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| 0374104115
| 9780374104115
| 0374104115
| 3.64
| 66,911
| Sep 02, 2014
| Sep 02, 2014
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really liked it
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”Writing, for me, is like trying to restart an engine that has rested for years, silent and rusting, in an empty lot--choked with water and dirt, infi
”Writing, for me, is like trying to restart an engine that has rested for years, silent and rusting, in an empty lot--choked with water and dirt, infiltrated by ants and spiders and cockroaches. Vines and weeds shoved into it and sprouting out of it. A kind of coughing splutter, an eruption of leaves and dust, a voice that sounds a little like mine but is not the same as it was before; I use my actual voice rarely enough.” [image] There is this need for people trapped in Area X to write about what they see. They want to try and make sense of what they are experiencing. They don’t. They can’t understand, but maybe by leaving the squiggles of their thoughts trapped in a notebook they can give someone else a key to the locket they could not find. ”Perhaps so many journals had piled up in the lighthouse because on some level most came, in time, to recognize the futility of language. Not just in Area X but against the rightness of the lived-in moment, the instant of touch, of connection, for which words were such a sorrowful disappointment, so inadequate an expression of both the finite and infinite.” It is the perfect invasion. It is an unknowable entity that is undefinable. A sector of slithering, watchful creatures that all seem interdependent. It would be like every known living plant, or creature, and even those that are unknown suddenly being able to communicate on a cellular level. They would be working in tandem to remake the world in a new image. Humans can’t remain humans. They must evolve to be something more useful. We are conquerors after all and those that wish to rule could never be part of the whole. ”Even as he knew the words came from him, had always come from him, and were being emitted soundlessly from his mouth. And that he had been speaking already for a very long time, and that each word had been unraveling his brain a little more, a little more, even as each word also offered relief from the pressure in his skull. While what lay below waiting for his mind to peel away entirely. A blinding white light, a plant with leaves that formed a rough circle, a splinter that was not a splinter.” Our minds, our precious minds that placed us on the top of the food chain prove to be useless. There are monstrous flowers. There are sea serpents that would have nestled nicely within the gray matter of H. P. Lovecraft. There is a crawler who is a scrawler of dangerous verses with the one arm that still retains a nerve coupling to the dying remains of an old mind. [image] Lovecraft...H. P. ”Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead.” What we want are answer, right? That is what we do. The science and math that we cram into our heads is there to make more sense of the world we don’t know, but the answer lies in the title of book three…ACCEPTANCE. Difficult isn’t it? Movies are all about the brilliant scientist, the brave warrior, or the dipshit that accidentally stumbles on a solution. One of them always saves us. The fact of the matter is that in this case to understand means becoming part of Area X. Assimilate or assimilate, no dying allowed. There are useful parts of all of us to contribute to Area X. If it wants the world it will just take it. ”It acts a bit like an organism, like skin with a million greedy mouths instead of cells or pores. And the question isn’t what it is but is the motive. Think of Area X as a murderer we’re trying to catch.” Someone is still trying to apply their minds to this problem as if there is something catchable. It reminds me of the movie Evolution which is definitely a B movie, but it is one of my favorite B movies. The unconventional heroes are dealing with an organism from outer space that is adapting millions of years of evolution in mere hours. As it grows exponentially the government wants to nuke it but the scientists from the local community college know that a nuke is nothing but a release of energy and the organism will only feed on it and grow faster. So attacking Area X with what we feel are our most powerful weapons would be a mistake. [image] Now there are going to be people disappointed in this series. They will have made it through the first two books, bought the I Survived Area X t-shirt (of course they really didn’t), and are looking forward to having all their questions answered, but Jeff Vandermeer is doing something very delicate here. This is a fragile egg of an idea to present to his readership. He is presenting the theory that there are things that are unknowable. I’ve read most of his books and these three books have some of the most dynamic, lush prose I’ve ever experienced in a Vandermeer book. The puzzling mind must be gagged and chained and tossed in a corner so that the rest of the brain can embrace the psychedelics of what we can’t know, but what we can experience. I will conclude with a quote from Kingsley Amis who was talking about another book I read recently, but it certainly applies as equally well to this trilogy. The books are "actually quite good if you stop worrying about what's going on". 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, 2015
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Jan 29, 2015
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Jan 25, 2015
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Paperback
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| 0060741872
| 9780060741877
| 0060741872
| 4.08
| 46,043
| 1959
| Jul 01, 2005
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really liked it
| ”And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication ”And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication [image] The cover art of the American First Edition from 1959. Randy Bragg comes from a long line of prestigious individuals. He, unfortunately, has never found a way to live up to the family name. He has some ambition. He isn’t a wastrel. He just isn’t sure what he is supposed to do with his life. He served in Korea and came back with his uniform weighed down with medals. He recently ran for a political position, but was soundly trounced. His family name would have won it for him, but his honesty about his liberal politics in a conservative Central Florida district made him easy pickings for his opponent. He is floundering. And then he receives a telegram from his brother Mark who is currently assigned to a strategic air base in Omaha. Alas Babylon The code word they’d used since they were young lads to indicate that something was seriously wrong. Mark sends his family to be with Randy. Like a bone reader or a truth sayer Mark has assembled the pieces of information he has collected from conversations, field reports, and radio frequency chatter. A war is coming. ”Within the pillar and the cloud, fantastic colors played. Red changed to orange, glowed white, became red again. Green and purple ropes twisted upward through the pillar and