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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0544671899
| 9780544671898
| 0544671899
| 3.59
| 1,428
| Jan 16, 2018
| Jan 16, 2018
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it was amazing
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”He didn’t know what was going on with him. He felt so hollowed out, he could almost hear the rush of the emptiness inside him. It was the blank sound
”He didn’t know what was going on with him. He felt so hollowed out, he could almost hear the rush of the emptiness inside him. It was the blank sound at the mouth of an elevator shaft. He had no idea what would fill that hole, no sense of what he was looking for.” ”I have kissed honey lips I Still Haven’t Found What I’m looking for---U2 The ethereal sounds of the Joshua Tree album kept floating through my head as I read this book, played at a slower speed so Bono’s enunciation was elongated. Blue and red electric sheep froliced on the periphery of my vision. I watched my cell phone spin slowly in a pitcher of water. Bubbles streamed upward as if it were drowning. I put a book on top of the pitcher, not a good book, but one of those books that trees weep over the making. I’d already turned the TV to face the wall. I unplugged everything electronic in the house. It took a sledgehammer to break my computer into enough jagged pieces to ease the bubbling anxiety in my stomach. I looked at the scattered plastic pieces on the lawn and resisted the urge to fling them over the fence or better yet throw them into the nearest bog and watch them sink from view. I shut the blinds to keep from looking at them. Where’s Deckard when you need him? I’m writing this on a Big Chief Tablet with a #2 pencil. (I tore the cover off the tablet because the Indian was inducing me to buy Indian Motorcycle Cigars.) Old school, you say? Well read this book, and you might think that old school is as hip as you want to be. I have a friend who is going to pick these pages up and take them to another friend and so on. Some brave soul in Russia will be the one who actually loads my words up to the web. I hope the glow worms in his head don’t make him give me up for a lifetime supply of Black Aria perfume. Need, want, desire. Who can separate them anymore? ”Three women were taking shelter from the rain beneath the bar’s awning, their faces lit by the paper-thin glowcard advertisements they held. Every few seconds, one of the women would tap a glowcard against her cell phone to consummate a purchase. Discarded screens pulsed like LED embers around their feet, twinkling with soft music and looping videos.” If you resemble this ensemble, then you probably should stop reading this review now because it is probably pointless. This review will not tell you what you want to hear. It will not liberate you. You are probably already lost. What do I tell you about Ross Carver? He is a cop who lands in…”gray moss. Like a carpet of it spread across a rot-shrunken log. Carver could see the bones of his fingers, could see the riverine fissure marks in his skull where patches of scalp had eaten away.” He is thrown into a decontamination unit along with his partner, Jenner. He wakes up in his bed with no memory of...well...much of anything. His beautiful and intriguing neighbor Mia is sitting by his side reading a book to him. It all feels right with a serpentine twist of something very wrong. "If she's not crazy," Jenner said, "then she knows something. But maybe it's not the same thing she's telling you." There is absolutely nothing wrong with Mia’s apartment, though. ”He saw no TVs, no computers, no telephones and no radios. Instead, she had books. Hundreds and thousands of hardback volumes on shelves built throughout the apartment. It smelled like the Rare Books room of the San Francisco Library--aged leather and the exotic musk of dry paper.” Oh sweet nectar...daddy’s home. Mia peels the labels from her wine bottles. That might sound eccentric, but not to me. I want to drink a bottle of wine because I’ve chosen to drink a bottle of wine. Carver, the poor bastard, really tries, but he is caught in a situation where, even if he wins every battle, he will still lose the war. The conspiracy is bone deep. To bring it down, he’d have to reboot civilisation and leave it...dark. This book is set in the near future, or so they say. I’m the one sitting here watching my cell phone drown in the present, or is it already the past? Jonathan Moore has written a loosely connected San Francisco trilogy which frankly ends with a glow-rious bang. The writing is top shelf; the thrills bring chills, and the noir atmosphere drips with the metallic essence of Blade Runner. It is only science-fiction if you don’t want to believe. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 18, 2017
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Aug 25, 2017
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Aug 18, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0374115249
| 9780374115241
| 0374115249
| 3.94
| 36,991
| Apr 25, 2017
| Apr 25, 2017
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it was amazing
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”The closer I approached, the more Borne rose up through Mord’s fur, became more like a hybrid sea anemone and squid: a sleep vase with rippling color
”The closer I approached, the more Borne rose up through Mord’s fur, became more like a hybrid sea anemone and squid: a sleep vase with rippling colors that strayed from purple toward deep blues and sea greens. Four vertical ridges slid up the sides of its warm and pulsating skin. The texture was as smooth as waterworn stone, if a bit rubbery. It smelled of beach reeds on lazy summer afternoons and, beneath the sea salt, of passionflowers. Much later, I realized it would have smelled different to someone else, might even have appeared in a different form.” The city has been reduced to rubble; conflict and drought have thinned out the population. With desperate hope, people turn to The Company to save them. Science is the religion of hope, and for a short time, it looks like the mystical arts of biology, chemistry, and medicine are going to save the world, but then the very things The Company develops to help stabilize civilization become the very things that crush the last vestiges of it. Mord the bear, who is the size of King Kong, and his minions of bears seem to be everywhere, searching to kill anything that isn’t one of them. The Magician, a woman of uncanny abilities, is warring with Mord for control of the territory. It seems creatures will even fight over rubble. The area is full of biotech that is usually hazardous and sometimes even lethal, so when Rachel plucks Borne from Mord’s fur, she is taking a chance that this colorful, vase-like structure will turn out to be one of those death-dealing gizmos. She tells her companion Wick about it. Wick doesn’t trust Borne. He wants to open him up and use the nanotechnology to fix other things, but Rachel is attached to this creature who eats every chance it gets, but never poops. “It” is growing exponentially. Is it a living thing, or is it a piece of sophisticated engineering? She teaches Borne to talk. ”He was born, but I had borne him.” While you are considering all this, have an alcohol minnow or three. Wick and Rachel live in the Balcony Cliffs, a haven away from the power struggle over the remains of the city. Wick designs traps and levels of protection that will hopefully keep away intruders. They are forced to the ground to scavenge. There are always strange new things appearing. ”Three dead astronauts had fallen to Earth and been planted like tulips, buried to their rib cages, then flopped over in their suits, faceplates cracked open and curled into the dirt. Lichen or mold spilled from their helmets. Bones, too. My heart lurched, trapped between hope and despair. Someone had come to the city from far, far away---even, perhaps, from space! Which meant there were people up there. But they’d died here, like everything died here.” That lurch in Rachel’s heart is the same lurch I felt in my own. I grew up in the space age, and astronauts were my first heroes. Whenever anything or anyone was launched into the air, my family would gather around the TV set to watch the plume of jet fuel on fire and the rise of the tin can into space to search for what was out there to find. To think of these astronauts lying there broken on the ground, the scene so vividly written, I was...shaken. If our astronauts are dying, truly the world is dying. Borne continues to grow and learn so unnaturally quick that even Rachel has doubts about who or what he is and whether he will prove trustworthy. Wick has secrets from Rachel. Rachel has secrets from Wick. Trust is hard to come by when the candle of life is a puddle of wax and the flame is flickering at the end of the taper. And death is only a misstep away. ”The bear had ceased its demolition of the wall. The murderous eye held to the widening crack to pin us with its stare. Bloodshot, self-aware, taking our measure. I couldn’t look away….” I’ve been reading Jeff Vandermeer since his premiere novel, Veniss Underground, exploded my brain. I can remember thinking as I read it that I had never read anything like this before. His world building is one of his best strengths as a novelist, and he certainly delivers in this novel as he has in every novel of his I’ve read. His descriptions of strange creatures or devastated landscapes are so vivid that I don’t need an artist’s rendering. It is as if I’ve gazed upon it with my own eyes. His Southern Reach Trilogy is very accessible to the uninitiated reader, but I also found Borne to be strange and wonderful and highly readable. Enter a new world if you dare!! If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 2017
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Aug 05, 2017
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Aug 01, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0805092994
| 9780805092998
| 0805092994
| 4.15
| 72,308
| Feb 11, 2014
| Feb 11, 2014
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it was amazing
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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May 19, 2022
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May 21, 2022
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Apr 03, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 3.48
| 18,730
| Jun 30, 1962
| 2013
|
really liked it
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”The solar disc was no longer a well-defined sphere, but a wide expanding ellipse that fanned out across the eastern horizon like a colossal fire-ball
”The solar disc was no longer a well-defined sphere, but a wide expanding ellipse that fanned out across the eastern horizon like a colossal fire-ball, its reflection turned the dead leaden surface of the lagoon into a brilliant copper shield. By noon, less than four hours away, the water would seem to burn.” [image] Solar radiation has melted the polar ice caps, and the oceans have risen to engulf most of the major cities of Europe and America. These cities have become tropical lagoons with only the upper floors of the tallest building sticking up out of the water and silt. Flora and fauna baked by radiation have grown to enormous sizes reminiscent of the Triassic era. A team of scientists have come to investigate and analyze the changes that have occurred in London since humans were forced to flee North. Some of the members of the team start to have strange, primordial dreams. ”’What are these nightmares you’ve having?’ Beatrice shrugged. ‘Jungle dreams, Robert,’ she murmured ambiguously. ‘I’m learning my ABC again. Last night was the delta jungles.’ She gave him a bleak smile, then added with a touch of malicious humour: ‘Don’t look so stern, you’ll be dreaming them too, soon.’” Ballard explains what is happening to the scientists with a bit more detail beyond just calling them jungle dreams. ”Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory.” Beatrice Dahl is a beautiful woman made more lovely by the fact that she is the only female on the expedition. She has found an exquisite apartment that with the help of a generator still has air conditioning and ice. She has a sexual relationship with Dr. Robert Kerans, but she seems rather apathetic about her lover. Of course, it could be the heat. Temperatures climb to 140 degrees by midday. There is a Max Ernst painting on the wall of Beatrice’s apartment, and the longer they are there, the more the painting reminds Kerans of the real world. [image] I wonder if the Max Ernst painting was something like this. As the day approaches that they will have to leave, Robert and Beatrice become more convinced that they are going to stay. It doesn’t make any logical sense. Within a matter of months they would be out of fuel to drive the air conditioning and food would begin to be a problem, but the desire to stay and become part of their jungle dreams clutters their thoughts. This novel has a Conradian feel, specifically one of my favorite books Heart of Darkness, so Ballard had my attention from the very first page. I’m a fan of post-apocalyptic books, and J.G. Ballard was obsessed with the worlds that are created by the chaos of destruction. The characters in this novel go against the norm for post-apocalyptic novels. They aren’t resisting the apocalypse. They are intent on joining it. The novel becomes even stranger when some scavengers show up led by the pale, thin man aptly named Strangman. Ballard explores the urges that are normally repressed by civilized human beings. The call of the wild is in our DNA. When we are dipped in the primordial soup of a tropical lagoon, we feel the need to escape the bondages of civilization. Something on a cellular level is telling us that we are missing the fundamental purposes of life. Kerans is intent on escaping the clutches of all that is trying to bind him and head South into the uncertainty of a new world. [image] ”His commitment to the future, so far one of choice and plagued by so many doubts and hesitations, was now absolute.” If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 23, 2017
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Mar 26, 2017
