Funny from the first page, in my opinion. It's certainly a certain style of humour--in line with Monty Python, Dickens, Douglas Adams, and similar Brits.

Yeah despite everyone loving Monty python it was never my type of humor either. So that explains why I didn't find this book too funny.
Although Douglas Adams books were amazing to me.

I read Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloane. Meh. Pretty interesting story but it wasn't particularly well-plotted. It's got the same sort of juvenile or young adult tone that Ready Player One has, without the charm. It has its moments, though. Pretty much the definition of an average book.

Also, has anyone here read Red Rising by Pierce Brown? I read the first chapter last night and it struck me as being poorly written. The second paragraph has a cringeworthy mixed metaphor -- "Listening to the beast who brought the flame that gnaws at my heart." The prose seems so subpar in many aspects. I mean, I can deal with it if the story improves, but I'm wondering if it's even worth continuing.

For anyone interested it was announced the Wheel of Time series is finally going to be made into a TV series.

I found a nice little gem in The Earth Moved: On The Remarkable Achievements Of Earthworms by Amy Stewart. All kinds of interesting facts about this seldom-studied little creature. She's a gardener, not a scientist, but the book does draw from Darwin and other scientific sources a good deal. My phone is now full of bookmarks from all the interesting stuff in this book.

Just finished Ubik by Philip K. Dick. What a trip. I don't really read science fiction so this was a big left turn for me. Crazy mind blowing stuff.
Any suggestions for further reading by PKD or in science fiction in general?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (turned into Blade Runner)


Man in the High Castle (turned into Amazon miniseries)


The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (not turned into anything, but trippy)

Hi chaps

My first book is now available on Kindle, and it's on free promotion until 5th May. You can download it and keep it forever.

It's a non-fiction work about the TV shows, movies and radio series of Quatermass, a British scifi hero that started in the 1950s, and was a precursor to Doctor Who.

http://www.amazon.com/Quatermass-Tel...2089897&sr=8-1

If you like it, I'd be grateful for a good review.

Ta,
db

I watched a couple of Quatermass movies for the first time recently.

Pauwl,

Three Stigmata is definitely a good one after reading Ubik. It's a little more complex and cerebral, and a little less zany.

I'd also recommend A Scanner Darkly. It's more speculative fiction than scifi, but it has the same identity crisis theme that is so prevalent in Dick's work.

Funny, I'm currently reading this. I started it mostly based on the great ratings, and had the very same issue you had. The first 5% of the book orso I Was wondering why people liked it, thought it was pretty bad, but I'm now at 40% and definitely like where it's going. so I suggest to keep going with it. To me it wasn't really the writingstyle that bothered me, but more that none of it made sense to me.

I'm pretty sure Quatermass isn't that well known outside the UK, and even inside the UK it's not that well known these days lol. It deserves to be better remembered imo.

I found them enjoyable. Can't remember the name of the 2nd one I watched, it was filmed at a new chemical factory or something.

Vegasvilla,
I gave up on Red Rising. I soldiered on until I got halfway through Part 2 Ch 1, but I just couldn't take anymore. It's been a long while since I've given up on a book. Usually I'll be able to find some redeeming quality to keep me going, and I heard it took a cool turn at around that point. Once I hit that point and realized the twist, though, I had to put it down. If you finish and love it I might give it another shot.

Fortunately, I had a good audiobook going at the same time -- Robin Hobbs' Assassin's Apprentice. Top notch fantasy. There is a lot of set up and teaching going on, but it never lost my interest, and the payoff is pretty nice even if it's mostly obvious. It reminded me a good bit of Once and Future King.

**** I read the preview on ibooks of that east germany soccer book and now i might have to spend $100 to read the rest of it. was really good ****.

Quatermass II

The first movie sequel to use a numeral in its title (apart from Ivan The Terrible Part 2, and that wasn't a sequel, it was the second part in a long story)

Dimension of Miracles by Robert Sheckley is a damn funny book, kind of an American precursor to Hitchhiker's Guide. The plot centers around a guy from 1960s NY who wins an intergalactic lottery prize by way of a pious computer glitch. Lots of episodic-style absurd conversations and a really cool ending.

Finished The Magicians by Lev Grossman.

I enjoyed the first half, found the second half difficult to slog through. I liked the idea of an adult Magical college, and the concept of Magicians practicing in the real world unbeknownst to the rest of society.

I hated Fillory and everything to do with it. It did not feel like a properly fleshed out and realized world. It felt like he put these characters in Place A, and got them to Place B, while inventing as many completely fantastical things that might happen to them on the way. I never felt like he actually gave much thought to the world or it's inhabitants. I never felt like this was a real place to be honest, and maybe that was intentional, but it doesn't make it enjoyable.