spread tentacles through the cloud. The gaudy mushroom enlarged with incredible speed, angry, poisonous, malignant. It grew until the mushroom’s rim looked like the leading edge of an approaching weather front, black, purple, orange, green, a cancerous man-created line squall.” [image] The Soviet Union and the United States have done the unthinkable. Cities wink out one by one as both sides hit the other with everything they have. In Fort Repose it becomes very real after the electricity goes out. ”In four months,” Randy said, “we’ve regressed four thousand years. More, maybe. Four thousand years ago the Egyptians and Chinese were more civilized….” There is a run on the bank. Merchants have vaults full of cash after they sell all their merchandise, but you can’t eat money. It has about the same value as Confederate script or a year old newspaper. Everyone tries to think about what they will need. Food of course. Water Gasoline But do you think of tires or coffee or medicine? Fort Repose as it turns out is strategically located far enough away from the big cities that received these megaton explosions. They were also lucky the wind blew in the right direction. They have fruit and nut groves, so nature will provide them with a source of food. There are fish in the river and crabs if you know where to find them. Did you think about salt? If you are a doctor who can you save? People who need medicine to survive are quickly winnowed out of the population. People who can’t cope are committing suicide. Instead of having babies women are having miscarriages. Nature is making some decisions. ”It is said that nature is cruel. I don’t think so. Nature is just, and even merciful. By natural selection, nature will attempt to undo what man has done.” Carpe Diem! Seize the Day as the recently departed Robin Williams extorted his students to embrace in Dead Poets Society. There is a dark side to this concept and that would be those people who live for today and don’t worry about tomorrow. They have to seize everyday by stealing from those that have planned for a future, killing those that oppose them, and for entertainment raping those they desire. This works for a while, but fortunately most people prefer a civilization where they can plan for a future and can exist in a reasonable modicum of safety. Randy Bragg finds himself in the leadership position he tried to win through the ballot box. He forms a vigilante group and starts to win back control of a future for all by taking it away from the few willing to use violence to intimidate. [image] Pat Frank looking very studious. This was a hugely influential book when it was published in 1959. It continues to be listed as one of the best science-fiction books of all time. The fifties spawned a lot of great apocalyptic novels because the threat of our imminent demise from those “crazy” Russians was on everyone’s mind. There are moments of violence, but for the most part Fort Repose feels more like a small town that has been cut off from everything rather than a town in the midst of a terrifying post-apocalyptic situation. In 1959 I’m sure it was very unnerving to read, but for me in 2015 it felt more like a jaunt in Winesburg, Ohio. I do think that Pat Frank had a tiger by the tail and he brought it home, put it in a cage, started feeding it, and turned that tiger into a house cat. There was the potential for a truly great novel that transcends the genre, but everything wraps up with a wiffle rather than a bang. 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 26, 2014
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Jan 07, 2015
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Dec 26, 2014
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Paperback
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| 4.07
| 529,759
| Aug 26, 2014
| Sep 09, 2014
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it was amazing
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”Hell is the absence of the people you long for.” When the Georgia Flu sweeps around the world killing 99.6% of the population there were suddenly... a ”Hell is the absence of the people you long for.” When the Georgia Flu sweeps around the world killing 99.6% of the population there were suddenly... a lot of people... to long for. The people missing from our lives is the hardest part. We mourn their loss, but we also have to mourn for the part of ourselves that is lost with each of their passings. To survive is painful. ”Civilization in Year Twenty was an archipelago of small towns. These towns had fought off ferals, buried their neighbors, lived and died and suffered together in the blood-drenched years just after the collapse, survived against unspeakable odds and then only by holding together into the calm…” I’ve met a few survivalists over the years. People who are obsessed with surviving the next great catastrophe. They have food, water, and weapons stockpiled. Some have even went so far as to build bunkers. Everyone of them has looked on me with pity when I admit that I might have a weeks worth of canned food in my house at any one time. They have all kinds of scenarios mapped out that will help insure their survival. They are more than willing to kill people to protect what is theirs. They are living for the end of the world. While they are buying bullets, bottled water, and MRGs I’m spending my money on fine wine, collectible books, and wonderful meals. I want civilization to continue to keep me in a bubble of protection so that I can continue to spend my money on culture for the rest of my days. It so happens that the day before the world ends Arthur Leander, the famous movie actor, is playing a part in King Lear on the stage in Toronto. Dying is never a good thing, but when he drops from a heart attack on stage he has no idea how lucky he is. Kirsten is a child actress in the play and for a very short period of time she will think this is the worst day of her life. In the audience is Jeevan Chaudhary a paramedic trainee who leaps onto the stage and tries to the best of his abilities to save Arthur Leander’s life. Jeevan leaves the theater thinking he has finally discovered what he wants to do with his life. His revelry is interrupted by a phone call from a friend who works in the hospital. The Georgian Flu is in the states and the medical staff have no treatment options. It is killing people faster than they can initiate medical countermeasures. Now most people who get a phone call like this would dither, would maybe even go into denial for a period of time hoping for a miraculous change in the world’s prognosis, but not Jeevan. He goes to the nearest supermarket and buys seven grocery carts filled with food. The image of a man pushing seven carts through the streets of Toronto to his brother Frank’s apartment will stick in my mind forever. Believing the worst... soon enough... saved his life. Kirsten also survives, by luck, by the dint of her adaptability. We find her in the future as part of a travelling theater group. They protect each other and continue to perform the plays of the greatest playwright in the history of the world to what remains of human race. Shakespeare survives. And so do the first and second issues of a comic book series called Dr. Eleven because