Okay, so let’s be straight: December sucked. I had very little time to read and what time I spent reading could’ve honestly been better spent doing…pretty much anything else. What other excuse could I have for posting this over two months late?
This is Literary Lollapalooza, December Edition.
Books Read This Month:
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
The Keep by F. Paul Wilson
Books Acquired:
Fiction: The Keep by F. Paul Wilson, Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child, Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr.
Non-Fiction: Nothing to be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes, The Best American Non-Required Reading 2008 edited by Dave Eggers
E-Books:
Books Borrowed: After the Flood by Margaret Atwood
Currently Reading: After the Flood by Margaret Atwood
Reviews of This Months’ Books:
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
I picked up this thick door-stop of a book as an advanced reader copy a couple of years ago. It spent the years sitting on my bookshelf and mocking me.
This December I decided to celebrate the coldest of the winter season reading science fiction…y’know, because it’s cold and removed, relegated to the cold depths of space…(okay, it actually made sense in my head.) I decided that I would start off with this enormous tome that has been mocking me from my bookshelf.
Basically Anathem is…wait for it…MONKS. IN. SPACE! Duh duh dun! Okay really it’s much more complex and complicated than that. But still.
The idea is that on a planet much like Earth (pretty much identical to Earth), the world is separated into the Mathic world, consisting of monks who study math, and the Praxic world, consisting of common rubes like you and me, who really have no idea what is going.
The book is set firmly in the Mathic World, and Stephenson was dead-set on making sure the reader understood that world. After 25 pages I was still reading description of the monks’ Concent, down to the smallest detail. It was right about here that I wavered. Do I go on reading something I don’t understand or appreciate, or do I soldier on like a good reader, and see if I was being short-sighted? Answer: I soldiered on, God help me.
It got better. You should know that. It got downright interesting and exciting (right about the time people started doing things…eh, about ¾ of the way through the hefty tome).
In the end, I have to say it was okay. I don’t read a whole of sci-fi (or as the author calls it “speculative fiction”, whatever that is), but this was a whole, whole lot of introduction to what ended up being a not-very mind-blowing conclusion.
It didn’t suck. Well, alright, at times it sucked. But in the end I kinda enjoyed it. But was it worth the three-weeks it took me to read it? Nope. That was time I could’ve been reading something…well, um…good. Skip it.
The Keep by F. Paul Wilson
I was recommended this book from a friend who knew I was looking for good science fiction. I trust his opinions, so I was looking forward to this horror novel by an author I hear many great things about. And the premise sold me on the spot: The Nazi’s vs. Cthulu.
Sadly, the book is very dated (it was written in the early ‘80s), and the characters and plotlines are very clichéd, including a cheesy sex-scene that read very much like a bad romance novel. The premise was great, and even though Cthulu turned out to be more Dracula than otherworldly madness-inducing monsters, it was fun rooting against the Nazis, as the resident evil Romanian overlord kills them all ruthlessly.
It was fun. That’s all. I am no smarter having read this. I am no more enriched than I was before. It was trite and insincere writing (it was Wilson’s first novel, and I plan on giving his Repairman Jack series a try), but we also get Nazis dying in horrible, bloody ways. I can’t really knock that.
Well, it was a pretty pathetic end to an otherwise great year of reading. December sucks. I blame Christmas. And that fat bastard, Santa.
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