The Terror by Dan Simmons
Fuck, I haven't posted about this yet? Seems like I covered a ton in the TV season recap. Regardless, this is a book that stayed on my shelf for far too long, that I tried reading once and just plum gave up on after all of thirty pages. (And it's pretty long! There are more than 700 pages!) This book wasn't perfect, and it had a few pacing issues, a few character introduction issues - when you're introducing some characters for the first time toward the very end of a story about a dwindling group of survivors, come on, you really ought to just go back and do that earlier in the story! But I absolutely loved it. The book captivated me (likely with the AMC show's help, as I've established) in ways no horror or survivalist book ever has. I remain steadfastly in awe of the hell these real life explorers went through, frozen into the Canadian Arctic for years on end, slowly going mad and starving to death and losing fingers and toes to frostbite, all before deciding, fuck it, the only way out is a thousand-mile trek south. Fuck, man.
The Grownup by Gillian Flynn
I'm familiar enough with Flynn's tone and vibe by now that I was able to just sort of blindly buy this barely-there short story (we're talking 50 very small pages) and trust that I would like it just fine. I did! But it felt very, very much like something she thought up and pounded out over the course of like, one week. (Yeah, I'm ignorant of the whole writing process, I know.) This was enjoyable, but it was over as soon as it got going, the "eight-minute episode segment" equivalent in whatever metaphor allows Flynn's full novels to be feature length films. I think George R.R. Martin might have had a hand in pushing her to write this, if that moves your needle whatsoever.
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Much like with Sartre's Nausea a few months ago, I respect the hell out of what's going on here, what's being said here, the absurdity of it all, and so forth, but I didn't walk away with any sort of appreciation for the actual prose of the story I'd just read. Gotta imagine this would make for a better movie or even miniseries than an unfinished novel. (Also gotta imagine this has been done like a dozen times by now.) For those unfamiliar, it's about a man arrested for a an alleged crime no one will reveal to him and then subjected to so much bureaucratic red tape as part of his, uh, "trial," that his ultimate execution comes as a sort of relief. He's been so beaten down by an all-powerful state that he's not even mad when death comes. It's not unlike The Stranger, really, except that The Stranger had a more compelling story. Kafka, a German Jew, gets bonus points for writing this like ten or twenty years before the rise of the Nazis. Prescient much? (Sorry.)
So, sometimes you really can judge a book by its cover. Look at this. What is this? This is vapid chick lit, right? Wrong! (Not actually wrong.) It's really an eye-opening cultural exploration of the old money Chinese masquerading as a soapy and pulpy love story, you see! Except, no, no it really isn't, it's really as empty and vapid as its title and book art imply, five hundred pages of designer dresses and million dollar earrings and Filipino servants and decadent food porn. Worst of all, it doesn't even come to a proper conclusion of any sort, leaving whatever story threads did exist at all to dangle in the breeze. Surely they get tackled in the remaining two books of this trilogy, but so what? Bad book!
Alright, so that's fourteen books so far on the year. Can I up it to sixteen on the back half and hit my goal of thirty in 2018? We'll see...
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