Arthur Leander’s ex-wife gave him copies of her artistic endeavor and he promptly pressed them into the hands of Kirsten mere hours before he breathed his last. Arthur thought it would entertain his young friend for an hour or so. Little did he know these two comic books would crucially entertain her for decades. The motto of the travelling dramatists is Survival is Insufficient. The blending of Shakespeare and a line now immortalized from Star Trek is exactly how I see the future. In fact, in my household it frequently happens now, the best of the past, blending with the best of the present, everyone must keep up. My kids, now young adults, roll their eyes every time I say “you probably need to google that”. Of course when the world has disappeared and you can entertain children with stories of cool air or warm air just coming out of the vents and they look at you like your telling science-fiction stories; it is overwhelming to think about what has been lost. So what would I miss? One scoop of ice cream, not a bowl full, one scoop because when you only have one scoop you shave off these small bites and savor every one of them. Movies, I can’t even imagine not having movies. For a while I could play the entire movies in my head, but we all know the images will begin to corrode over time and I’ll be left with highlights. Cary Grant running across a field chased by an airplane in North by Northwest. The death scene of Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner. The scene when the king stumbles out wounded but intent on fighting the final battle in The Thirteenth Warrior. Fred Astaire dancing with Ginger Rogers… in that dress... in Top Hat. Marisa Mell frolicking naked in a pile of money in Danger:Diabolik. Marlon Brando saying I coulda been a contender in On the Waterfront. Marilyn Monroe’s skirt blowing up on the subway grate in The Seven Year Itch. John Wayne staring off into the distance over the back of his lathered horse thinking about what he will find in The Searchers. I could go on and on. Hopefully everyone would remember different scenes so we could all remember more. Taking a hot shower. A ritual of thinking that allows me to map out my day while luxuriating in a warm continuous spray. For those who have their entire library on their Kindles, well you are out of luck, but for me the Luddite, I’d be contending with keeping bugs and moisture as far away from my books as possible. Still, books need a controlled environment to continue to be useful so it would be a world with fewer books everyday. Like the movies it may not be that long before many books would only exist in my head. Trains, planes and automobiles. When the world collapses the world would become flat. Global trekking would be more along the lines of seeing what is going on in the next county. I would miss being able to head to Santa Fe, Chicago, or Savannah on a whim. Until I’m there, sitting in all my odoriferous splendor under a tree reading the tattered remains of a copy of War and Peace, it is really hard to say what I would miss the most. Of course the end of the world is never complete without a PROPHET. The troop of dramatists make a swing back through an area where a year earlier they had left two of their members. They had hoped to reconnect with them, but soon discover that they had to move on. A religious element has taken over the region led by a man who is selling the concept of “we are the light”, but really he is saying he is the sun, the moon, and the stars. As a friendly gesture he offers the troop of actors his protection if they donate one of the lovely young ladies from their company to become one of his wives. Why does it always take so long for someone to put a bullet, an arrow, or a knife through a guy like this? The troop politely declines his offer, but soon discover after leaving that they have a twelve year old stowaway who is frantic to escape because she is destined to become The PROPHET’s next wife. Of course THE PROPHET is dissed and it soon becomes a chase as Kristen and her friends try to outrun the ire of a madman. Emily St. John Mandel blends the future and the past together seamlessly around the life of Arthur Leander and how he continues to live in the mind of his young friend Kirsten. Mandel takes this moment in time, the death of Leander on stage, and spreads her tentacles of information backwards and forwards until the reader is captivated by the memories of the past and the people living in this theatrical future. This is an impressive performance from a young writer and now we have to wait to see what form her next novel will assume. ***4.50 out of 5 stars*** 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 23, 2014
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Dec 13, 2014
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Nov 23, 2014
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Kindle Edition
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| 0307959945
| 9780307959942
| 0307959945
| 3.95
| 65,332
| Aug 07, 2012
| Aug 07, 2012
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really liked it
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“Meager as it is. Nothing to lose as I have. Nothing is something somehow.” [image] Hig doesn’t have much, but what he has is precious to him. He ha “Meager as it is. Nothing to lose as I have. Nothing is something somehow.” [image] Hig doesn’t have much, but what he has is precious to him. He has his books of poetry. He has rivers to fish in. He has fuel to fly his plane. He has a furry co-pilot named Jasper. He has a garden. He has Bangley. He used to have a wife. He used to have friends. He used to have the possibility of a long life full of happiness achieving all those things we are supposed to achieve. He wasn’t supposed to be old at forty. They say it was a weapons grade flu that got loose from a lab in England. Of course, they blamed it on India. The same way we call stickers in Kansas Texas Sandburs. If it ain’t good it had to come from somewhere else. Nobody wants to be responsible for an apocalypse especially one that kills 99.6% of the population. Hig doesn’t seem like the kind of guy that would survive the apocalypse, not because he doesn’t have skills or value, but because at his core he is a helluva nice guy. Too nice to do what needs to be done to stay alive. Like kill people. Bangley is a man who loves his guns and incendiary devices. The end of the world was a horror story for most people, but for Bangley it meant he could finally blossom into the man he always wanted to be. Don’t be fooled though, he has regrets as well. They live up near the mountains. Hig lives in an old airplane hangar and Bangley lives in a house up on the hill with a good view of “the kill zone”. The house in front of the hanger is the bait. The place that people looking to score food, and weapons will attack first. They even leave an old dumpster out front to provide the attackers with a place to hide which actually just bunches them up so Bangley can pick them off like yellow ducks at a county fair. Hig and Bangley disagree on tactics. ”Still we are divided, there are cracks in the union. Over principle. His: Guilty until--until nothing. Shoot first ask later. Guilty, then dead. Versus what? Mine: Let a