Stan's Book Dump: Fall 2018

I finished the year strong with ten books in the final three months of 2018 to reach my goal of thirty on the year. Never again!

The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower by Stephen King

No need to beat a dead horse - folks, if you've been reading this blog for the past several years, you know I'm the only guy I know who just couldn't muster up two fucks to give when it came to Stephen King's decades-spanning fantasy series. I'd be lying if I said I didn't skim enormous portions of this thousand-plus-page finale, but I have no regrets. Life's too short to get bogged down for hours on tertiary characters' D-plots in the seventh book of a series you've just never been able to love.

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
Read this in one night in front of a Sox-Yankees playoff game, and let me tell you - baseball is the perfect sport to watch while you read. so yeah, here's the now-decades-old story about a carefree guy who just wanted to soak up as much, I dunno, nature as he could, and how he disappeared and turned up dead in an abandoned bus in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. Beyond the specific details of this tragically preventable tragedy, the book's really about the urge to just disappear into the woods, that primitive and anti-social desire to just leave civilization behind. The author's an extreme outdoorsman himself, and remarks on his own near-death experience on a climbing trip a few years back. (Note that this book was written just before the author survived the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, which he wrote a book about a year later.)

Artemis by Andy Weir

Everyone liked The Martian, yeah? The very modern-feeling science fiction book (and then movie) about the astronaut who gets stranded on Mars and then has to "science the shit out of" his situation in order to find a way to survive? Here's Andy Weir's follow up, set on a lunar city. It's not great, and the biggest shame is that it comes close to being very good. The science is once again very good, with fully imagined and reasonably explained technology that would enable, you know, a moon city. But the story itself is kind of a silly caper in which the protagonist needs to sabotage a bunch of mineral harvesting machines and then evade the authorities looking for her. And, yeah, that's the bigger issue - "her." Look, it's great that a male author is giving his second book a female protagonist and narrator, and the effort is earnest, but man, the character is just so clearly a fantasy woman as imagined by a man. I can't get into how or why that is, really, but it really feels less like a young woman than like a young man's ideal young woman, if that makes any sense. Like a sexy bro, I guess. I don't bring this up for woke points or anything, I just bring it up because it's a huge distraction from the rest of the story. It's like Ready Player One-level bad.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun

A thing I've done throughout the history of this blog, to mixed success, is attempt some of the European classics from ~1850-1950 that helped to shape and define modern Western literature. This is a thing I found when I googled something like "most famous book norway" back when I thought I could read this on my flight to Norway a year ago, and here's how Wikipedia describes it: "The novel has been hailed as the literary opening of the 20th century and an outstanding example of modern, psychology-driven literature." Glowing praise, right? But just like with The Trial and Nausea earlier this year alone, man, I just couldn't find a way to enjoy reading it. All three of these books are about regular guys slowly losing their grip on reality, and I can recognize and acknowledge why that might have been groundbreaking a hundred years ago, but they all kind of blur together for me into a boring paste that severely violates that very basic "show, don't tell" rule. Sorry, but this was the least impressive of the three books of this type that I read this year. (Oh, did I say three? Because a fourth one is coming up soon!)

It by Stephen King

What a marathon this was! Started it all the way back in February in audiobook form and got maybe two thirds done by spring before I pivoted hard into a podcast-based commute pattern. Dabbled very occasionally with it throughout the summer, and finally returned in full force to finish up the homestretch in October. You know, for Halloween. Look, I loved this book. (I saw the movie last year, so it helped that I already knew which of the hundred or so characters King included here would end up mattering long term and who was there more or less just to get killed instantly.) I've ragged on King here a thousand times - scroll up for an easy example - but when he nails an ending, his stuff tends to be pretty great. What impressed me about It though, more so than the story and its resolution, was the ridiculously detailed world-building that went into this one standalone novel. King goes through great lengths to describe the geography and history of this fictional little town in Maine and you know who I was reminded of? No lie, fucking Victor Hugo, taking dozen-plus-page breaks form the action of Les Misérables to describe, like, the Parisian sewer system, or the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo. Or George R.R. Martin going nuts about the religious customs of some out-of-the-way city that barely registers as a dot on his invented planet's map. World-building. It matters, guys! And that's really what set It apart from the rest of King's oeuvre of thousand-page monster books. I could ever tell what the fuck was going on in The Dark Tower or what realm or dimension they were supposed to be in at any point in time, but in It there are transitions from the past to the present that work just flawlessly.

The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Remember two books ago when I said Hunger was the least impressive and readable and memorable of the three-no-make-that-four books I read this year in which a now-dead European guy tells the story of a person having a psychotic breakdown? Yeah, The Double was maybe the most impressive and readable and memorable of those, but the bar's not very high and the range isn't very wide. Russian literature's been a huge blind spot for me to this point in my life, but rather than five headfirst into like, War and Peace, I thought I'd dabble with something short and easy. There's more wit and humor here - and it's Russian, so it's dark and dry as hell, but it's still there - than I've generally found in 19th century stuff, so that's a good sign, right? But yeah - overall, just not loving these old-as-balls stories about dudes going crazy. (Side note - this cover, I can't tell if it's the worst-designed public domain book cover hackjob I've seen in my life or one of the best. It looks like something your mom could make if you gave her a picture of an 1800s guy and some freeware Photoshop and five minutes to play around, and it gives me the worst headache to try to focus on it - but then, that's kind of the theme of the book, this jagged inability to make any sense of oneself in relation to an identical copy of oneself, no? Like I kind of imagine this shitty book cover art being exactly how the main character must feel by the end of the story, but again, also, this looks like an abandoned rough draft of a concept for something you'd be feeling out with stock art. Who knows?)