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Mar 23, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0062200631
| 9780062200631
| 0062200631
| 3.91
| 60,832
| May 17, 2016
| May 17, 2016
|
really liked it
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”...Her left arm was sheet music. Delicate black lines spooled around and around her forearm, bars as thin as the strands of a spiderweb, with what lo
”...Her left arm was sheet music. Delicate black lines spooled around and around her forearm, bars as thin as the strands of a spiderweb, with what looked like golden notes scattered across them. She found herself pulling her sleeve back to look at it every few minutes. By the end of the following week, she was sketched in Dragonscale from wrist to shoulder. When she got over feeling winded and sick, she had to admit to herself that it was curiously beautiful.” [image] When Harper Grayson comes down with Dragonscale, A.K.A. Draco Incendia Trychophyton, it is a death sentence. The contagion spreads quickly through the body, wrapping its tendrils around the skin, leaving behind these beautiful shimmering scales that eventually start to smoke until they reach a certain maturity or the person comes under a large amount of stress. They then spontaneously combust, experience cellular combustion, develop contagion points, and disease vectors are produced. We can be as scientific as we want to be, but the end result is the infected turn to ash. This disease is highly contagious. When one person lights up, it can cause a chain reaction where anyone with dragonscale in the area joins the inferno. When the crisis hit, Harper volunteers at the local hospital wanting to help anyway she can. She is careful, wears a hazmat suit, but the problem is there is a lot of conflicting information on how the contagion is spread. Almost simultaneously with learning she has dragonscale, she discovers she is pregnant. Joy crushed by the certainty of death. The disease moves so fast in most people that it wouldn’t be the right time to start reading War & Peace or Infinite Jest. You might want to think more in terms of The Bridge Over San Luis Rey. Her condescending, but loving, husband Jakob is furious. He becomes fixated on them ending their lives now even though he doesn’t have the contagion. There is much more to be learned about Jakob, so as you read the book, be sure to keep a baseball bat hidden down the back of your leg because you are probably going to need it. ”Harper supposed it did not pay to be too impressed with a man just because he could ride a unicycle.” A good rule of thumb for every woman to keep in mind. :-) People are dying so fast in such numbers few are not directly affected. Those who live lose as much or more than those who die. Too many people are gone too quickly. ”We are taught to think of personality as a singular, private possession. All the ideas and beliefs and attitudes that make you you--we are raised to believe them to be a set of files stored in the lockbox of the brain. Most people have no idea how much of themselves they store off-site. Your personality is not just a matter of what you know about yourself, but what others know about you. You are one person with your mother, and another with your lover, and yet another with your child. Those other people create you--finish you--as much as you create you. When you’re gone, the ones you’ve left behind get to keep the same part of you they always had.” You may still have that part of the people you have lost, but it is like having a garden without water or having a flower in the window that the sun never reaches. Without seeing that person, revitalizing that connection, eventually it will wither and die. With the help of a man referred to as the Fireman, Harper finds her way to a small community of followers who have figured out how to control the disease. ”Cortisol kicks off spontaneous combustion. But oxytocin--the social-networking hormone--puts the Dragonscale at ease.” In other words, stress releases cortisol which inflames the disease, but oxytocin, produced by say singing together, turns the disease into a benign light show. I’d be humming the Sound of Music 24/7. On the outside of the community is a radio personality who calls himself the Marlboro Man. He has assembled a crew of executioners who travel around looking for the infected so they can eradicate them. There are always those people who are kept in check by society, but once civilization starts to crumble, their true nature emerges, and we discover that what they really like to do is kill people. The fear of the infection is just an excuse for them to drop the pretenses surrounding their own warped and blackened soul and be who they have always wanted to be...a killer. Things go well at the community of the infected for a while, but as always seems to happen with human beings, eventually a power struggle breaks out. The camp breaks into factions. The one man who can actually control the dragonfire and use it as a weapon, the Fireman, is the man they all respect/fear. He lives with the community, but on an island away from the rest of them. He has his own demons he is wrestling with, and fire is just one of them. As the world goes up in flames and the sanctuary community starts to come apart, the only beacon of hope is Martha Quinn’s voice, a blast from MTV of the 1980s, broadcasting over the radio about a sanctuary on an island off the coast of New England. To get there will become an odyssey as arduous as navigating the terrain from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. [image] The author Joe Hill I am a huge fan of post-apocalyptic books. It is a part of me I’m still exploring to determine exactly why I find them uplifting. Is there a twisted part of my psyche that wants the civilised world to end? Am I as crazy as the Cotton Mather followers of the early 18th century? Am I so bored with my existence that I feel a good end of world scenario would shake me out of my doldrums? I don’t think I suffer from any of those things, but self-delusion is always a good possibility. I think what is more likely is that I like seeing humanity when their backs are against the wall, their ass is stuck in the darkest, deepest crack, and absolute annihilation of the human species is on the verge of becoming a reality, and we find a way to survive. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 25, 2017
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Feb 04, 2017
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Dec 23, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0983166625
| 9780983166627
| 0983166625
| 4.00
| 15
| unknown
| Dec 01, 2016
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really liked it
|
”Any case, all the digital whatnot is gone, as is all the geeks what made ‘em. And with ‘em went the power, water, and wherewithal to keep the world i
”Any case, all the digital whatnot is gone, as is all the geeks what made ‘em. And with ‘em went the power, water, and wherewithal to keep the world in some semblance of livability. As I look at it, when you got a world ruled by geeks that’s got too complicated for even the geeks to comprehend, it’s an epic cluster-fuck waiting to happen, which is exactly what did happen, thereby once and forever ending everything down into this present sinkhole of total, irreversible uselessness.” I was watching the television show Timeless the other day, and the show’s heroes had been dispatched back to 1969 to NASA for the moon landing. The “villains” were there to put a computer virus into the system that would make it impossible for the astronauts to return. NASA used 2 megabytes for the guidance system to bring those astronauts down on the moon and safely off the moon. 2 megabytes My iPhone has 128 gigabytes. How many fleets of rocket propelled spaceships could I fly to the moon with my phone? Or how about to Mars? All I use it for is to call people; yes, I actually dial numbers and talk to people. I text with my kids and growing numbers of millennium friends. I check my GR updates to see if anyone...hello Major Tom, this is ground control...has read my latest review. I use Google to look something up, usually inspired by something I’ve read. I just checked my phone history: Lola Montez, John Carradine, Sun King, bloodshotbooks, Tuppence Middleton, Mona Lisa, Chinese Pepper Steak, H. P. Lovecraft, Gregorian chants, Scotland, PA, Charles II of Spain, Kay Francis, abebooks, Hall Caine, and Catriona. Good thing I’m not single because that phone Google search history looks like a guy completely undateable. I guess my question is, why do we need so much power? I talked to one of my favorite geeky IT guys, and he said that all those bytes are needed for speed. We have the need for speed. The problem is we are getting things so complicated that we are leading up to what Rick Moss calls the epic cluster-fuck. So overnight, we go from Speedy Gonzalez down to Cecil Turtle. Don’t get whiplash. In this world that Rick Moss has created, things have become less complicated because it had to. No televisions with spoon fed entertainment, no Facebook, no Goodreads (now wait a minute, let's not get crazy here), or blockbuster movies with screaming cars and earth shattering explosions. What would happen? People still need entertainment. We still value our singers and storytellers, but if things go completely bat shit crazy, their worth will go up like real estate in the Upper East Side of New York City. Homer (and I don’t mean Simpson) will be wined and dined like a king. The thing is, everyone is a storyteller, and in this society people want to hear each other's stories. We learn about pain, first love, lost love, victories, defeats, and ethics. It is a survival mechanism, a collective of wisdom that is supposed to make each generation stronger and smarter if they can see the stories for what they are. Rick Moss is going to move you around in the timeline of his story. If you like linear written books, this is not for you. What I appreciate about what he did with this back and forth jive is he kept my brain just slightly off balance. It made me thirsty for his words so that my brain could catch up to where I was fifteen minutes ago. No worries, it is really well done, and people pay a lot of money for illicit drugs to make their brain slide sideways. There is a “geek” in this story by the name of Whit, a brilliant programmer who is definitely meddling with things that frankly shouldn’t be meddled with. He makes a program for his boss that allows him to remove memories from his head with, of course, disastrous consequences. Does Whit learn from this experience? Nope. He has the power to do things beyond anything any other programmer has ever been capable of doing. It isn’t about right or wrong; it is about proving he is the best. As a HaHa isn’t this funny, he creates the Voice of GOD app. I think that Rick Moss should have patented this idea because it is going to be worth millions. The idea is you ask this app for guidance, and the app answers you with circular logic. It is a spiritual GPS. The question is, does it work? ”It works alright. It’s just not based on science. It’s based on religion. In other words, it’s pure crap.” Not only do millions of Christians start using the app, but they become addicted to it. They ask the application for guidance not just on big issues...will my mother recover from cancer...but also on things like, should I turn left or go straight?. GOD, guide me. A senator from the Deep South hears about this app, and he thinks that maybe he could use it for his own purposes. He sends some of these strung out junkies, Voice of God people, on a quest to find Whit and bring him to Jesus...well the senator, but the same thing. I first had contact with Rick Moss when he read my review of Dhalgren and reached out to me because there are a dearth of Samuel R. Delany fans knocking around this site. Moss is a true fan of Delany, and I can see Delany’s influence on his writing. The main character of Dhalgren is a poet in a post-apocalyptic situation. Poetry may take a back seat to the newest sitcom in today’s society, but when other forms of entertainment go away, poetry will make a resurgence. Her freestyle was funky without losing the regal, This book is a smart, fascinating, unique look at our way of life imperiled, and maybe it should be. A simpler way of life allows us to focus on the things most important. The Luddite in me applauds. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 10, 2016
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Dec 10, 2016
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Dec 10, 2016
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0375706682
| 9780375706684
| 0375706682
| 3.78
| 11,533
| Jan 1975
| May 15, 2001
|
really liked it
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”I have to keep mentioning this; timelessness because the phenomenon irritates the part of the mind over which time’s passage registers, so that insta