visitor live a minute longer until they prove themselves to be human? Because they always do. What Bangley said in the beginning: Never ever negotiate. You are negotiating your own death.” What keeps them alive is their differences. It is one of those strange alliances that maybe doesn’t make sense when drawn out on a blueprint. Half the time they aren’t even sure they like each other, but the fact of the matter is Bangley is the relative you can’t hardly stand to break bread with, but you still... love... the stubborn SOB. [image] Dogs are really something else. They are the only animal on the planet that absolutely loves humanity. They are loyal. They understand the hierarchy and consider their owner their King/Queen. They will kill and they will die for a human being. I grew up with a pack of farmhouse mutts, but there is one dog that is a ghost in all my memories. He was part pointer and part who knows what. He was never trained as a bird dog, but he still would assume the stance of his ancestry whenever he would run across a quail or a pheasant. He was a lover, as many of our neighbors for miles around would remind us when they found themselves saddled with a bunch of black and white puppies. He had a groove along the top of his back where someone had shot him with a rifle. One time I found him on the edge of our property bloodied from a shotgun blast. I hauled him back in my red wagon to the house bawling my eyes out. He recovered, scarred, but undeterred. My best memory of Spot/Putz (He never was formally named, but should have had the name of a gladiator. Putz was short for puppy.) was one time when I was somewhere around ten. I was playing in the yard which was the size of a football field. Farm machinery surrounded the outer edges, but my dad had always kept the center open so he could hit my brother and I pop flies in the evening. Across the street lived this gigantic German Shepherd (I’m sure he was a normal sized shepherd, but when one is 10 years old a dog like that looks like �� of Cererbus.) He was meaner than chicken shit (Not sure why we say that, but I will say that I have never fallen harder than the time I fell liberating eggs from a coop on a chicken shit slick floor.). This German Shepherd saw me out in the yard and came racing across the street at me. I was caught in no man’s land. I was too far from any of the equipment to climb to safety or to get to the line of trees and lilac hedges that surrounded the house to hide. I was about to become dog chow. Out of the corner of my eye I saw this black and white blur. Putz was streaking from the line of hedges and he exploded through the Shepherd. I remember the meaty impact as he sent his chest through the legs of the Shepherd. The Shepherd cartwheeled into the air and landed on his side. Putz took off running for the hedge. I ran for a Combine (threshing machine for those not familiar with farm equipment terms). A few days later Putz was chained in the yard for one of his many transgressions up in town. The Shepherd came to see him with a couple of Labs he liked to hang out with. He didn’t come by himself because he was a yellow bellied %*@^! The fight was a brawl, cage fighting at its worst. My Dad had to fire off a shotgun in the air to get the encroachers to leave, tails between their legs, limping. So when Jasper dies, I understand how Hig felt. Jasper doesn’t get to go down fighting like a Valhalla inspired dream. He just passes in the night...from old age. “You can't metabolize the loss. It is in the cells of your face, your chest, behind the eyes, in the twists of your gut. Muscle, sinew, bone. It is all of you. When you walk you propel it forward....Then it sits with you. The pain puts its arm over your shoulders. It is your closest friend, steadfast. And at night you can't bear to hear your own breath, unaccompanied by another. And underneath the big stillness like a score, is the roaring of the cataract of everything being and being torn away. Then, the pain is lying beside your side, close. Does not bother you with the sound even of breathing.” We all have to have reasons for getting out of bed in the morning. Hig’s universe had shrunk down to the space that Jasper occupied. When he died the Dog Stars stopped orbiting. There was only one solution. Hig needed to expand out his universe beyond just the continued day to day survival with Bangley. If he had been in Australia he would have went on a walkabout, but since he was a pilot with a 1956 Cessna at his disposal he went on a flyabout. The rest of the story can only be found between the pages of Peter Heller’s book. Although I would like to mention that the flutter a man feels at seeing a woman’s shape, those hips, the way they walk, even at a hundred yards brings out the pointer pup in all of us. :-) [image] There is nothing that adds to my own enjoyment more than someone telling me how much they loved a book. Thank you Gloria! Your words expressing your joy for this book certainly enhanced my own. I also want to dedicate this review to a black and white mutt named Putz who gave me my first lessons in courage, boldness, and squeezing every drop out of life. I’ve been on a bit of an apocalyptic reading binge of late. For those that have followed me for a while you well know these binges do happen from time to time. I am not depressed as a worried friend recently asked me. I find well written apocalyptic novels strangely uplifting. ***4.25 stars out of 5*** The Menagerie of Apocalyptic Reviews. On the Beach by Nevile Shute No Blade of Grass by John Christopher Earth Abides by George R. Stewart The Reapers are the Angels by Alden Bell 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 18, 2014
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Nov 23, 2014
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Nov 18, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 0345487133
| 9780345487131
| 0345487133
| 3.95
| 30,130
| 1949
| Mar 28, 2006
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really liked it
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”The trouble you’re expecting never happens; it’s always something that sneaks up the other way. Mankind had been trembling about destruction through