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

I've been too hard on Dickens in the past, ad he really was a generational talent with the pen. I think my issue with him and his work has always had more to do with the style of his day and time - both in sentence structure and overall story conventions - and less to do with him personally. Oliver Twist was a perfect example of this, a story teeming with a gaggle of cartoonishly one-dimensional cockney poorfolk (what a talented writer!) that went on for way, way, way too long and never really coalesced into a consistent or pleasant narrative (what a shitty storyteller!). The easiest way for me to think of it is to remind myself that they didn't have TV or podcasts back in the 1830s, and this was how people entertained themselves, was by reading a "chapter" or episode of a familiar story every week, or a few every month, or however the hell this was initially published. When you read something like Oliver Twist you are not so much reading one story as much as you are bingeing a whole series of stories, many of which stand alone entirely, and none of which really build the character up any amount at all. Like you'd think, with your 2019 mindset, that a story about a young orphan that has a happy ending would include a coming-of-age element where the orphan grows up, works hard, fights back, and so on. But, no - he's just a completely passive little poor kid who stuff is constantly happening to and around. He's like a video game character, an avatar for the reader to enjoy these hijinks. By the way, the iconic part of this book, where Oliver Twist goes "please sir, may I have some more?" and dares to request a second bowl of soup-gruel? Yeah, that's Chapter 2 of this thing. There are 53 chapters. Anyone who tells you they've read and loved this whole thing is lying.

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

It's the Black Lives Matter book. That's not meant to be dismissive, but it's an apt description. This thing has just an insanely high rating on Goodreads. It's a ripped-from-the-headlines story about a black girl who's riding shotgun when her black friend is pulled over and summarily executed by a shitty cop. What happens next? Nothing. Nothing good. Protests, the victim getting his character just absolutely assassinated by the mainstream media, the cop being acquitted, and a full scale riot. And then the book just kind of ends with a half-hearted "we're going to rebuild our community with help from the good cops." It rubbed me wrong, I guess. It didn't seem to do or say anything profound about the depths of racism in America that could surprise or enrage or sadden a reasonably aware adult - and maybe I'm out of line, maybe the mere existence of a popular book with a young black woman's point of view is of tantamount importance, maybe books like this are absolutely vital for making other white people empathetic toward, like, Colin Kaepernick. But now it sounds like I'm saying that I, a white man, am "too woke" to have any need for this "very obvious" book written by a black woman. I'm not saying that! I'm just saying I'm astonished by its appeal and praise, especially since it seems to end not with a powerful statement, but with a "hey, that's the way it goes" shrug. Or maybe the shrug is all you can do as a black woman who saw her friend get shot by policemen, and that's the point I'm horrifically missing? In which case, holy shit, wow, amazing, but also, I think so many other people are missing the point then, when they call it eye-opening? Bu tthen again, does authorial intent even matter? God, this feels sticky. Let me start over. I am glad that this book exists, and I am thrilled that it is opening some of its readers' eyes to the breadth and depth of systemic racism in America, and I am mortified that those readers need young adult novels to do that for them when the real world is, like, right fucking there, just unfolding before our eyes day after day and police shooting after police shooting. Four stars out of five, get me the fuck out of here.

Island by Aldous Huxley

I was probably too young to fully appreciate the horrifying accuracy of Aldous Huxley's dystopian predictions for the future when I read Brave New World in high school. Island is a weird kinda-companion to that book, even though it came out a full thirty years later, in that it's Huxley's final novel and it contains his vision of what a utopian society might look like. Turns out, a utopian society is actually pretty boring! Or at least reading 300 pages about it was. Huxley does that very tropey thing where, actually, the best way to live is on a tiny island in the South Pacific, with all of the science and reason of Western nations but Polynesian family structures like "everyone raises everyone" and a healthy dose of Buddhism and meditation and recreational drugs.

The Wondering Years by Knox McCoy

A problem with any rating system, and in particular with Goodreads, is that it;s tough to make honest comparisons without grading on a curve. What is a 5-star book? A 5-star book is impressive, enjoyable, insightful, a page-turner, it stays with you, and so forth and so on. What's a 4-star book? A decent book. What's a 3-star book, a 2-star book, a 1-star book? Look, here's where I run into trouble, because I take some of these stuffy, hard-to-read older books like Hunger or Nausea and I say, come on, I can't give these less than three stars, they're a product of their time, they're classics in their own right, whatever. But then I come across a book like this - a simple little collection of memoirs and anecdotes and some wry pop culture observations, courtesy of a likable enough dude whose podcast I've heard a few episodes of and enjoy just fine, and just because I don't absolutely love it, I'm like, "oh okay, here's a book I can give two stars to." And that's probably not really very fair, and it probably makes it sound like I'm saying. "this book sucks," when really what I'm saying is, "this book is trivial and unimportant in the big picture even if I found it to be occasionally entertaining to read," and those are two different things, you know? So I'll end my year in books with a sheepish apology to Knox McCoy - it's not that I'm giving the story of your life two stars, man - it's just that I'm letting it represent the bottom of a scale where the top consists of some of my all time favorite books. I don't read books I know I'll hate, is the thing. Maybe I should just adopt a 3-star minimum? God, the things I worry about.

Happy 2019, all.