his examples to fit history to his theory of play being the very basis of culture itself. It’s a highly interesting thesis which seems very suitable to the gamification of discourse we can see on social media these days with tons of implications for psychology and politics, but, all things considered, i’m not sure if his thesis holds up under scrutiny in a more historical context. Still, a good classic worth a read.
Johanna Sebauer - Nincshof ★★★ Lovely, quirky little story about a small town (more like a bunch of houses, actually) in Austria, where a handful of people start a movement to make the town forgotten by anyone else. It’s a weird story idea and i loved reading it, but the book and characters also show the aesthetics of a german TV-movie playing in the alps and it never really tries to escape that. The moments where the village conspiracists get into philosophy and muse about theories of absence and how to achieve willful collective memory holes are too rare, unfortunately. A good book that could’ve been much more.
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