”The trouble you’re expecting never happens; it’s always something that sneaks up the other way. Mankind had been trembling about destruction through war, and had been having bad dreams of cities blown to pieces along with their inhabitants, of animals killed, too, and of the very vegetation blighted off the face of the earth. But actually mankind seemed merely to have been removed rather neatly, with a minimum of disturbance.” [image] Isherwood “Ish” WIlliams is out in the wilderness rock climbing to clear his head from the buzz of civilization when he puts his hand in the wrong crevice. He hears the rattle and feels the strike. He is pretty sure he is going to die. He gets back to the cabin, uses the snake kit to suck as much of the poison out as he can. He becomes too sick and too woozy to drive. He waits for someone to find him. As his time to return comes and passes he becomes angry that no one has come looking for him, not family or friends. He doesn’t die and when he recovers enough to drive into town he finds only dust motes and echoes. A virulent disease has swept through humanity, killing indiscriminately, collapsing society as easily as a biker crushes a beer can. The one thing that we have always been able to count on is our genetic diversity. There always seems to be a fraction of a percent of humanity that is immune to whatever nature has to throw at us. “As for man, there is little reason to think that he can in the long run escape the fate of other creatures, and if there is a biological law of flux and reflux, his situation is now a highly perilous one. During ten thousand years his numbers have been on the upgrade in spite of wars, pestilences, and famines. This increase in population has become more and more rapid. Biologically, man has for too long a time been rolling an uninterrupted run of sevens.” It was just our turn to roll snake eyes. He goes through this period of time swamped with a buffet of feelings. Ish never quite feels lucky to be alive, but certainly reaches varying levels of depression as the extent of the devastation becomes apparent. But for now the electricity still flows through San Francisco. Street lights come on as if the hand of humanity was still guiding the way. For a while he just goes about his life. There is plenty of food. He makes friends with a dog. He reads books, but his curiosity gets the better of him and he explores the city. He finds people, a few stragglers, still alive. He decides that he has to see what has happened to America. [image] The Earth reclaims what man has built, quickly. There is too much of everything now, too many cars, food spoiling, too many clothes, piles of things that no one might need for a thousand years. He drives across country and finds a survivor here or there. Some survivors can’t cope and suicide rates skyrocket among the few fortunate/unfortunate people who find themselves facing a new world bereft of family and friends. He discovers the the virulent entity has been thorough, unrelenting, all-embracing, and taken more far more than it has left. He returns to San Francisco and finds a woman who becomes his wife. She moves in with him because, he...well...had a house full of books and anybody who has moved books before can relate to the fact that it is easier to move to the books than move the books to you. Ish uses the term this is a New Deal to describe this new era which was ironic given that this book was written in 1949. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies had just been enacted in the decade before. The book moves languidly along. There is never this feeling of desperation or Mad Max situations or really even scenes of high tension. George R. Stewart was more interested in exploring cultures, how they emerge, how they survive, what motivates them to innovate. Being in the San Francisco area with a temperate climate, they don’t have to fight weather. The city is full of canned foods, weapons, bullets, clothes, and anything else they could possibly need. When the power does finally go out they switch to candles and lanterns. When the water shuts down they find streams and they dig latrines. Life overall is relatively easy almost better than before. Ish is the only intellectual in his tribe of survivors, soon offspring start to become plentiful. Ish finds himself to be the only one concerned about teaching them the ability to read. The only one that sees the importance of sharing a vision of the world through the lens of science. Ish has a dream of restoring the world, to bring back the civilization that took several millennium to create, but to the new generations who never lived in that world they have all they need now. To bring that world back to life will take more labor than they are willing to give. They respect what he knows and even look on him, superstitiously, as a deity of knowledge, but they lack the curiosity or the desire to learn what he knows. Ish reluctantly gives ground on his expectations. He soon realizes that instead of building an ice machine, or aqueducts, or keeping cars in working order that he needs to give them something they will desperately need when the supply of bullets finally run out, something that can be made with a sharp blade and a handful of feathers...the bow and arrow. [image] Original Ace Publishing painting for the 1949 cover. Certainly another very different take on the post-apocalyptic world. Some of the complaints that people may have about this book are the same ones that they had about On the Beach, that there isn’t enough action, not enough tension, not enough claws and teeth, but those situations were not of interest to Stewart. He wanted to explore what we need. Why civilization is necessary? What do we gain from it? Are we happier in a penthouse apartment or would we be happier if we had to forage for food every day? One thing that Stewart and I can agree on is: “Men go and come, but earth abides.” At least I like to believe the earth will ultimately survive us. You can read my most recent book and movie reviews at http://www.jeffreykeeten.com Check out my Facebook bloggers page at: https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 30, 2014
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Nov 2014
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Oct 30, 2014
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Paperback
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| 0688022235
| 9780688022235
| 0688022235
| 3.97
| 45,268
| Jul 1957
| Jan 01, 1957
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it was amazing
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“It's not the end of the world at all," he said. "It's only the end for us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan't be in it. I dare say it
“It's not the end of the world at all," he said. "It's only the end for us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan't be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us.” [image] An Instructional Manual from 1951 on what to do in the event of an A-Bomb attack. On the Beach was published in 1957, but the novel is set in what was then the near future of 1963. Those years between 1957-1963 proved to be tumultuous years indeed. When I checked this book out of the library, the librarian, the same one who gave me such good material for my In Cold Blood review, said that this book terrified her, not because of the horrifying circumstances in the book, but the plodding calmness of the characters. I was intrigued. I wanted to ask what it was like to have read this book in 1957, but that is a rather delicate question to a woman of an indeterminate age. Luckily she bailed me out and told me she read the book much later, but still while we were up to our eyeballs in the Cold War. My Father has always said he has never been more afraid of the World Ending than in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. My bellwether librarian agreed that she remembered how difficult it was for everyone to go about their regular business with the oppressive presence of the eminent demise of civilization looming over their lives. (I paraphrase.) I still can’t quite peg her age. I could dig around a bit and probably discover her birth date, but then that wouldn’t be very sporting of me now would it? So it is the end of the world. [image] John