What are you reading?

[dark_crystal]

Yesterday I read O FALLEN ANGEL, By Kate Zambreno.

I agree with the Rumpus reviewer in all but conclusion (mine was "no")

It is undeniable that Kate Zambreno’s O Fallen Angel is completely successful in its goals. It’s got the quirks, the puns, the joking asides, and the quickest pace of almost any book I’ve read. Zambreno’s characters are vivid—from Maggie the spoiled child turned bipolar wreck, to Mommy the quintessential Midwest housemom—and the setting seems somehow familiar, though actual description is rare. Paradoxically, these elements may begin to explain why I struggled with this book.

O Fallen Angel tells the story of Maggie and Mommy and their tumultuous relationship. In the present-day story, Maggie has moved to the “big bad” city—Chicago, I think—and slowly become a pill-addicted prostitute who has sex with strange men to kill the pain. Mommy makes egg salad with way too much mayonnaise and thinks things like, “Mommy can visit Europe when she goes to Epcot Center.” Both are, of course, archetypes of a Midwest Catholic household—or maybe the subject matter is just all too familiar for me, being a Midwest Catholic girl who moved to the “big bad” city.

Either way, it seems clear that Zambreno intended her characters to remain static as they move through the narrative. She keeps a very tight leash on this story, her voice never faltering from the on-guard judgment she casts upon her characters. Although they may deserve to be derided—they’re honestly very stupid and self-centered—the question arises whether it’s possible to write a good novel in which the characters are stereotypes who don’t change and whom readers are expected from the beginning to hate.

Semi-conclusion: I want to believe it’s possible.

This concludes my book club obligations for June! Back to sci-fi...

[homoe]

The Gilded Years by Karin Tanabe


Built around the true story of Anita Hemmings, a light-skinned African-American woman who convinces the admissions board at Vassar College that she's Caucasian in order to attend school there.

Sidebar: I just read an most interesting article about Reese Witherspoon, her book club selections, and her production company Hello Sunshine. It mentioned that this is soon to be adapted for a film starring Zendaya who will also co-produce.

[girl_dee]

*The Cases that Haunt us*

John Douglas
Mark Olshaker

It’s about famous unsolved crimes

[dark_crystal]

Originally Posted by dark_crystal

This concludes my book club obligations for June! Back to sci-fi...

I went on a binge! Here is what i have read since i cleared the book club hurdles last week:

THE CIRCLE, by Dave Eggers

Mae Holland, a woman in her 20s, arrives for her first day of work at a company called the Circle. She marvels at the beautiful campus, the fountain, the tennis and volleyball courts, the squeals of children from the day care center “weaving like water.” The first line in the book is: “ ‘My God,’ Mae thought. ‘It’s heaven.’ ”

And so we know that the Circle in Dave Eggers’s new novel, “The Circle,” will be a hell.

LEVIATHAN WAKES, by James S.A. Corey

Leviathan Wakes is James S. A. Corey's first novel in the epic, New York Times bestselling series the Expanse, a modern masterwork of science fiction where humanity has colonized the solar system.

Two hundred years after migrating into space, mankind is in turmoil. When a reluctant ship's captain and washed-up detective find themselves involved in the case of a missing girl, what they discover brings our solar system to the brink of civil war, and exposes the greatest conspiracy in human history

AUTONOMOUS, by Annalee Newitz (2018 Lambda Award!)

Jack Chen is a pirate who's dedicated her life to the development and distribution of free drugs, reverse-engineering patented pharma cheaply and quickly and distributing it where it's needed. But when she drops a productivity-boosting drug called Zacuity on the black market and it starts unexpectedly killing people, she has to do two things very quickly: develop a drug therapy to fix her mistake, and make public Big Pharma's illegal development of a drug that deliberately makes work as addictive as heroin.

Unfortunately for Jack, two IPC agents are hot on her trail. Paladin is a brand-new military grade robot, partnered with a human man named Eliasz to track Jack down before anything can officially embarrass Zacuity's patent-holders. Paladin's job is to protect Eliasz while he gathers information – but the robot finds Eliasz himself more fascinating than their mission parameters, devoting time and processing power to understanding him and the nuances of their developing relationship

I had (justified) high hopes for AUTONOMOUS bc I happened to read Newitz's previous non-fiction book on surviving a mass extinction on the plane home from Shanghai last March:

SCATTER, ADAPT, AND REMEMBER, by Annalee Newitz

In “Scatter, Adapt, and Remember,” Annalee Newitz presents a sort of prophylaxis for the apocalypse. As the founding editor of io9, a Gawker Media blog about science and futurism, Newitz is a techno-optimist, convinced that we humans can outwit just about everything our solar system throws at us in the coming millennia. “How can I say that with so much certainty?” she asks. “Because the world has been almost completely destroyed at least half a dozen times already in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, and every single time there have been survivors.” She’s probably right.

Also, Annalee is eye candy



I have now started GNOMON, by Nick Harkaway

To call Gnomon a work of genius is not entirely a compliment. Nick Harkaway’s epic, unwieldy, unpredictable new novel is outwardly brainy and pridefully digressive, and the distance it projects from its reader feels excruciatingly deliberate. Harkaway (Tigerman) wears his deep, fabulous vocabulary on his sleeve, and he’s unafraid to ruminate on the seemingly irrelevant in great detail. The sheer intelligence of the book feels almost beside the point; it’s to be taken as something of a given.

If Gnomon is not exactly a departure from Harkaway’s previous work, it’s at least his rawest effort, a window into his writerly impulses and motivations — into what separates him from the pack. It’s why, at first glance, Gnomon nicely stands out as a dystopian novel that manages to approach the genre uniquely and push it forward. The book arrives stateside after a year in which 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale skyrocketed on best-seller lists and found popular adaptations in theater and television, respectively. More broadly, the genre has felt appropriately ubiquitous in a tumultuous and unsettling political era.

[Kätzchen]

Ooooh, I just read a good book review about Gnomon by Mark Harkaway, in The Guardian.

It looks like an good book to read and I hope to find it at Powell's.



LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...ment-110011379

[homoe]

This was released earlier this month on paperback so I just picked it up and just started it.

It's another book on Reese Witherspoon's book club selections and it too is soon to be made into a movie by her production company.

[knight]

The Rohingyas by Azeem Ibrahim

This is a very disturbing book about the suffering of the Rohingyas people by the most unfortunate hands of some self claimed Buddhists. Each one of us has Buddha nature, no matter where we come from or what we do. Much Meta to all!

Knight

[Kobi]

From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage-and a life, in good times and bad-that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support.

Days later-the night before New Year's Eve-the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary.

In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over.

Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.

[2qt]

Mind by Daniel J. Siegel


Neuroscience studies the brain. A full examination of what we mean by the term “mind” has traditionally been the province of philosophers but here Daniel Siegel explores what neuroscience can teach us about it-how the mind differs from consciousness and how we know who we really are. In Mind, Siegel, The New York Times best-selling author, brings his characteristic sensitivity and interdisciplinary background to this most perplexing of topics. He explores the nature of the who, how, what, why and when of your mind-of your self-from the perspective of neuroscience. Mind captures the essence of our true nature, our deepest sense of being alive, here, right now, in this moment. How science explains it is one of the most exciting journeys into knowledge we can take.