Darwin8u

Maybe not the greatest, but Wells is certainly one of the first and the greats in the Science Fiction pantheon. Like Plato's Ring of Gyges and other morality tales of special powers corrupting, 'The Invisible Man,' is far more than just a story of invisibility. It is a story of the limits of morality and humanity. We are defined by our limits and the interdependence created by those boundaries. Another book I'm amazed I didn't read years ago. Not the best Wells I've read, but worth the effort.

Vicki Morgan was an interesting pick for a narrator. At first her narration was a tad distracting, but I soon got used to it. Eventually, she did her job and disappeared into the story.

Just finished this with the kids. I remember reading this with my mother when I was 10. It is a nice generational conveyance. When I was young, the STORIES of Tom and Huck affected me the most. Now, however, it is Twain's language that touches me. I love how Tom's life and play is impacted by the adventure books he reads. One day Tom is animated by a bounty of pirates, the next day by a shadow of robbers, and everyday Tom's vocabulary and actions are endowed with the books of his youth. 'Tom Sawyer' is just as much an ode to his youth as it is a poesy to the adventure books of a more tender age.

A collection of Chesterton detective stories revolving around Horne Fisher and his companion, political journalist Harold March. These stories have a lot of the same late Victorian/Edwardian flavor of Sherlock Holmes and Chesterton's own Father Brown stories. The reluctant, and moral protagonist of The Man Who Knew Too Much, however, is often forced by greater-good circumstance or a need to protect the best interests of England from revealing the killer or the culprit.

The strengths of these stories revolves around the clever paradoxes that the Chesterton (the dark prince of paradox) knows too well. The weakness of these stories (and the reason I gave them 3 stars and not 4 stars) is the unsubtle antisemitism that pops up in a couple of them (especially 'the Bottomless Well').

Stories include:

"The Face in the Target"
"The Vanishing Prince"
"The Soul of the Schoolboy"
"The Bottomless Well"
"The Hole in the Wall"
"The Fad of the Fisherman"
"The Fool of the Family"
"The Vengeance of the Statue"

Church FINALLY fixed his pacing problem with 'the Man with the Baltic Stare'. This novel was a lot better than 'Bamboo and Blood'. It may even be better than his first one (although 'Corpse in the Koryo' gets originality points). Anyway, it redeemed the Inspector O series for me.

Church is as strong a writer as Olen Steinhauer, just working a different geography. All the blurbing, however, about how he is the next le Carré is about 20+ amazing books premature. I don't think ANYONE will be the next le Carré . I'm not even sure if le Carré would be capable now of being the next le Carré .

But, head back to Church (no more le Carré backsliding today). I think this novel was more confident, less messy, and reminded me of why I started reading Church in the first place. I guess I'm going to have to read Johnson's 'Orphan Master's Son' now just to get North Korea out of my blood.

James Church's third Inspector O novel just doesn't quite deliver the goods. It starts out fine, blending hard-boiled noir (Hammett/Chandler) with international political thriller (le Carré/Steinhauer) mixed with a bit/dash of Hemingway.

Where Hemingway was fixated on food, wine and women, Church fixates on lack of food, the cold and wood. It all works, if you can ignore the sloppy pacing that creeps into the end of the novel. The novel's first 3/4 seems fine, not exceptional, but interesting and not too overdone, but with about 70 pages left it seems like Church loses all interest in the project and decides it will take entirely too much time and work to weave the various narrative threads back, so he just leaves them, or cuts them off completely.

The end of the novel reminded me of the butchered Geneva plane trees that Inspector O was so upset by. It is hard to love something that hasn't been allowed to freely grow to its potential. As Inspector O says of the plane trees, "They might wish they were dead. No, they have been mangled. Their tops have been hacked off. They are maimed."

An early Nabokov with many funky allusions to Tolstoy, early anticipations and presages of Lolita, and Nabokovian black humor from beginning to end. As a independent work, I don't think it belongs in the top tier of Nabokov's lush ouvre, but it seems to me to be a piece where Nabokov establishes his literary sea legs. The genealogy of most of his great later work seem to all thread back to 'Laughter in the Dark'/aka 'Kamera obskura'.