”I have to keep mentioning this; timelessness because the phenomenon irritates the part of the mind over which time’s passage registers, so that instants, seconds, minutes are painfully real; but hours--much less days and weeks--are left-over noises from a dead tongue.” [image] Something has happened in the city of Bellona. It has been cut off from the rest of the United States; most of the citizens have fled, and now you can only reach the city on foot across a dilapidated bridge. In Roman Mythology, Bellona is a war goddess, the Waster of Cities. Samuel R. Delany sprinkles all kinds of mythology throughout the book. A woman turns into a tree. Daphne, Orpheus, Charon, Jupiter, Juno and many more show up personified in the strange characters still populating this destroyed city. Myth and reality entwine as the unreliable narrator and the reader have to puzzle out what exactly has gone wrong. Our main character Kidd/Kid, reference to the goat which led me to think of Pan, looks 16 but is actually 27. He wears only one shoe, preferring to leave the other foot unshod. He doesn’t remember his name. He doesn’t remember where he is from. He doesn’t remember the name of his parents. He only remembers that his mother is Native American. ”I’ve lost a name. So? If the inhabitants of this city have one thing in common, it is that such accidents don’t interest them; that is neither lauded here as freedom nor wailed as injury; it is taken as a fact of landscape, not personality.” There are no laws left in the city, and certainly there is some violence, but considering the conditions, people are still able to coexist at a reasonable level of safety. There are hippies in the park, a gang calling themselves Scorpions, and in some cases families, who go through the motions of going to work that doesn’t exist and acting like all of this is just a temporary blip that will soon be righted. Kid meets a girl named Layna, who mesmerizes people when she plays the harmonica, another reference to Pan and his pipes. He forms a sexual relationship with her that is intense and unrestricted. He adds a 15 year old boy named Denny to their bed, as well. One thing about a post-apocalyptic situation is morality is generally the first thing to go, quickly followed by any other inconvenient laws that once existed. Even one of the Scorpions says something to Kid about Denny and another girl of 17 who Kid had copulated with. Kid brushes this off by saying the teenagers were willing. When Delany was married to the poet Margaret Hacker, they experimented with polyamory. Communes in the 1960s also experimented with the communal sexual sharing of partners, but it works better in theory than in practice. Eventually, someone becomes possessive or green eyed with jealousy, and the “natural order” of things is reestablished. Delany and Hacker lasted 14 years with a series of lovers of both sexes, which allowed them to explore sex in a kaleidoscope of variations. As Kid says at one point as he is washing up after a night of debauchery: ”Pleasure is an appalling business.” The suspension of rules in Bellona would appeal to Delany. There are nude posters all over the city of this Godlike black man named George Harrison. Rumors rumble through the community that he raped a 16 year old white girl. Even in this unconventional setting where the rules of man have been suspended, the thought of a black man raping a white girl is still seen by this haphazard community as appalling, revealing the underpinnings of racism that still manage to survive despite the circumstances. Kid finds a spiral bound notebook with some writing in it. He begins to add his own poetry to the notebook. He meets another poet who wants to publish his poetry in a book. A newspaper is still being printed with news of the community and the date on the paper swinging from a day in the past to the next day a date in the future reinforcing the idea...does it really matter what day it is? Strange things start happening: two moons appear in the sky, the sun boils and seems to explode, and Kid begins to lose time not hours at a time, but actually days. He doesn’t want to go crazy again. Again? [image] Samuel R. Delany looking strangely like Orson Welles. I would read a hundred pages or so of this book and then set it aside to read other books. With 800 pages to conquer, I liked taking the time to process and then come back with fresh, wiser eyes. I agree with the assessment that this is magical realism and certainly an interesting look at an alternative society created under unusual circumstances. I think chaos is a natural reaction to a suspension of laws. Some of those younger or stronger will attempt to dominate the rest. Eventually laws must come back and be enforced for a semblance of peace to be maintained. This society, interesting enough, does not use money. There seems to be plenty of food and beer, so everything is free and everyone takes just what they need. This is a fantasy, after all, and Delany had other aspects that he wished to explore rather than the rampant violence that, in my mind, would have had to be contended with. A fascinating book and certainly deserving to be called a Masterpiece. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 05, 2016
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Oct 28, 2016
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Sep 05, 2016
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1596067985
| 9781596067981
| 1596067985
| 3.34
| 7,847
| Jan 05, 2016
| Jul 31, 2016
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really liked it
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”I knew that, by whatever means he’d killed it, it was not to eat. I wanted to cry; I stood still. He had it by the neck. Its brown body was bigger th ”I knew that, by whatever means he’d killed it, it was not to eat. I wanted to cry; I stood still. He had it by the neck. Its brown body was bigger than a baby’s. Its shovel head lolled and its nasty hook beak twitched open and closed to snap faintly with each of my father’s steps. The bird’s broad feet dangled on the ground and bounced on stones as if it were trying to claw itself incompetently to a stop.” There have been wars. Civilization has fallen backwards and stalled in place. People are getting by, but others have lost everything and are on the verge of losing what little life they have remaining. ”A haggard man used one of the huts as a home. He lay on a sagging mattress, his head on his pack, surrounded by rubbish--paper, porcelain shards, food remains, and unidentifiable debris. His hand was over his eyes. He looked like a failed soldier. Dirt seemed so worked into him that the lines of his face were like writing.” There are also orphaned kids living together in town who band together for mutual survival. The boy’s father is a key maker. He makes keys to fit old machines. He makes keys to change the weather. He makes keys that turn the locks on hearts. There is a mysticism about what he does. Superstition has become almost a religion, but like Voodoo, it only works if you believe. The boy lives on the hill. He is an uphiller. He has seen things. He knows things about his father that others need proof to believe. There is the hole in the cave, a deep hole. A hole that might go to the center of the earth. When his mother disappears, the boy has nightmares. ”I thought of my mother’s hands hauling her up. Of her climbing all grave-mottled and with her face scabbed with old blood, her arms and legs moving like sticks or the legs of insects, or as stiff as toys, as if maybe when you die and come back you forget what your body is.” But his father insists his mother is still alive. When the man who counts people arrives, he might be the only chance the boy has to find out the real truth about his father. This is a very strange novella, with many of the Kafkaesque aspects of being trapped into circumstances that seem inescapable. I was frequently confused for the first third of the book, but after reading numerous China Mieville novels, I knew I just needed to hang in there, and eventually this world he was creating would become more substantial, and the clouds would part enough for me to see the ground. By the end of the book, I wanted more. I wanted to fold the book out like an accordion and find the rest of the story. I wanted the lost notebook with the feverous scribbles of the where, what, and when. I can see it in my mind’s eye, written in faded red and blue ink whose words map out the future. There are Gothic elements to the book, the shapes in the shadows, the menacing unknowable, which also helps ratchet up the ever heightening sense of terror. I felt my own tension increase as I, too, tried to find a way that the boy could escape a fate too unmentionable to put into words. This is not the place to start when reading Mieville, but it is a fascinating new wrinkle in an already outstandingly creative career. This book shows Mieville’s ability to stretch his already prodigious talents into worlds beyond where he has already been before. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 13, 2016
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Aug 14, 2016
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Aug 13, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0812998898
| 9780812998894
| 0812998898
| 3.90
| 21,243
| Aug 09, 2016
| Aug 09, 2016
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it was amazing
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******The movie version of the book starring George Clooney just released on Netflix under the title The Midnight Sky.****** ”I heave myself out of the ******The movie version of the book starring George Clooney just released on Netflix under the title The Midnight Sky.****** ”I heave myself out of the darkness slowly, painfully. And there I am, and there he is…” ----Jean Rhys It is interesting that Lily Brooks-Dalton named this book after the Jean Rhys’s novel of the same name. I’ve never read the Rhys’s book, but it is a notoriously depressing novel. The premise of this novel could certainly lead readers to believe that this book, too, is destined to be depressing, but for me it proved to be strikingly uplifting. Jean Rhys takes her title from an Emily Dickinson poem. Good morning, Midnight! Dickinson---Rhys---Brooks-Dalton are writers who are connected through strings of written words that are like strands of DNA passed from page to mind to pen from one generation of writer to the next. One writer lives in the next one who then influences the next one. The Earth goes silent. There is no bang, no debris cloud, no chaos. Augustine, who elected not to be on the last plane out of the Arctic Circle, is strangely contented. He has never really cared for the rest of humanity. He has always been lost in his own brilliance and focused on his astronomy career, which took off like a meteorite, but now at 78 years old, he isn’t really sure if he has achieved all he was meant to achieve. ”His work ethic was strong, his ego engorged, his results groundbreaking, but he wasn’t satisfied. He had never been satisfied and never would be. It wasn’t success he craved, or even fame, it was history: he wanted to crack the universe open like a ripe watermelon, to arrange the mess of pulpy seeds before his dumbfounded colleagues. He wanted to take the dripping red fruit in his hands and quantify the guts of infinity, to look back into the dawn of time and glimpse the very beginning. He wanted to be remembered.” He seduced women. He made women fall in love with him. It became a game for him. He played hot and cold and felt even more empowered over their desperate efforts to get him back. ”It was a thrill just to exist. There were control rooms full of humming equipment, enormous telescopes, endless arrays. There were beautiful women, college girls and townies and visiting scholars, and he would’ve slept with them all if he could have.” There is, after all, only so much time in a day. For most of us, if we were at the Arctic Circle or floating along in space and suddenly lost all contact with the rest of humanity, we would probably have a moment of panic or maybe even a complete meltdown. Augustine’s reaction was more along the lines of... huh, interesting. Of course, after being too high in the stratosphere his whole life to have relationships, beyond his physical needs, this isn’t that much different from his normal life, except things are quieter. He can focus. Well, except some moron left their eight year old daughter behind. How could this happen? Just at the moment he thought he was completely free, a cable snakes out from the ground snagging him, keeping him tethered to the Earth. He is angry. He was so close. The other story we are allowed to follow is of Sully and her fellow astronauts on their way back from an exploration of Jupiter. ”The receivers were picking up the murmurs of space all around them, from celestial bodies millions of light years away---it was only Earth that wasn’t saying anything.” The silence is deafening. They are professionals who are trained not to panic. They will have been gone two years by the time they touch down on Earth. They put their minds to work on the possibilities. We are noisy creatures, now silent, which makes them believe that whatever is wrong with Earth is catastrophic. Augustine would have never bothered to go fire up the radio, but now that he is responsible for Iris, he feels he needs to make some attempt to find another human being. He reaches Sully. Neither have the answers the other needs. They are both lost in their own desolations. The calmness of this novel reminds me of On the Beach where the people who are left alive are resigned to their fate and are trying to enjoy the last few days of their lives. There is no pell-mell race for safety, because there is no safety. The publisher is also making connections to the recent post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven even to the extent of using very similar cover art. This is a mature work with tight prose and elegant observations. Brooks-Dalton even manages to make me like Augustine by finding the spark of humanity in him that was always smothered by his brilliance. This is the most tranquil end of the world book you will ever read. Highly Recommended! If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 10, 2016
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Jul 12, 2016
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Jul 10, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1944866035
| 9781944866037
| 1944866035
| 4.26
| 31
| Mar 05, 2016
| Mar 08, 2016
|
liked it