Riordan comic strip. ”In the last of meeting places [image] Ok...so, Nevil Shute has the world ending with Albania attacking Italy. Egypt then bombed the United States and the United Kingdom. NATO bombed the Soviet Union because the planes used by the Egyptians were Soviet made. The Soviets bomb China because of Chinese attacks on their border. All of this bombing...well...is nuclear infused with cobalt to insure the maximum amount of radiation fallout. So those countries that were not involved in World War III, are fully involved in the dying part of the war. [image] I glanced through some other reviews of this book. The people who didn’t like this book were looking for the standard apocalyptic novel with desperate people fleeing in front of the radiation (zombies, tidal wave, Ebola etc) hoping to live days longer or maybe even hoping for a reprieve. They wanted people clinging to every last drop of their remaining existence. I would guess that the book would have been more fulfilling for them if a pocket of those people had found a way to survive thus leaving them with some hope that they too could be among the survivors. This isn’t that kind of book. I’m sure there were people fleeing South, but Shute focuses on the people who stay in Melbourne. The people who are measuring their lifespan in days and minutes as word arrives of radiation sickness three hundred miles away, one hundred miles away. Dwight Towers, commander of probably the last remaining operational American submarine, has attached his vessel to the Australian Navy. He has a wife and kids in the United States. He is a practical man who knows logically they are dead, but he continues to think about them and talk about them as if they are alive. He meets Moira Davidson who drinks brandy around the clock, loses her top while swimming (see how fun she is!), and is coming to terms with the fact that she is never going to get married or do any of the things she hasn’t even thought of yet. [image] 1959 movie poster John Osborne is a scientist who has been attached as a liaison officer to the USS Scorpion. Shute was an aeronautical engineer by trade. His love for machines comes out in the Osborne character. John finds a Ferrari and buys it for pennies on the dollars, even for that price it seems like an act of pure lunacy, but he has always wanted to race cars and has a stash of fuel that will make that dream come true. He organizes the final Australian Grand Prix and so many drivers come out of the woodwork that they have to organize heats to determine the drivers for the final race. Peter Holmes is a lieutenant commander in the Australian Navy, receiving promotions so quickly due to resignations that he will soon be an admiral. He has a wife, Mary, and a daughter. He cuts down trees and expands the flower and vegetable garden. It gives Mary something to do, something to think about other than winds of death. Moria is discussing the strangeness of planting a garden with Dwight. “Someone’s crazy,” she said quietly. “Is it me or them?” “Why do you say that?” “They won’t be here in six months’ time. I won’t be here. You won’t be here. They wont’ want any vegetables next year.” [image] There are old men at the Gentlemen’s Club slowly depleting the last 100 bottles of port. There are debates about whether it is ethical to move the fishing season up. There are people still going to school trying to finish course work. The people who stay are trying to be as productive with their lives as if a normal life span was still stretching out before them. ”Typically for a Shute novel, the characters avoid expressing intense emotions and do not mope or indulge in self-pity. Some reviewers thought the characters were wooden. I found the calmness of the people populating this novel more terrifying than if they had been fleeing for their lives. There was a part of me that wanted to go shake some sense into them and extort them to help me come up with a plan, but as I started to accept the circumstances I realized that the only sane course was the course they were already on. Do you want to die in a tent surrounded by people you don’t know, going hungry more than likely; and yet, as doomed as if you’d stayed in your home surrounded by your friends and family? Do you want to take the chance that you will survive the apocalypse? I say put on a pot of tea, keep the bourbon close to hand, and finally finish War and Peace. Maybe there is even time for a quick nap in the hammock with the sun on my toes and bees buzzing by my ear. A fascinating, historical look back to when the threat of nuclear war hung like a shadow around the sun. ***4.25 out of 5 stars*** 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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Oct 24, 2014
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Oct 25, 2014
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Oct 24, 2014
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0374104107
| 9780374104108
| 0374104107
| 3.54
| 87,130
| May 06, 2014
| May 06, 2014
|
really liked it
|
”In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reve
”In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth.” [image] John A.K.A. Control has been made director of The Southern Reach Facility. The last director finagled her way onto the last expedition into Area X and has never been seen or heard from again. The assistant director doesn’t only dislike him, but is working actively to undermine him. I’ve been in a similar circumstances before with a job. It is time consuming winning everybody over so that the work environment can settle into a new normal. As it turns out Control doesn’t have months to convince anyone of anything. There is something wrong with the building...it smells like rotting honey. Some of “the twelfth” expedition which were all women have returned, remembering next to nothing, scattered thoughts. Soon he is focused on The Biologist, the main character from Annihilation, whose answers are not...quite...right. There is blue sky in the amnesia that makes Control suspicious that she remembers more than she is letting on. ”They were beginning to exist in some transitional space between interrogation and conversation, something for which he could not quite find a name.” She is bemused by him. He discovers notes by the original director about The Biologist that he hopes will offer some clarification, but they only create more questions. ”Not a very good biologist. In a traditional sense. Empathic more toward environments than people. Forgets the reasons she went, who is paying her salary. But becomes embedded to an extraordinary extent. Would know Area X better than I do from almost the first moment sets foot there. Experience with similar settings. Self-sufficient. Unburdened. Connection through her husband. What would she be in Area X? A signal? A flare? Or invisible? Exploit. [image] Control has been resurrected from what should have been a career ending disastrous string of decisions on his last assigning. The type of judgment calls that haunts your career for the rest of your life. His mother, Severance, currently works for Central in some nebulous position deemed Classified. His grandfather also used to work for Central as well and filled Control’s head with all kinds