In this novel, Nabokov is playing with themes of vision, blindness, truth, deception, art and morality. You see many of Nabokov's later motifs surrounding vision floating (like mouches volantes) through this early work: mirrors, window pains, mimicry, scintillations, semblances, glasses, movies, etc. It wouldn't be Nabokov if he played any of these themes straight. He bends the narrative and plays with Tolstoy's belief that it is "the essential nature of truth to be hidden from, then revealed to, the eyes." Nabokov gives you the goods and gives them to you good and hard right between the eyes.

I'm not sure why I volunteered to jump into another D@mned Dan Brown novel. What Circle of Dante's Inferno was designed for a cynical, but weak reader who keeps returning to those crappy, popular authors (D@mn Brown Brown, Orson Scott Card, Tom Clancy) of their youth hoping to drink from the waters of Bimini? What circle do you consign the novel's author?

1. Limbo? Look, the novel isn't THAT horrible. D@mned Dan Brown can be tolerably entertaining if you SIMPLY ignore his actual writing. He IS (as everyone keeps telling me) the master of page-turning historical mysteries, but I'm just not sure if that says MORE about page-turning historical mysteries, Damned Dan Brown, or us as readers.

2. Lust? To be fair, while I despise D@mned Dan Brown's actual words, his style, and his in-artful language -- his plotting does somehow turn me on (occasionally) as a reader. While I am now convinced he hit his low-brow/high water mark with The Da Vinci Code (Yes, it's all down hill from Leonardo D@mned Dan Brown), this novel is slightly better than the The Lost Symbol so --- I can't absolutely pan it (thus 2 stars).

3. Gluttony? This is the most likely circle 'Inferno' belongs to. I think D@mned Dan Brown's major issue is his self-indulgence. DDB's style is inflated, but doesn't actually inform. His metaphors are swollen. His descriptions are possessed of a majority gristle with very little actual literary meat. Half of the book reminds me of some obscure teenager's fan fiction site cribbing a Lonely Planet Publication's guide to write about Florence, Venice, and Istanbul.

4. Greed? It is obvious why D@mned Dan Brown writes this way... because we (myself included) still buy it. It reminds me of why I hate it when directors in Hollywood become successful. They stop being interesting and instead become hacks. The reading public, much like the movie going public, demands mediocrity if the writer/director is going to be successful. Real art is not usually bought, real literature is most often ignored (I know that is a cliche, but it IS true). The amazing thing is that DDB started (in the beginning) as a hack and has just perfected hackery to a point where he will certainly be able to print money in 20 years by just publishing an Italian phone book.

5. Anger? No, not really. It is more like regret. If I am angry (Notice how I shifted from the circles being about DDB to the circles being about me? If you aren't comfortable with those kind of style abortions/grammar shifts, you should probably not read D@mned Dan Brown) it is an anger of what now passes as novel entertainment.

6. Heresy? No, D@mned Dan Brown definitely doesn't belong here. This is certainly a circle the Catholic church would have like to place him for The Da Vinci Code but 'Inferno' is mainly heretical to scholars of Dante, lonely Transhumanists, and perhaps the odd weekend, Malthusian alarmist.

7. Violence? Again, because D@mned Dan Brown is aiming for the center-mass of the pulp, paperback purchasing world, he isn't going to make his novel THAT graphic (plus DDB doesn't have the Cormac McCarthy writing chops to paste together a single sentence that would actually scare the beJesus out of anyone). He made 'Inferno' grim in parts, he made it painful to read cover-to-cover, but violent? Meh.

8. Fraud? 'Inferno' is simple and obvious rip-off of every dystopian SF novel about eugenics + a whole shelf of discount guide books + cheap James Bond knockoffs + a little bit of the 'Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'. But, since all writing is a crib, a rip-off, I can't really condemn D@mned Dan Brown to Hell, at least to this circle for doing what everyone does, but he just does poorly. If DDB is condemned to the 8th circle it will be more for The Da Vinci Code, which I believe is a boring, watered-down and mediocre version of Foucault's Pendulum.