I think I get what the author was trying to accomplish with the book. It works as an allegory for the contrast of "fantasy vs reality", whatever that fantasy may be. As kids, we imagine our future professions, we go to school, we go to University, we don't really know what we are going to do when we get out. At some point, those dreams dissolve into accepting some job that pays the bills and feeds your family, and offers very little in the way of actual rewarding work, and almost certainly bears little resemblance to the life we imagined for ourself at some point. It's about coming to terms with that and enjoying your life anyway (or not).

That said, a grand idea does not necessarily make for an interesting story, and this book definitely failed to hold my attention for the duration. I think it took me 2 weeks to read the last third of the book.



Now, after all of that, I'm still going to read the second book. There was still enough promise in the characters and story that I'm hoping I will enjoy the second book more. I'm still holding on to the "idea" for these books being a good one. Let's hope the reality matches my expectations, though I don't have my hopes too high.

Many thanks for the reviews!

I've been concerned by Zen's treatment of desire (often confused with craving when taught to Westerners) and, in search of a way to address needs without becoming their slave (renunciation is aversion of desire and thus slavery too), I've tried reading 'Open to Desire' by Mark Epstein, M.D.

I'm afraid it was a miss for me. The author's approach looks a bit too Freudian and hence too focused on eros. He draws parallels between psychoanalysis (incl. cases from his own practice of therapy), Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism, gives the Ramayana as an example of how craving and objectification (represented by Ravana) can stand in the way of completeness and how desire can be turned into positive creative energy instead (on Rama's part). He explains that, on the left-hand path to nirvana, it's crucial, instead of focusing only on the object of desire, to start also paying attention to the subject (one's own personal space), which he regards as a feminine approach.

The book is still a decently enlightening read for those who don't mind becoming more familiar with Tantra and its emphasis on eros as a fast-track approximation (but not a replacement) of nirvana.

Finished Inferno (A Poet's Novel) by Eileen Myles. I wanted to like this work more than I did. It's extremely well written. It's like Bukowski (though better written from a literary pov) without the grit or passion or emotion. It's a story of the NYC art scene of the 80's and 90's. A great deal is made of Eileen Myles working class roots and the deprivations she suffered while hanging out with all the hip names she could drop, I grew to feel that she was one more poseur in NYC, voluntarily suffering so she could write about life as a deprived Bohemian.

I like Eileen Myles, her writing style, her poetry and the narrative. The "how cool we all were" and "we were the in-crowd social group" aspect to it put me off. I'll take a loner like Bukowski or Pekar any day.

Can anyone recommend novels written by authors who usually write poetry? I'm thinking along the lines of Ben Lerner's 10:04 and Ondaatje's The English Patient.

Sylvia Plath is known for writing one novel, The Bell Jar. Some persons argue some of her other writings qualify as novels.

The book I reviewed directly over your post, Inferno (A Poet's Novel) by Eileen Myles, a poet and the inspiration for the professor on Amazon's Transparent.

"Usually" is a tricky word there; more typically these are writers who started out as poets and then began writing novels, often abandoning (or almost abandoning) poetry to do so. Ondaatje is one example of that. He's published two books of new poetry since his 1979 selected (1984 and 1998), while publishing five novels in that time. Atwood's career follows a similar line.

But to anwer your question: You won't go wrong reading more of Ondaatje's novels if you haven't already: particularly In the Skin of a Lion and Anil's Ghost.

Atwood (as suggested above) fits your category. Lots to choose from. My favourites are The Robber Bride and The Blind Assassin. Also, Life before Man. But others would disagree.

Another example of an excellent poet also producing terrific fiction is the Newfoundland writer Michael Crummey. Galore is a magnificent novel, working in a Garcia Marquez tradition. More realist, The Wreckage, is also a powerful book.

Anne Michaels (who was an Ondaatje discovery, while he was editing for Coach House Press) is another. Though she will be returning to poetry in her next book.

And then there's Leonard Cohen, who veered between poetry and novels before winding up in song (though most of his songs qualify as poetry in my judgement). Beautiful Losers is a bit of a period piece but still of interest.

For reasons that have to do (I think) with publishing culture and related issues, writing both poetry and fiction successfully is much more common in the Canadian literary community than in the American.

One terrific American poet who wrote an enduring novel is Randall Jarrell, whose Pictures from an Institution (1954) is one of the academic novels that I've gone back to. But it could be argued that this is not so much a novel as a comic monologue making fun of the foibles of various type characters by employing a constant stream of witticisms and semi-aphorisms, some of them quite good and some rather predictable.

Gertrude, the central character, was modelled after Mary McCarthy, who was at Sarah Lawrence for a while with Jarrell. Adam Gopnik gets it right when he observes:

Wow, thanks so much Russell and Gioco. Exactly what I was looking for.