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*******************SHARK WEEK***************** ”The creatures in the tanks before them had undergone procedures so twisted as to turn them into hulking *******************SHARK WEEK***************** ”The creatures in the tanks before them had undergone procedures so twisted as to turn them into hulking beasts. Part man, part shark, part robot, and all killing machine. Their red, rage-filled eyes said it all. They want to eat, or they wanted to die.” During the SHARKPOCALYPSE in volume one of Great White House, the President of China, Xi Jinping, unleashed genetically modified shark monsters on Washington D.C. and managed to kill most of the news cycle politicians, but Jinping made one fatal mistake. He left Bill and Hillary Clinton alive. Hillary Clinton is now President of the United States. Bill + Hillary = Billary America is never completely down and out as long as Billary is still alive. The biggest revelation in volume 2 is to discover that Xi Jinping was not working alone in trying to destroy the United States. Oh, no, he was part of a cabal of Vladimir Putin, Yoweri Museveni, and this is going to blow your mind: DONALD TRUMP Yes, the orangutan himself has much greater ambitions than just being President of the United States. He wants to...rule the world. Welcome to your life, there’s no turning back, We’ve all heard that Trump wants to stamp out ISIS. You know the rhetoric, he wants to kill them and kill their families and their dogs and cats, too. According to Arthur Graham and Christoph Paul’s intensive undercover investigation, that is all just a bunch of phoney baloney. In actuality, it isn’t Obama (as he has been accused) in league with terrorists, but actually Donald Trump. Ahh, yes, in fact he has shared the shark technology with ISIS, creating sand sharks. Their goal is to devour Israel like a plate full of flaky Jewish borekas. It has to be said, yes, Israel is on the verge of a SHARKOCAUST. So Donald Trump and his cabal are hanging out on Trump Island with a bunch of nuke missiles each morphed with a human ISIS volunteer. These human nukes are going to be yet another part of the plan for world domination. To work up an appetite for the amazing omelets that are being served on the island, the world leaders hunt and shoot celebrities who have been kidnapped specifically for this entertainment. They are celebrities that Donald Trump finds annoying, such as Kobe Bryant, Larry David, Jennifer Lawrence, the whole cast of Shark Tank, Stephen Hawking, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The deeper you read into this novel (really an exposé of the TRUE natures of all these dastardly people), things are just going to get weirder and weirder. Of course with Bill Clinton in the equation, there is a steady stream of seductions. Bill, true to form, has my favorite line: ”’This scotch is aged nice and smooth,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘It’s almost like drinking myself.’” Bill is still Bill...well...at least until he becomes Billary. Let’s just say Hillary takes one for the country. If this self-sacrifice doesn’t make you want to vote for her, I don’t know what will. Second favorite line in the book is when Larry David says: ”Better to be rejected as a Buttron then accepted as a Cenobyte.” That line makes absolutely no sense, but once you read this book, you will have extended your vocabulary exponentially. There are potential ramifications for reading this book. Sharks of Singularity will just pop into your mind randomly throughout the day. You will frequently daydream about porn queen Alexis Texas taking sex to a whole new plateau of spunk. You will never watch another Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton speech without developing a facial tic. The world will be a much more twisted, hostile, scary, odious, smelly, and alien place for you. You will suffer from rampant paranoia. Fruit Loops will taste like Raisin Bran in the morning. You will start counting sharks instead of sheep. Whenever you see MADE IN CHINA, you will feel an uncontrollable urge to smash that item with yet another item MADE IN CHINA. It is all well worth the risk. You will also laugh out loud at several points. You will find yourself worrying about whether the authors have been picked up by the NSA, or if they have ever been bitch slapped by Donald Trump’s tiny, tiny hands. After all, you must be prepared for the potential TRUMPOCALYPSE this fall. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 2016
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Jul 2016
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Jul 01, 2016
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Paperback
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| 034581648X
| 9780345816481
| 034581648X
| 3.67
| 6,773
| Jul 05, 2016
| Jul 05, 2016
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really liked it
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”She didn't know how many of them there were, but they were frantic. Dozens of them at least. They'd been packed in the egg, and they came out in a sw
”She didn't know how many of them there were, but they were frantic. Dozens of them at least. They'd been packed in the egg, and they came out in a swarm, their bodies unfolding, alien and beautiful. Big and fast, black apricots thundering against the glass. Skittering. She put her palm against the glass of the insectarium, and the spiders flew to it." [image] Professor Melanie Guyer has dreamed about being on the cover of Science or Nature Magazine. When she gets a Fed Ex package from an archaeological dig in Nazca, Peru of an ancient spider egg sac, she has a chance to eclipse anything that has ever been done before. She can hatch the eggs and bring back a new/old species of spiders. Why? Cause it would be cool. Except these spiders aren’t normal. They are aggressive. They eat flesh. They breed like fleas. They are an apocalyptic tide of destruction. Good thing they are locked up in the lab. [image] Nazca spider drawn in the ground by an ancient civilization...maybe as a warning? In Peru, billionaire Bill Henderson takes his private jet to stretch his legs and see the sights. He has a guide, Miguel, his bodyguard, and three ridiculously beautiful women, thirty years his junior, with him. Without all that money, none of these people would give him five minutes of their time, and he knows it. He steps off the trail to take a piss. ”And then the blackness started streaming toward him, covering the path and moving quickly, almost as fast as a man could run. Miguel knew he should be running, but there was something hypnotic in the quietness of the water. It didn’t roar like a river. If anything, it seemed to absorb sound. All he could hear was a whisper, a skittering, like a small patter of rain. The way the river moved was beautiful in its own way, pulsing and, at certain points, splitting and braiding into separate streams before rejoining itself a few paces later. As it got closer, Miguel took another step back, but by the time he realized it wasn’t actually a river, that it wasn’t water of any kind, it was too late.” Henderson didn’t wait around. He made a run for the plane. The shrill screams of his entourage only inspired his fat legs to run faster. Something bit him. He made the plane and headed back to Minnesota. Now if you are thinking what a rat bastard, there probably wasn’t anything he could do to save the beautiful trio of muses or poor Miguel, but still... the billionaire... had to make it? Don’t fret because... well... a spider is going to crawl out of his face. Well, actual do fret because his plane has become the Plague ship Mary. Bill Henderson is bringing those spiders to YOU. Meanwhile, a seismic station in India is hearing rumblings beneath the earth that don’t make sense. The Chinese have dropped a nuke on themselves. Of course, being Chinese, they don’t just say we have a HUGE SPIDER PROBLEM. They get all cryptic as if they are too embarrassed to ask for all our RAID MAX SPIDER BLASTER supplies. So as we start to put all the various reports together, we begin to understand how totally screwed we are. Something has started all these spiders hatching, and it isn’t the brilliance of Professor Guyer because they are hatching everywhere. I’ve read a few zombie apocalypse books. I’ve read a slew of post-apocalyptic books with everything from nuclear war to the moon exploding to flu destabilizing civilization and sending us back to a more primitive society, but I’ve never had the pleasure of reading about spiders who are capable of stripping the planet of every living thing. WARNING: there are ramifications and behavior modifications possible after reading this book! [image] This was nearly me! I was driving to Woodward, Oklahoma, the other day, listening to Metallica, when a spider the size of a half dollar leaped out of the vent in my dash and landed on the windshield right at eye level. My first thought was that I had to save all of humanity by lighting the molotov cocktail I always keep handy and driving off the road into a deep culvert, grasping a spider leg for what little comfort it could provide (I couldn’t decide if I was Thelma or Louise.), but after my heart rate reduced to normal levels, and I quit screaming like a republican at a presidential rally, I decided that I needed to pull over and commit arachnicide. Now I’m going to blame Ezekiel Boone for the death of that spider, just like I blame Alfred Hitchcock for my natural aversion for flocks of crows or blackbirds or ravens. Those beady eyed black bastards! I’m also suffering from Eight Legged Freaks (2002) flashbacks. Boone will convince you to quit worrying about zombies or meteorites or nuclear explosions and start paying better attention to something a little more likely...spiders, a black tide of spiders. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 31, 2016
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Apr 09, 2016
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Mar 31, 2016
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0062190377
| 9780062190376
| 4.00
| 116,655
| May 19, 2015
| May 19, 2015
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it was amazing
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“We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or at
“We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It's our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.” [image] Nerd Alert! Be nice to the nerds in your life. They might save your ass someday. Nerds realized a long time ago in the United States that they needed to become rich if they ever expected to marry the super model, have 2.5 kids, and be able to afford all those expensive technological toys. The guy who was completely undateable in high school suddenly becomes Tom Cruise when he has a couple of million bucks in his pocket. Several years ago, I read an article that discussed the fact that, over the past several thousand years, Jewish people have progressively become smarter because Jewish women are attracted to men primarily for their brains rather than their brawn, while Catholics and Protestants have maybe become progressively better looking because C&P women are attracted to athletic men, and C&P men are attracted to pretty women. If you are a man who doesn’t do well on the athletic field, then you have to counter your lack of physical coordination by being very, very successful. Your ability to pass on your genes for future generations is counting on that. Of course a nerd is not so much worried about reproducing as he is about getting laid, but the end result is the same. Now, let’s say you wake up one morning, and ”THE MOON BLEW UP WITHOUT WARNING AND FOR NO APPARENT REASON.” It is shattered into seven big pieces and many, many smaller fragments. [image] I always have new possibilities to mentally explore whenever I read a Neal Stephenson book. It has never crossed my mind that the moon would ever blow up. I’ve thought about the Earth shattering or falling into the sun or splitting in half, all of course due in some way to human stupidity, but I’d never considered the ramifications of the moon...exploding. My first thought would be, “Wow, I’m so glad whatever hit the moon didn’t hit us.” I’m an optimist, right, so I’d be thinking about how lucky we were for the near miss. The moon is gone. The moon is gone. The moon is gone. Wait, what does this mean for Earth? Astronomers name the pieces of the moon and watch as they dance around each other, occasionally colliding. Life goes on with little change...until one astronomer determines that those collisions are going to send debris toward the earth in the form of fiery bolides. The earth is going to burn. He tags the phenomenon: #HARD RAIN #Kiss your ass goodbye. Predictive models give the Earth, as we know it, about two years. Sex anyone? “The human race might be about to disappear, but not before putting on a two-year frenzy of recreational sex.” Nerds are now in the driver’s seat. Those brawny warriors of the gridiron would have been better served hitting the books instead of catching footballs or hitting baseballs or smacking pucks or launching basketballs at small round hoops. Those skills, once lauded, are now obsolete. Same goes for those preening pretty girls who may have only aspired to make themselves more beautiful. They, too, will need much more than long eyelashes and long legs to see that their offspring be part of the future of humanity. Overnight, the human race will be reduced from seven billion down to a few thousand. Every country is asked to select their best and brightest young people and send them for training. Of course, only a fraction of those will be selected to go into space. Understandably, things get wiggy. “Seven billion who need to be kept happy, and docile, until the end. How do you do that? What's the best way to calm down a scared kid, get them to go back to sleep? Tell them a story. Some shit about Jesus or whatever.” For me, I guess I would just refuse to believe the math or hope for another intercession by something spectacular. Not that I would be passing on the new hedonistic lifestyle that most humans would be adopting; after all, if the world does survive by some miracle, it still wouldn’t be the time to be prudish because chances are the math ignored or not will prove to be right. Although frankly, as the clock ticked down, I’d probably decide it was the perfect time to finish War and Peace while sipping a very fine, ancient Kentucky Bourbon. People, for once, become too busy to really think about politics. They are too intent on the Herculean effort of building a larger space station and also figuring out how to anchor an asteroid on one side as a protective shield from bolides. Two years is not enough time to get things right. It is only enough time to give humanity a chance. And then… ”Earth was, of course, completely unrecognizable. From this distance it was about the size of a tangerine held at arm’s length, and about the same color. Formerly a cool blue-and-white lake in the cosmos, it now hung there like a blob of molten steel thrown out by a welder’s torch. In the belt between the tropics, where most of the Hard Rain was falling, it glowed orange.” The remaining members of humanity spend the next few decades on the verge of extinction. They battle food and water shortages (think about drinking melted ice five