of platitudes. ”So long as you don’t tell people you don’t know something, they’ll probably think you know it.” Gramps didn’t pass along anything original, but as his situation becomes more and more tenuous Control finds his grandfather’s voice in his head very reassuring. ”Is your house in order?” the Voice asked. “Is it in order?” That voice is not grandfather, but his contact at Central. The entity that is supposed to be running interference for him at Central and buy him time to work his way through this puzzle. But why does he always feel so damn funny after talking to him? Then there is the plant in his desk drawer; the plant that won’t die. It is obviously from Area X. Somebody gave it a dead mouse to eat. [image] Rabbits will do what rabbits do best, but what will Rabbits do best in Area X? And then there is Whitby talking about the terror, the terroir. The French word meaning the set of special characteristics that the geography, geology and climate of a certain place possess and how it is interacting with plant genetics. Area X=TERROIR! Why don’t we agitate it? Make it do something. Will it bring him ”closer to the truth about Area X, and even if the truth was a fucking maw, a fanged maw that stank like a cave full of putrefying corpses, that was still closer than he was now.” Control is opening that door that defies the first rule of every horror film…DON’T OPEN THE DOOR. [image] Control would have been so much more focused if he’d had Dana Scully licking his face. This was such a surprise after reading book one. I was expecting to be up to my armpits in malicious people eating foliage, attempting to keep my brain from going completely Gonzo, and hopefully finding answers to some lingering questions about Area X. Jeff Vandermeer switches gears on us and puts us in the middle of an X-File with a Fox Mulder without the steadying influence of a Dana Scully. The suspense builds beautifully with many moments of...that was odd...until finally it reaches a crescendo with Control on the run not only from Area X, but also from the people at Central. And now I MUST read Acceptance. ANNIHILATION review Book one of the Southern Reach Trilogy 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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Sep 13, 2014
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Sep 15, 2014
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Sep 13, 2014
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 4.12
| 2,525,040
| Apr 26, 1993
| Aug 01, 1994
|
liked it
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*******SPOILER ALERT******* “I don't know what you mean when you say 'the whole world' or 'generations before him.'I thought there was only us. I thoug *******SPOILER ALERT******* “I don't know what you mean when you say 'the whole world' or 'generations before him.'I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now.” [image] Read the book, watch the movie, experience the synergy. We don’t live in a dystopian world, but we do have a growing number of our population who believe that all that exists is NOW, that history is irrelevant, and that there is no future. It simplifies existence when a person can convince themselves of this. No need to learn about the past, no need to think about tomorrow, they just react to what they have to do today. I insist on being a more complicated creature. What I learn about the past helps me make decisions about the present. The dreams I have for the future influence my decisions in the NOW. The past, the NOW, and the future all mingle together with very little delineation. Reading this novel, experiencing this future society, my nerves were as jangled as if Freddy was running his metal tipped fingers down a chalkboard over and over again. That is not Lois Lowry’s fault it had much more to do with my natural abhorrence for everything and everyone being the same. “The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.” When Jonas turns twelve he, like every other twelve year old, is assigned his life’s work. He is delegated to the ancient, wise, old man called The Receiver. Because Jonas is now The Receiver, the old man by definition becomes The Giver. He is the vault, the keeper of memories, the only person in the community that knows there was a past. Jonas is understandably confused, overwhelmed with the concept of anything other than NOW. Jonas is seeing red. In a monochrome society devoid of color, it is the equivalent of seeing a UFO or a Yeti. Color changes everything. As The Giver lays hands on him, transferring more and more memories to Jonas, he starts to see the world as so much more. Color creates depth, not only visually, but also mentally. Jonas’s expectations increase exponentially, quickly. He wants everybody to know what he knows, but of course that is impossible, most assuredly dangerous. “They were satisfied with their lives which had none of the vibrancy his own was taking on. And he was angry at himself, that he could not change that for them.” SAMENESS eliminates pain, discrimination, desire, pride, ambition, choice, thinking, and all the other things that make us uniquely human. To eliminate bad things also requires an equal measure of a loss of good things. In making this society the holes in the strainer were just too small. The Elders select your mate for you (no homosexuality allowed in this society), but then with the elimination of desire, by a cornucopia of pharmaceuticals, it doesn’t really matter if one is gay, straight, or pansexual. Your mate is really just a partner, someone to schedule your life with. Children are assigned to you. They are nurtured by others until they are walking, and then like the stork of old they are plopped into a family unit. Two children only per couple. Women are assigned for childbearing, but only for three children, and then they are relegated as laborers for the rest of their lives. Childbearing is looked on as one of the lowest assignments a woman can be given. The Elders decide what job you will have for the rest of your life, well up until you are RELEASED. No decisions necessary...ever. “The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.” The Giver, his mind not as elastic as it used to be, is consumed by the pain of the memories. He needs to speed up the process of passing some of that distress to Jonas. For the first time in his life Jonas feels real discomfort. Pills in the past had always taken away any pain he felt, from a skinned knee or even a broken arm. As The Receiver he has to understand the source of the pain, and to do so he must feel it. There was another Receiver. She had asked to be Released. A more than niggling concern to young Jonas. Even though the rule for The Receiver, You May Lie, bothers Jonas, it becomes readily apparent the more he learns the more imperative that rule becomes. The veil has been lifted from his eyes, and it is impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. He must choose the path that his predecessor chose ( to be released), or he must go into the great beyond of ELSEWHERE which is anywhere but there. The Giver has had to be so courageous, staying, holding memories for everyone, bearing the annoyance of only being consulted in moments of desperation, knowing so much that could