9. Treachery? The further down into Hell you go, the more you realize it actually takes a lot of work to earn a place at these lower levels. That alone would discount D@mned Dan Brown. It would also probably discount my review, since I just couldn't bring myself to spend an inordinate amount of time reviewing a book I wasn't all that impressed by.

If for whatever reason, during the last twenty years, you've missed John le Carré's anger, and if his last 10 books were too subtle for you, and if you didn't catch le Carré's moral outrage in 'the Constant Gardner' and 'a Most Wanted Man', then you might need to skip 'A Delicate Truth'. In his newest novel, John le Carré tackles the amoral world of private contract espionage, rendition, and ineptness. Le Carré attacks Western ethics, Western hypocrisy, the West's venal “war gone corporate.”

John le Carré war is a battle of young idealism vs amoral and often incompetent mercenaries. It is a war of principled, but flawed individuals vs what Olen Steinhauer summarized as the "shortsightedness, hypocrisy, lies and unfettered greed that plagues the “post-imperial, post-cold-war world".

This isn't the most artful of le Carré's novels, but it is probably one of his sharpest. He dares the reader to follow him in his role as a latter-day Jeremiah of espionage and statecraft. He condemns the hypocrisy and the false gods of the Post-Iraq War/WOT West in his aim to "root out, pull down, destroy and throw down" the inhuman idols of the West. His NeoCon critics might aim for le Carré's eyes, but they can't destroy his vision or overlook his balls

There are many parts of Dickens' writing that I love and few pieces of his that fall short of complete adoration. 'Great Expectations' is one more of Dickens' absolute masterpieces. I love how with 100 pages left you can almost feel the universe shift as Dickens grabs the crazy, once loose strings of his moral narrative and begins to pull it all together.

I think a significant part of the magic, for me, of 'Great Expectations' is found in the minor characters. Everyone from Uncle Pumblechook, Miss Havisham, & Mr Jaggers, to Mr. Wemmick and the Aged Parent (the Aged P.) could be the center of their own Dickens novel; each life is given a warmth (or where there lacks warmth, a round coldness) that keeps the novel propelled on.

You can't have a Dickens novel without a little bit of melodrama and a bit of Victorian moralizing. However, with 'Great Expectations', Dickens does this with a soft touch. He isn't as confrontational about social ills as he is in 'Hard Times' or 'Oliver Twist' and he isn't as melodramatic as he was in 'Tale of Two Cities', but even so, I completely enjoyed this gentle, more muted Dickens.

Reading Roth is almost a spooky, sexual experience. I say that knowing this will sound absurd, trite and probably hyperbolic. But with Roth, his words are imbued with an almost carnal power, a spectral courage, energy and life. IT is like watching an absurdly talented musician do things with an instrument/with sound that bends the edge of possible.

Reading Roth, I can understand how the audience in Paganini 's time wanted to burn the man for witchcraft, feared the man for his deal with the Devil. I'm not sure who Roth sold his soul to, but Roth's run of novels: Operation Shylock (1993) Sabbath's Theater (1995) >> American Pastoral (1997) >> I Married a Communist (1998) >> The Human Stain (2000) can only be thought of as the greatest series of novels produced by ANY writer at anytime. Maybe Shakespeare had a better run. Maybe Proust. Maybe. For me, these five novels, ending with 'The Human Stain' are the apex of 20th Century writing. Spooky.

While I enjoyed the book and my kids were entertained, like a lot of 19th century adventure stories I am more impressed by its staying power and influence than the story or writing itself.

The strength of 'Treasure Island' is its characters. Even minor players in this pirate/treasure/tropical adventure story are fascinating. The plot had enough ups and downs and twists to entertain, but like Jules Verne's and H.G. Wells' minor novels, Stevenson's writing just wasn't interesting enough to draw me back for a second draft.

Neil Hunt's narration was varied enough for the characters without being overly distracting from the story.