billion years old. I’m still trying to wrap my puny brain around that.), bolide collisions, lack of resources, but what finally almost destroys humanity...politics. Humanity gets shaved down to the barebones. There is a very good reason why the book is called SEVENEVES. For the last part of the book, Stephenson flashes us forward five thousand years when the earth is returning to a more habitable form. You will be relieved to know that humanity does survive, though it has evolved and devolved from where we were before the Hard Rain. Some humans survived below Earth, and now we are seeing the first contact between ”those who fled” and those who stayed. Who owns the Earth now? Creating deep, resonating characters is not Stephenson’s strong point, though they are interesting people who are existing in this spectacular set of circumstances that showcases how creative a writer can be and still stay within the bounds of known science. This is an epic, post-apocalyptic book made more scary because there is no place in the shattered remains of humanity for people like me. I’ve met Neal Stephenson a couple of times, but the first time was when he was promoting his book Diamond Age. Snow Crash was getting a lot of buzz in the book community, and I’d just finished reading it. He was sitting behind a big pile of ARC copies of Diamond Age book, looking very uncomfortable. I was handling a booth for Roy P. Jensen, a remainder book company I was working for at the time. Traffic was slow, but those few people there didn’t seem to know who he was. I was able to slip over and sit down with him for a while and chat. His mind, not surprising, was razor sharp. He had a way of looking at me like I was streaming computer code that only he could read. He was pleasantly surprised I’d read Snow Crash. He was built like a slender reed and looked very much like the picture I posted at the beginning of this review. I then met him again much later when he was promoting Quicksilver. He had somehow morphed into a dramatically handsome man still brimming with intensity. He wore his success very well. With each book he writes, he continues to add to an impressive collection of work that will continue to influence science-fiction writing for a long, long time. [image] If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 10, 2016
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Mar 20, 2016
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Feb 10, 2016
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0393072231
| 9780393072235
| 0393072231
| 4.30
| 161,709
| Mar 15, 2010
| Mar 15, 2010
|
really liked it
|
”The ability of Wall Street traders to see themselves in their success and their management in their failure would later be echoed, when their firms,
”The ability of Wall Street traders to see themselves in their success and their management in their failure would later be echoed, when their firms, which disdained the need for government regulation in good times, insisted on being rescued by government in bad times. Success was an individual achievement; failure was a social problem.” The real estate market in the United States after several years of frantic growth peaked in 2004, which was the year I decided to start buying properties. I was able to secure 6% interest on about any property I wanted to buy with no money down. I had an 800+ credit score, which had bankers salivating when I walked in the door. I put everything on 30 year notes to give me more cash flow. The first time I bought a property, the banker wrote it up as an ARM (adjustable rate mortgage). He showed me how much lower my payment would be. Of course, what he didn’t explain was what the payment would look like when the interest rate went up. (I’m the offspring of a farmer and had the opportunity to watch my father negotiate several mortgage notes. My father always said to never trust a banker and, furthermore, never trust that a banker knows what he is doing.) When I told the banker I wanted a fixed mortgage, he looked shocked for a moment. He said, “I haven’t written a fixed note in so long that I’ll have to look up how to do it.” Warning bells were going off in my head. My friends and acquaintances from all over the country were buying properties. Many were buying properties they could not afford and knew it, but they were hoping to ride the positive wave of escalating property values which would allow them to keep tapping their equity to pay their bills. Many of them fell into the category of subprime mortgages. ”A subprime mortgage is a type of loan granted to individuals with poor credit histories (often below 600), who, as a result of their deficient credit ratings, would not be able to qualify for conventional mortgages.” Michael Lewis talks about ”thin file FICO scores,” which are people with short credit histories, but have good credit. One example that Lewis uses is a Mexican strawberry picker making $14,000, who qualified for a loan for $750,000 all because he hadn’t proved he couldn’t pay. Anyone with any sense, you don’t need business acumen for this one, can look at that situation and KNOW with certainty that strawberry picker will not be able to make his payments. The whole lending system, from the big boys on Wall Street down to the loan officer in your local bank, was making and encouraging too many loans destined to fail. It was ok though because they were going to bundle them together with a bunch of other notes and sell them to someone else. Unfortunately, and I blame the car industry for this, Americans are much more interested in a lower payment than they are in how long it will take to pay off a note or how much interest they will end up paying. What is the first thing a car salesman asks a car buying prospect? How big a monthly payment can you pay? It doesn’t matter what type of car or how expensive that vehicle is; what is important is what they are capable of paying per month. Car loans used to be three years in length. Now, most people take seven years to pay off their car. They have no idea how much they will have paid for that vehicle at the end of seven years. I recently bought a new Jeep Cherokee, and when they brought the paperwork, I realized that they hadn’t even asked me if I wanted a five year or a seven year note. They automatically wrote it up for seven. I had them change it to five. So that same mentality transferred over to mortgages. It was easy to talk Americans into ARMs because of the lower payment offer (interest only) compared to a fixed rate. In most cases, I can guarantee they were never offered or shown a fixed rate. ”Interest only ARM mortgages were only 5.85% of the pool in early 2004, but by late 2004 they were 17.48% of the pool, and by late summer 2005 25.34% of the pool. To say that everything was getting out of balance was an understatement. We were being set up for a disaster. If the real estate dipped or remained flat, the whole, forgive the pun, house of cards, was going to come down. Home owners had to keep gaining equity to stay afloat. 2009 was the year that I decided to refinance all my properties. The interest rate was unbelievably low, and one of my fears was that the paradigm would shift and interest rates would begin to climb. I was on a fixed rate of 6%, which historically that was a great rate for home mortgages, but the interest rate I was about to get was going to blow my mind. 4.25% (now you can probably write a primary loan for less). Not only did they give me that rate on my primary home, but also across the board on all my rental properties. My main goal for refinancing was to lower the interest, but also to take my 30 year mortgages and put them on 15 years. The banker said some interesting things to me. One was that they were willing to waive the fees if I’d write new 30 year mortgage notes. He showed me how much lower my monthly payments (ahh yes that old stratagem) would be compared to the 15 year notes. He said that if I wanted to pay them off in fifteen years, all I would have to do is make bigger principle payments. This is extremely bad advice. Most people never make an extra payment on their car or house or with some, totally insane consumers, even their credit cards. They pay the minimum they have to pay. One of the problems with most loan officers is that they really don’t understand the loans they are writing. I had one property that had a house with a trailer house on the same lot. I could almost hear the pop in the banker’s head when he realized there was a trailer house involved. They don’t finance trailer houses. I explained that the trailer house needed to be considered personal property; I had plenty of equity in the house to meet the criteria for the loan. I had to go up the chain of the bank until finally I was talking to some guy in Milwaukee who got what I was saying and approved the loan. I don’t like the fact that the person who makes the decision about any loan I make is not the person sitting in front of me, but that is the banking system we work with now. The crises of 2008 should have never happened. Regulations on banks and Wall Street had been relaxed. Without regulations they went crazy. They lost their minds. ”There were more morons than crooks, but the crooks were higher up.” This book focuses on the handful of brokers who could see the crash coming and decided to bet against homeowners being able to make their payments. It was dicey because if the government stepped in and shored up those home loans, they would lose their bet. They won, and they won big. At the time, I supported President Bush’s administration stepping in with a bailout for Wall Street. I was wrong to do so. I was afraid of a further collapse that would bring even those of us who were solvent down with the ones already under water. (I do believe that the bailout of the auto industry was an astute decision that ended up saving that industry and thousands of blue collar jobs.) I have only a few thousand in the stock market these days. I took my money out and bought a business. I wish more Americans would invest in something tangible, like a business or real estate. I’d rather that when Wall Street goes crazy with greed again, and they will, that they don’t have the retirements of middle class Americans to lose on some greedy short term gain venture. My advice to everyone is to really KNOW your finances. Don’t assume that a banker or accountant knows what is best for you. Don’t put your future in someone else’s hands. Use their expertise to educate yourself. Don’t over leverage yourself under the assumption that you will make more money in the future. Buy at a price you can afford now, not what you think you will be able to afford later. If you are thinking about buying a home, the concept of buy low and sell high should apply. If possible, wait for a buyer’s market. Buy below market if you can so that you have some ready made equity already in your home. (The quicker you can get enough equity, usually 20%, in your home to avoid PMI payments the better. Private Mortgage Insurance protects the lender if you default on your loan though THEY benefit you pay the premium.) Don’t fall in love with a house until you own it. Don’t ever risk money you can’t afford to lose. This is a painful book to read from the standpoint of the recklessness, the greed, the foolishness that all contributed to the 2008 subprime mortgage crises. I wasn’t shocked to learn that the “experts” didn’t even know what they were selling or buying most of the time. They didn’t understand their own acronyms. Like, what the fxxk is a CDO (collateralized debt obligation), and what the hell are tranches? It’s okay for me not to know, but these people at Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, UBS, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley didn’t really understand what they were either. These supposedly best and brightest were blinded by greed. They couldn’t see that the track in front of their roaring train loaded with subprime mortgages...had disappeared and the gorge they fell into was... deep. I’m really looking forward to seeing the movie. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visithttp://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten . ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 2016
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Feb 04, 2016
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Jan 29, 2016
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0307346609
| 9780307346605
| 0307346609
| 4.02
| 531,320
| Sep 12, 2006
| Sep 12, 2006
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it was amazing
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”The book of war, the one we’ve been writing since one ape slapped another was completely useless in this situation. We had to write a new one from sc
”The book of war, the one we’ve been writing since one ape slapped another was completely useless in this situation. We had to write a new one from scratch.” With most apocalyptic situations, I think the hardest part to deal with is that there are no wrong decisions or right decisions. There are simply too many variables to consider if your ultimate goal is to survive. The most meticulously planned strategies can still result in failure. You make the best decisions you can and then hope for a bit of luck. Should we barricade ourselves hoping to be saved, or go North hoping the zombies will eventually become popsicles when winter hits? Are we safer in the underground tunnels of Paris or on a cruise ship or living in the woods by ourselves? Whatever decision you make, you must think long game and short game. The short game, the immediate concerns, involve food, water, and shelter. The short and long game both come into play when trying to figure out how to avoid becoming zombie chow. Once you survive the first wave of contagion, then what? This book is written as an investigative report, collecting all the experiences of survivors from around the world. Different cultures reacted differently to the apocalypse. Some were more successful than others. The learning curve, unfortunately, has to be short with apocalyptic situations, especially if the hope is to actually salvage civilisation. The lights go out, and many of the comforts we’ve become accustomed to are gone instantly, and the possessions that have come to define us, such as electronic devices, suddenly become useless. If the whole idea of a zombie apocalypse is too wild a concept for you to grasp, you might be relieved that for the most part the zombies are really just part of the background. What Max Brooks is really dealing with goes well beyond the concept of zombies and focuses more on how people survived the collapse of civilisation. He could have used microbes or conventional war or a devastating meteorite hitting the earth or any of the other fascinating concepts that people have come up with as ways to end the world. It reads like books of a similar nature that collect the stories of people who survived World War Two. The scope is huge and impressive. Brooks addresses aspects about a zombie apocalypse that I have never thought about before. Quislings ”Yeah, you know, the people that went nutballs and started acting like zombies.” Ok, I’ve read a handful of zombie books, not enough to make myself an expert, but certainly enough to have some background on the lore of a zombie apocalypse. WTH? Now Brooks didn’t just make this term up. It is a term from WW2. ”A quisling is a person who collaborates with an enemy occupying force. The word originates from the Norwegian war-time leader Vidkun Quisling, who headed a domestic Nazi collaborationist regime during the Second World War.” The minds of survivors, I’m sure, snapped in all kinds of strange and wonderful and terrifying ways, but unfortunately pretending to be a zombie was a quick way to find yourself...well...dead. First, any reasonably sane human who notices you lurching toward them, performing your very best mimicry of the undead, will smash your brain. Second, you don’t blend with the zombies. They know you are alive. You become a zombie delight! People also just went to sleep perfectly healthy and didn’t wake up. This was called ADS, short for Asymptomatic Demise Syndrome or Apocalyptic Despair Syndrome. ”It killed as many people in those early stalemate months as hunger, disease, interhuman violence, or the living dead.” I’ve heard of things like this happening to people who experience long term stress situations. The body just reaches a point where the brain decides to just shut down the power to the spacecraft and let the mind drift away. RIP People will put up with a lot as long as there is hope that someday their situation will improve. Babies die when they are not held. People die when things become hopeless. Brooks also told stories about zombies underwater. WTH? Yeah, people reanimated as the living dead on ships and eventually managed to fall off the ship in the water. It wasn’t unusual for zombies to just walk out of the water onto beaches or grab divers or attack fishermen in boats. Somehow they are more scary underwater than on land. It gives me the shivers just thinking about it. I’m having a Jaws flashback. During and after WWZ, people had to relearn things that our grandparents and great grandparents knew. A chimney sweep. ”I help keep my neighbors warm.” he said proudly. A cobbler. ”You see those shoes. I made them.” A shepherd. ”That sweater, that’s my sheep’s wool.” A gardener/farmer. ” Like that corn? My garden.” ”That was the upshot of a more localized system. It gave people the opportunity to see the fruits of their labor, it gave them a sense of individual pride to know they were making a clear, concrete contribution to victory, and it gave me a wonderful feeling that I was part of that. I needed that feeling. It kept me sane for the other part of my job.” The other part of his job?...killing zombies. Several of the survivors talked about how important it was not to think of them as people or of who they were or of who they might have become. They couldn’t see them as people or what they were doing was genocide. This is by far the most serious zombie book I’ve ever read. The stories are compelling. This is a panoramic view of a society in crises. The observations are thoughtful. The writing is convincing. By the end I had the feeling I’d just read a history book, not a speculative zombie apocalyptic book. The book is unfilmable, but the movie industry knew a catchy title when they saw one. They certainly borrowed aspects from the book, but really the movie should be considered a completely different entity. The zombies in Brooks book are the George Romero lurching, yucky living dead. In the movie, they are super charged, fast moving, aggressive, nasty creatures. The virus in the movie is fast acting. Someone bitten is transformed within seconds. In the book, the virus takes much longer to take effect. Did it bother me that the director Marc Forster took such liberties? Not one I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. I was thoroughly entertained. I certainly intend to watch the movie again. So read the book to discover new depths to an overly exploited genre, and watch the movie to experience a whirlwind of fear and dread. Just a suggestion, have someone else hold the popcorn. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 08, 2015
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Nov 12, 2015
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Nov 08, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 1477808701
| 9781477808702
| 1477808701
| 4.15
| 73,643
| Sep 17, 2013
| Sep 17, 2013
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it was amazing
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”I know what they need. Perfection all the time would drive them mad. For every perfect little town, there’s something ugly underneath. No dream witho
”I know what they need. Perfection all the time would drive them mad. For every perfect little town, there’s something ugly underneath. No dream without the nightmare.” [image] We all have secrets we carry around with us. As a species we aren’t really good at keeping secrets, even those rattling skeletons that could prove detrimental to our lives. In the end, most of us end up telling somebody. You can swear someone to secrecy, but the same itch, the same need to tell someone that compelled you to tell them, is whispering to them from the corners of their brain. This powerful urge, maybe with some help from some uninhibiting wine or soul exploding sex, will eventually gain the upper hand, and those locked away words will spill. They swear that person to secrecy, and so on and so on until everyone you know...well...knows. So the only way to keep a secret is to tell NO ONE. Recently appointed Sheriff Ethan Burke is carrying the granddaddy of all secrets. I was trying to think of something in the history of mankind that is a bigger secret. Knowledge of what Brutus has planned for Julius Caesar at the forum?...hmmm...nope. Finding out the Japanese plans for Pearl Harbor on December 6th?...not even close. How about the fact that I travelled back in time and handed Alois Hitler a FREE condom nine months prior to April 20th, 1889? Epic fail! Unfortunately...his appendage was too small to stay covered for the crucial moment (as it turns out that unfortunate disability runs in that family). See, and what did I just do...I told you!! Ethan tells his wife, Theresa. Guilt is hammering away at him. He has kept secrets (not very well... proving my point) in the past. Big ones like doinking his hot FBI partner Kate, who also is a resident of Wayward Pines. She also happens to be running a resistance movement against the powers that be. No one, except Ethan... well and now Theresa, knows exactly who that might be. The electric fence surrounding the town hums with high voltage electricity. Occasionally, one of the 461 residents uses the fence to kill themselves. Unfortunately, the smell of their charred flesh just makes people hungry for barbecue. Miraculously, new people show up to replace those who have been lost. They are quickly assimilated into the community. Speaking about the past is verboten. If people don’t accept the rules by joining the rest of the seemingly ecstatically happy people, they are fêted. Yes, there is a big group. Yes, there is a big party. No, those being fêted are not having a good time. What the FRILL is going on? As I said when I wrote the review for the first book in the trilogy, Pines, my recommendation is to watch the Wayward Pines TV series first. I know! Shocking! I feel like frog marching myself out to a stone cliff and throwing myself into the sea. The rule is always read the books first. *Sigh* one thing I’ve learned after decades of life is that flexibility, even as your joints refuse to be so, is important in all things. Rules were maybe not meant to be broken, but certainly, they were meant to be bent. Be the tree that sways in the wind. Watch the series, there are only ten episodes ( I really appreciate it when American TV shows some restraints with the number of episodes), and if you like the series, read the books. The books do differ from the series, but not by a large margin. In for a penny in for a pound, on to book three. My PINES review, the first book in the trilogy. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at: https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 30, 2015
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Sep 05, 2015
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Aug 30, 2015
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 088001654X
| 9780880016544
| 088001654X
| 4.16
| 5,750
| Jan 01, 1962
| Jul 10, 1999
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really liked it
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“The world is no longer man's theatre. Man has been made into a helpless spectator. The two evil forces he has created- science and the state- have co
“The world is no longer man's theatre. Man has been made into a helpless spectator. The two evil forces he has created- science and the state- have combined into one monstrous body. We're at the mercy of our monster...” [image] The Big Board from the 1964 movie. As I was making my way through the public school system in the 1970s, they were still doing duck and cover drills. In retrospect, of course, these drills were absolutely worthless except as an effective way of convincing all of us that our lives were dangling at the fingertips of madmen. Getting under our desks and covering our heads with our hands as a way to survive an atomic blast is about as effective as holding up a tissue in front of a speeding bullet heading towards our heart. It took me years and much reading on my own to undo most of the brainwashing that was just part of our normal psychotic relationship with the Soviet Union. My impression of Russians were that they were deranged lunatics and that our strong military was the only thing standing between them and world domination. The Cold War. The Nuclear Weapon Buildup. Gazillions of dollars were spent by both countries. Paranoia was behind the wheel with the gas pedal mashed to the floor. Both militaries used inflated numbers of the other’s strengths to keep blackmailing their politicians for more and more money. This book came out in 1962. The timing could not have been better. The Cuban Missile Crisis in that same year gave the world a very genuine taste of what had previously just been academic conjecture. The end of the world was very real. This book was an instant best seller. The copy I appropriated from the library was a fifteenth printing. I’m sure it went into many more printings than that. Frankly, the book depicts a terrifying scenario. Being a child of The Cold War, it certainly pressed all the right buttons for me. To those who have grown up with illusions of safety, it is ludicrous for most of them to even think that something as crazy as a Nuclear Exchange could ever happen. To those who don’t understand the historical significance of this novel, they could think this scenario to be...well... unbelievable. To those of us who lived through it and felt the haunting spectre of war hovering over every international crisis, this book confirms every worse fear that we experienced while living in a nuclear unstable world. In the book they talk a lot about Fail-Safe. ”Fail-safe means that a device will not endanger lives or property when it fails.” The plot begins with a blown fuse that sends an errant message to a bomber group hovering in the designated “Fail-Safe” area. Computers have replaced men, and protocols are in place that are based off those same paranoias that sustained the whole Cold War. Once the GO signal is given it is almost impossible to stop the process from proceeding. I watched the excellent 1964 movie right after reading the book. Being a natural optimist, even though I knew the ending from the book, I was still hoping for an eleventh hour reprieve. The book and the movie (it follows the book very closely) both left me shaken. The decisions of the world leaders, I can guarantee, will shock and surprise you. The book is compelling especially in the last hundred pages, but the movie might even be more so from start to finish. The dark, stark black and white footage lends a feeling of desolation to the actions of the characters. The director snaps close ups of eyes widening, of sweat glistening on skin, and of lips saying words that are devastating in their impact. One of the more interesting and abhorrent characters in the book is Professor Groteschele (played very well by Walter Matthau in the movie), who shares end of the world scenarios at cocktail parties with the intention of leaving those listening to him shocked and disturbed. The prospect of war is a punchline for him. ”Knowing you have to die, imagine how fantastic and magical it would be to have the power to take everyone else with you.” Groteschele said. “The swarms of them out there, the untold billions of them, the ignorant masses of them, the beautiful ones, the artful ones, the friends, the enemies...all of them and their plans and hopes. And they are murderees: born to be murdered and don’t know it. And the person with his finger on the button is the one who knows and who can do it.” [image] Walter Matthau conveys smug very well. He is smug in his objectivity. War is a series of calculations that ignore the human cost as long as more of us survive than those who oppose us. When soldiers follow orders, even immoral orders, they have to become less than human. Groteschele fears our best intentions the most. ”'What frightened us was not so much the madman problem, ' Groteschele was saying, 'but its opposite: at the last moment someone might refuse to drop the bombs. A single act of revulsion could foil the whole policy of graduated deterrents.'” With six United States Vindicator bombers flying towards Moscow with a large enough payload of atomic bombs to wipe six cities the size of Moscow off the map, the tension continues to ratchet up as the President tries to keep Nikita Khrushchev, The Soviet Premier, from launching all out war. [image] Henry Fonda as the President in the movie. It may have just been an accident, a horrible accident, but still with paranoia flowing freely it is difficult for both sides to convince themselves that this is not just a trick perpetrated to create an advantage in war. Everyone involved is trying to decide what exactly is true and what is subterfuge. As the bombers approach Moscow, the President orders his military advisors to tell the Russians the weaknesses in the Vindicator’s defenses. ”General Bogan felt his finger tips shaking against his trousers. He felt for a moment as if he were being exposed to some strange torture; some spikelike split of his allegiance; some rupturing of his life.” As the Vindicator planes score victories, it is hard for the United States military men not to cheer, even though the fate of the world rests on the ability of the Russians to shoot all the planes down. The ballooning tension kept my gut churning and my mind spinning with all the potential outcomes. The ending was not what I expected at all. The book was good. The movie was even better. I felt like the experience was enhanced by reading the book and watching the movie, but I would highly recommend anyone who is interested in this era or fascinated by human behavior under pressure to, at the very least, watch the movie. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 27, 2015
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Aug 30, 2015
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Aug 27, 2015
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0385352875
| 9780385352871
| 0385352875
| 3.85
| 26,309
| May 26, 2015
| May 26, 2015
|
it was amazing
|
“If I could put my finger on the moment we genuinely f**ked ourselves, it was the moment we decided that data was something you could use words like b
“If I could put my finger on the moment we genuinely f**ked ourselves, it was the moment we decided that data was something you could use words like believe or disbelieve around.” [image] Massive Dust storms from abandoned farmland add to the misery of those left alive. Water is going to be more expensive than gasoline. Water is going to be more precious than gold. Water is going to be fought over. “Some people had to bleed so other people could drink. Simple as that.” The world in the future is going to tilt sideways and only a few are going to be able to hold on. When I lived in Phoenix in the 1990s, the city was in constant litigation with Los Angeles. Both communities were/are dependent on the Colorado River. L.A. was ascerting that Phoenix kept more than their share of the water from the Colorado River. This was true. The boom of large cities like Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas moved a lot of people from places that had adequate sources of water to places where water is scarce. The weather in these communities, though too warm for some people during the summer, is a dry heat, and for most of the year the temperatures are moderate. It is easy to live there. I was meeting people all the time who gave up great paying jobs in Chicago, New York, Washington D.C. etc. to come live in The Valley even though they made considerably less money. In 1986 (revised 1993), a reporter by the name of Marc Reisner wrote a book called Cadillac Desert that talked about a coming apocalypse in the West over water. “In the West, it is said, water flows uphill toward money. And it literally does, as it leaps three thousand feet across the Tehachapi Mountains in gigantic siphons to slake the thirst of Los Angeles, as it is shoved a thousand feet out of Colorado River canyons to water Phoenix and Palm Springs and the irrigated lands around them.” Water, worth billions then, is worth more now and will be worth an incalculable amount in the near future. But then, ultimately, we can put a dollar amount on just about anything. The problem is that you and I may not have enough. ”The Doomsday preppers will be fine though right? Angel snorted. ‘F**king preppers.’ ‘You have issues with them?’ ‘Just when we pump their wells dry.’ He laughed cynically. ‘Never could figure out why people would think they could survive all out on their lonesome like that. All of them sitting in their little bunkers, thinking they’re going to ride out the apocalypse alone.’ ‘Maybe they watch too many old Westerns.’ ‘Nobody survives on their own.’ Angel’s vehemence made Lucy suspect he wasn’t really talking about preppers.” There is speculation in the book about the ability of Americans, even those that are not batshit crazy doomsday preppers, to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. ”...people are alone here in America. They’re all alone. And they don’t trust anyone except themselves, and they don’t rely on anyone except themselves. He said that is why India would survive all this apocalyptic shit, but America wouldn’t.” We have become so fearful of co-dependency issues that we have become tribal units of one or in a best case scenario a tribe of immediate family. We are certainly vulnerable to catastrophe. I agree with those thoughts, but I also think we have always proven ourselves adaptable. The question will be will we change fast enough to save ourselves. [image] NOAH an arcology system designed for New Orleans. In the book New Orleans collapses very early. Angel Velasquez has survived the water collapse. He was plucked out of prison by Catherine Case, who has become the most powerful woman in the West. She controls the Nevada water from her stronghold in Las Vegas. She builds arcology habitats that are self-sufficient for water and also for all the other needs of the residents. These lucky arcology people are isolated, living in a bubble, immune to the suffering and dying going on mere yards away from their habitat. They are not for people like you and me. We are merely: ”Human spackle, filling the cracks of disaster.”The people living in these safe havens are very, very wealthy people. Angel is one of Case’s most trusted Water Knives. He and other loyal hand-picked members go out and enforce her water rights, and ensure the continued Disneyland existence of her arcology residents. She makes towns die. Phoenix is next on her list. She dispatches Angel to Phoenix to see what is going on. Zona is up to their eyeballs in Texans and holy rollers. The city is coming apart at the seams. Coyotes are taking people’s money to take them North and then executing them in the desert. Desperation colors everything and everyone. Bangbang girls (Texas teenagers) are prostituting themselves with wealthy executives just for an opportunity to take a shower and wash their clothes in a hotel. Who actually controls the water is being disputed. The man who had the papers with the ancient water rights (written on actual paper) has been mutilated, tortured, killed. The papers are in the wind, and it is Angel’s job to get them back. He meets Lucy Monroe, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, who made her first mark writing Collapse Porn. The world couldn’t get enough of all the scenes of degradation and death. They are an unlikely pair, but then Lucy has certainly become someone she didn’t expect to be. Phoenix has changed her. ”Phoenix made people crazy…. Sometimes it turned people into devils so bad they weren’t recognizable as human. And other times it turned them into goddamn saints.” She was more saint than devil, but she couldn’t deny that she had a bit too much of both to have much of a chance of surviving in a place where it is becoming apparent that no one is in charge. The whole city is going tribal. ”It never rains in Phoenix, except when it’s raining bodies.” Alliances are changing and re-forming. Gut wrenching betrayals are making it hard for anyone to trust anyone. California is working against Las Vegas. Las Vegas is working against Phoenix. States are controlling their borders, keeping the parched refugees from the Southern states from invading. Everyone has spies gathering information that can mean the difference between a community flourishing or a community declining. Cadillac Desert has become a water Bible as people try to understand exactly what has happened to them and what is continuing to happen to them. [image] It is logical to cut off water to the rural areas when water becomes scarce. The problem is that it creates a food shortage. Land that is not being used for crops drys out and begins to blow creating massive, dangerous dust storms. This book is set in the near future. The plot of this novel could be the harbinger of a future prize winning work of nonfiction. The book gave me shivers because the possibilities of this becoming reality are all too probable. It is such a compulsive read that I read the last 220 pages in one sitting interrupted only by the need for a glass of water to parch the thirst the book inspired. Noir is hardboiled into the inflections of speech, into the scars, into the actions of the characters. Bodies pile up, massive dust storms blanket the city, and uncontrollable fires greedily eat up the dry tinder of abandoned buildings. Phoenix has become hell on Earth. Water has become something no one has enough of. I also really enjoyed Paolo Bacigalupi’s book My The Windup Girl Review If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeete... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 02, 2015
|
Aug 09, 2015
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Aug 02, 2015
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1612183956
| 9781612183954
| 1612183956
| 3.94
| 132,321
| Aug 21, 2012
| Aug 21, 2012
|
it was amazing
|
”Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve treated our world like it was a hotel room and we were rock stars. But we aren’t rock stars. In the scheme of
”Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve treated our world like it was a hotel room and we were rock stars. But we aren’t rock stars. In the scheme of evolutionary forces, we are a weak, fragile species. Our genome is corruptible, and we so abused this planet that we ultimately corrupted that precious DNA blueprint that makes us human.” [image] Ethan Burke was sent to Wayward Pines, Idaho, to find two missing secret service agents. One of them was his old partner and for a brief time his lover. Going after Kate does complicate things, putting more stress on his fragile relationship with his wife Theresa and his son Ben. Enroute he is in a “car accident” which kills the agent that was sent with him and lands him in the hospital. He has memory issues. Burke escapes from the hospital, which was starting to feel more like a prison, and wanders around the town. There is a distinct “you aren’t from around” here vibe coming from the inhabitants of this town. A Children of the Corn creepiness that is hard to ignore. He meets a friendly bartender who gives him her address in case he needs a place to stay. It is hard to even buy a cup of coffee without his wallet which has mysteriously disappeared. Later when he does decide to take her up on her offer, he finds out it isn’t her home. ”He hadn’t heard the flies until now, because they had congregated inside the man’s mouth--a metropolis of them, the sound of their collective buzzing like a small outboard motor.” Ethan had found Agent Evans. By this time it doesn’t surprise Ethan that Sheriff Pope acts strange. Everyone in this town acts scared, acts peculiar. They act like people do when something is very, very wrong. The phones don’t work, and then when they do, he gets the voicemail of his wife. She never calls him back. He tries to check into work and gets this person that is about as helpful as a tree of feces throwing monkeys. He decides to steal a car and leave town. Every road out of town brings you back to Wayward Pines. When he goes into the woods to explore, he finds a large electrified fence encircling the town. He hears: ”The scream could only be compared to human suffering or terror. Like a hyena or a banshee. Coyotes at their maddest. The mythologized Rebel Yell. High and thin. Fragile. Terrible. And on some level, humming under the surface liked buried electrical cables, was a dim awareness that this wasn’t the first time he’d heard it. Again, the scream.” [image] He finds Kate, but not the Kate he was expecting. He finds Kate who is fifteen years older than when he last saw her a few weeks ago. She is married to a man named Harold. He can’t believe what he sees. ”Are you losing your mind? You tell me. I can’t. Why? Because I am you.” Kate is cryptic, but tells him that he is not crazy. Something he desperately needs to hear given the fact that absolutely nothing has made sense in this town since he woke up in a hospital bed. There are cameras and microphones everywhere. He finds a box that makes the soothing, normal sounds of crickets. In the immortal words of Kevin Bacon in the movie Tremors: ”What the hell is going on? I mean what the hell is going on.” There is a big twist, and I am not going to talk about the BIG TWIST because some of you might want to read the book or watch the excellent TV series by M. Night Schyamalan. The series was must see TV for my family every Thursday night. The casting was excellent with Matt Dillon, Carla Gugino, Shannyn Sossamon (I was really glad to see her. I haven’t seen much of her since she starred in the double movies with Heath Ledger: Knight’s Tale and The Order.), and Toby Jones as the creepy David Pilcher. I watched the series before reading the book. There are differences for sure. There were a couple of scenes in the book that I found more compelling than the ones in the series, but for the most part the series outperforms the book. [image] It is not really a fair comparison because the series covered what I think are all three books in the trilogy. This first book ends at about maybe three episodes into the series. Normally, I will read the book before watching a TV adaptation or a movie, but in this case the series kind of snuck up on me. Not hard to do with my face in a book all the time. :-) I plan to read the rest of the Pines series mainly because I’m interesting in where Schyamalan deviates from Blake Crouch. For instance, in the book Ethan is having flashbacks to the war and the torture he experienced while captured. That was left out of the TV series. I thought it was a good decision. This series is an ode to Twin Peaks. Crouch remembers vividly the impact that TV show had on him in his pre-teen years. When it was cancelled, he was so distraught that he wrote a season three. I hope he is excited about the return of Twin Peaks which I believe is slated for 2016. There are certainly Twin Peaks elements to this series, enhanced by a really good twist. David Lynch’s inspiring series created a writer out of Blake Crouch. I can only hope that the Wayward Pines series sparks a dormant creative gene in some other pre-teen who will grow up to write an ode to Wayward Pines. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visithttp://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 24, 2015
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Jul 26, 2015
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Jul 24, 2015
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0575070536
| 9780575070530
| 0575070536
| 4.14
| 70,267
| 1972
| Aug 24, 2000
|
really liked it
|
”Intelligence is the attribute of man that separates his activity from that of the animals. It’s a kind of attempt to distinguish the master from the
”Intelligence is the attribute of man that separates his activity from that of the animals. It’s a kind of attempt to distinguish the master from the dog, who seems to understand everything but can’t speak. However, this trivial definition does lead to wittier ones. They are based on depressing observations of the aforementioned human activity. For example: intelligence is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural act.” “Yes, that’s us!” [image] There is a 1979 film by Andrei Tarkovsky loosely based on The Roadside Picnic. The screenplay is by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. I’m, of course, going to have to watch it. Redrick “Red” Schuhart is a stalker. He is one of the few people crazy enough to go into “The Zone”. Thirty years ago Aliens visited the Earth. They landed at six different locations. Hung out for a while and took off. They ignored us. What The Frill? Here we are the most intelligent species to ever evolve on this planet (debatable) and the big moment occurs when another, obviously intelligent species comes to visit, and they act like the snooty prom queen and king at the big dance. You’d think we were mere bugs. Not even worthy of a good probing or dissection. In these zones they left behind trash, as if, as one scientist put it, they had just stopped off for a roadside picnic. They also left behind traps. Things unexplainable. Things that science even has trouble labeling. One example is what Red calls a bug trap, but the “eggheads” call it something else. ”His face has become completely calm, you can see he’s figured everything out. They are all like that, the eggheads. The most important thing for them is to come up with a name. Until he comes up with one, you feel really sorry for him, he looks so lost. But when he find a label like ‘graviconcentrate,’ he thinks he’s figured it all out and perks right up.” [image] Stalkers are people who go into The Zone and retrieve objects. They then sell them on the black market for cash. They need a big payoff because every time they go into The Zone they are risking life or limb (there is this slime that melts the bones and eventually turns everything it touches into more slime). Most of the original stalkers are dead. Their corpses litter the landscape of The Zone providing guideposts for…don’t go there. The Zone does something to them. Their kids are mutants. Red’s child becomes less and less human as she grows and becomes something unknown, unknowable. People from this area can’t emigrate because odd disasters start happening in the places they move to. The Zone owns them. Still, Red should just settle down and get a real job, a safe job. ”But how do I stop being a stalker when I have a family to feed? Get a job? And I don’t want to work for you, your work makes me want to puke, you understand? If a man has a job, then he’s always working for someone else, he’s a slave, nothing more--and I’ve always wanted to be my own boss, my own man, so that I don’t have to give a damn about anyone else, about their gloom and their boredom…” Besides being dangerous, working as a stalker is also illegal. He soon finds himself on one last mission for a golden sphere that he has to find before The State robots get there first. It is about more than just the money. It is about outwitting everyone maybe even himself. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky were Russian science-fiction writers who managed to publish most of what they wrote even under the heavy censoring hand of the Soviet Union. Ursula K. Le Guin in the forward explains it well. ”What they did, which I found most admirable then and still do now, was to write as if they were indifferent to ideology--something many of us writers in the Western democracies had a hard time doing. There wrote as free men write.” They did struggle to get Roadside Picnic published. In the afterword Arkady has a list of all the letters and petitions that were exchanged between various Russian committees trying to get approval. ”Eight years. Fourteen letters to the ‘big’ and ‘little’ Central Committees. Two hundred degrading corrections of the text. An incalculable amount of nervous energy wasted on trivialities...Yes, the authors prevailed; there’s no arguing with that. But it was a Pyrrhic Victory.” [image] Arkady and Boris Strugatsky The book was published in Russian in 1972 and translated into English in 1977. This edition, that I read, is a new translation with all the original text, as the authors intended, reinstated. There is a 1979 movie as I mentioned above. The book also inspired a video game called. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I absolutely love this concept. Hollywood has spent so much time making us worry about Aliens coming to Earth to enslave us, to steal our natural resources, to take over the planet, to use us as incubators for their spawn etc. We are completely unprepared to be ignored. We really don’t like being ignored. The book can be read on many levels. It is an enjoyable fast paced read on the most basic level. For those that like to apply philosophy, politics, and psychology to their reading there is plenty of hooks to keep you pondering the true meaning of different situations. It is a book, that without a doubt, will give the reader more with each new read. This is one of those terrific finds that I may have never read without the guidance of friends on GR. Our compiled reading knowledge is oh so much greater than when we read alone. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
|
not set
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Mar 06, 2015
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1935869051
| 9781935869054
| 1935869051
| 3.56
| 1,443
| May 22, 2011
| May 22, 2011
|
it was amazing
|
”It’s about how much fear you hide in your cells: blue cells, red cells, sickle cells, sleeper cells, jail cells--people are shot through with it. But
”It’s about how much fear you hide in your cells: blue cells, red cells, sickle cells, sleeper cells, jail cells--people are shot through with it. But I don’t hold my fear there. Everybody needs a place where they’re fearless or they’d never survive, at least I wouldn’t. Sometimes I hate this world. Especially when it’s more beautiful than I can imagine.” Della Mylinek is slinging tofu scrambles and other vegan concoctions at a local diner. The world is destabilizing with a series of wars against unnamed foes. Ultimately does it matter who they are? She has a Ph.D. in Geology, but sees the world not just through a scientific lens, but also through a romantic counter culture kaleidoscope. I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone in fiction or real life that sees the world more clearly, more expansively, than Della Mylinek. ”I feel different when I believe different things. Only I don’t know how to go back to feeling how I did because I can’t re-believe.” That’s what life does to us, right? It keeps hitting us. We see our shield go spinning away from us. We can’t breath so we pull off our helmet. Chunks of our armor fall down around us. We hold our sword with two hands and wonder if we should parry another blow or just drive the sword up into our own throat. Please, everyone, continue to parry. Once the apple has been eaten. Once the gossamer has been swept from our eyes. Once we see the world in all it’s violent colors we can not re-believe. ”Save your fucking pennies for a gun and a history book.” If our leaders had read more history we wouldn’t need to buy the gun. People are leaving, jumping ship, escaping before the last pretenses of civilization have become nothing more than a tattered flag. They are going to exotic locals, extended eco tourism, thinking simplicity will save them from the ravages of an unraveling technology based world. The people who are staying are embracing more hedonistic behavior such as orgy parties, drug experimentation, and using alcohol to excess. Interesting what we decide to do with our last days. ”What would Scooby Doo do? Della has a ticket, a cowardly ticket, but it feels like the last vestiges of a defendable world are crumbling and she believes that soon she will be overrun, trampled by the revolution of the new world. Her parents who are die hard radicals will be so disappointed. The anarchy of this new future is their drug choice. ”It was all suffering, all torque, a seamless garment of misery.” Bombs are going off in the city. The explosions remind me of the hunts when they use noise from beaters to move the game towards the guns. The bombs are convincing more and more people it is time to go. Those that have hunkered down are hearing the screams of their biology to flee. Della is caught ”between moments”. She starts calling in fake bomb threats just to see the reactions of the people. She presses her finger into the oozing wound of their fear. She feels herself descending into an amalgam of her parents, terrorists, and prophets. ”I felt the part of me that couldn’t be moved, moving, a glacial shift in all my horrible pride.” Is she moving away from herself or towards her real self? Vanessa Veselka was a teenage runaway. She has worked as a union organizer, a sex-worker, and a student of paleontology. Her past has been fused into this novel creating a future that is so real that after reading it I walked outside just to make sure my world was still there. There are condemnations of the recent wars that we’ve found ourselves mired in. She exposes the unnatural conspiratory fears that people are capable of embracing that were so prevalent with the Tea Party recently (as one example) and how real those fears become to those that wish to believe. The left doesn’t get off the hook either as she casts a jaundiced eye at what they choose to feel is important as well. Of course she doesn’t name names or party affiliations or even countries, but she shows a recent past that could have been so much worse and a future that could be our own. There is brilliance throughout the book. Lines that can not be ignored. ”The world is a violent child none of us will get to see grow up.” This is a thoughtful book. Every person that reads this novel will see pieces of their past and future selves shining like beacons of truth. It is relatively easy for us to roll through life with dashes of tragedy or pain or joy or unbridled happiness when the safety net of society is there to break the fall or keep us from growing Icarus wings. When the safety net is gone that is when we all will find out who we really are. ***HIGHLY RECOMMENDED*** If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 21, 2015
|
Feb 23, 2015
|
Feb 11, 2015
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Paperback
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 3.59
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 25, 2017
|
Aug 18, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.94
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 05, 2017
|
Aug 01, 2017
|
|||||
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| 4.15
|
it was amazing
|
May 21, 2022
|
Apr 03, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.48
|
really liked it
|
Mar 26, 2017
|
Mar 23, 2017
|
|||||
|
| 3.91
|
really liked it
|
Feb 04, 2017
|
Dec 23, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 4.00
|
really liked it
|
Dec 10, 2016
|
Dec 10, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 3.78
|
really liked it
|
Oct 28, 2016
|
Sep 05, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 3.34
|
really liked it
|
Aug 14, 2016
|
Aug 13, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 3.90
|
it was amazing
|
Jul 12, 2016
|
Jul 10, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 4.26
|
liked it
|
Jul 2016
|
Jul 01, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 3.67
|
really liked it
|
Apr 09, 2016
|
Mar 31, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 4.00
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 20, 2016
|
Feb 10, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 4.30
|
really liked it
|
Feb 04, 2016
|
Jan 29, 2016
|
|||||
|
| 4.02
|
it was amazing
|
Nov 12, 2015
|
Nov 08, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 4.15
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 05, 2015
|
Aug 30, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 4.16
|
really liked it
|
Aug 30, 2015
|
Aug 27, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.85
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 09, 2015
|
Aug 02, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.94
|
it was amazing
|
Jul 26, 2015
|
Jul 24, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 4.14
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
Mar 06, 2015
|
|||||
|
| 3.56
|
it was amazing
|
Feb 23, 2015
|
Feb 11, 2015
|
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