be so helpful, and yet, made to feel like a dusty museum piece with the placard stating: Only Break Glass in Case of Fire. The conclusion really bothers people, but I consider the ambiguous ending as one of my most favorite parts of the book. For those who read the books Choose Your Own Adventure, this is a Choose Your Own Ending. Pessimists and optimists seem to choose according to their natural preference for a glass half empty or a glass half full. I was struck by an odd parallel between the ending of Ethan Frome and the ending of this book. Only, being an optimist, I of course chose a very different result than the finale of Ethan Frome. If your children have read this book or are currently reading this book, do read it. The language is by design simplistic. The concepts though are much larger, and you will enjoy your discussions with your children. This is a perfect opportunity to slip in some of your own brainwashing by including some of your own views of our current society into the dialogue. In an attempt to make Eden they produced a Hell. I kept thinking as I read it of the culling and the brutality that had to occur to gain this much control over human beings. I most certainly would have been RELEASED in the first wave. Compared to a future like this, we are living in a PARADISE. With all our issues, we still have choice. We have color. We have desire. We have ambition. We have a past, a future, and a present. We are not drugged zombies (well most of us, well some of us). We can read a book and see the world from another’s perspective. We can choose our mate, as dicey as that seems for most people. We can have a child, if we choose, who will be The Receiver of our collective memories and in the process we gain another generation of immortality. Regardless of how everyone feels about this book, I would hope that most people come away from reading it feeling a little better about life as it is now, and also realize the importance of a remembered past and a hopeful future. 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 28, 2014
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Jul 29, 2014
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Jul 28, 2014
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Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0385537093
| 9780385537094
| 0385537093
| 3.70
| 6,374
| Jun 10, 2014
| Jun 10, 2014
|
really liked it
|
”In its last days, the thinking machine known as Archos R-14 was trying to know humanity. It mastered the art of capturing the human mind. When it die
”In its last days, the thinking machine known as Archos R-14 was trying to know humanity. It mastered the art of capturing the human mind. When it died, it left behind the tools. I found stories trapped in patterns of neurons. Using scavenged hardware, I took three accounts straight from three minds and I lined them up from beginning to end and back again. Three times to tell it. Three times to understand. They say history is written by the victors, but this right here is told by its victims. My name is Arayt Shah, and this is the story of how I won the True War.” [image] In Robopocalypse Archos R-14, an artificial intelligence, takes control of the robots and other machines that have made human life easier. Humanity, is on the run, being hunted by superior killing machines, and in the initial days the herd is thinned considerably. A robust band of remaining fighters continue to learn and figure out how to turn the technology against the uprising machines. I must in all fairness issue a word of warning to any artificial intelligence considering taking over this world and I would issue the same warning to any alien intelligence considering the same move; we are a nasty, scrappy bunch and we haven’t been sitting on the top of the food chain on this planet for thousands of years because we are benevolent beings. You will most assuredly catch us with our asses flapping in the wind, totally unprepared for whatever mayhem you wish to inflict upon us, but we will in the end be sitting in the wreckage of our world sipping the wine of triumph from your skull or dripping some fine vintage into the smoking ruin of your hard drive. We’ve been going beyond the reach of the firelight for a long, long time sometimes with just a rock in our hands. [image] Most of us, don’t look like him anymore, but buried in our lizard brain he is sitting around waiting to be unleashed. Ok, so, I’ve probably made sure I’m not going to be one of the triumphal survivors at the end of the next apocalypse. I’m hoping that my keyboard doesn’t send 10,000 volts through me before I can finish this review. I do like finishing what I start. Needless to say I would not be doing so much chest pounding if Daniel H. Wilson had not figured out how to beat the machines. We win! Archos R-14 is destroyed and now the humans are returning to the shattered, tattered remains of our grand cities. The only problem is that we hate to lose data. Most of us have numerous ways of backing up important data. As it turns out Archos R-14 was not any different. The entity spread pieces of itself all over the world and one of those copies is Arayt Shah. "I decimated the human race, regrettably. But I did so with one purpose: to forge a hybrid fighting force capable of surviving the True War—a war that has been initiated and is being fought by superintelligent machines. Instead of simply discarding your species, as the others would, I have transformed your kind into a powerful ally." Mathilda Perez is one of those that have been transformed into something more, something beyond human, something that proves very dangerous to Arayt Shah’s plans for domination. ”Back home at the Underground, our friend Dawn used to call it my “ocular prosthesis.” It’s made of dead black, lightweight metal. The thing wraps over where my eyes used to be before a Rob surgical unit dug them out and ported this piece of foreign machinery directly to my occipital cortex. I remember Mommy’s hand on my shoulders, pulling me out of the autodoc before it could finish. The hurt sound in her throat when saw what Rob had done to my baby face.” There is also Lark Iron Cloud one of the heroes from the war who paid the ultimate price for his service, but does not receive the peaceful rest that death should bring. He’s been taken over by a parasite, a bug that did not need his body, but needed his brain. ”I remember the wind-sucking pain of that motherfucker when it first hit me and dug into living flesh. My frantic little dancing out there on the battlefield, along with so many others. With the pincered fingers of both hands, I grasp either side of my split foot. Motors hum and bones snap as I crudely rip the sides of my boot-encased foot apart. I toss the chunks of flesh and leather splashing into the lake. Where my foot was, only the glistening black bones of the parasite remain. I feel nothing. My foot is gone. One second. Two. Then the reality of it hits me like suffocation. In surges. Some deeply human part of my brain is gaping, screaming at this horrible violation of my body. My foot was. And now it is not.” There is also Cormac Wallace who has survived through sometimes dumb luck and sometimes through the kindness of strange machinery. He is still mourning the loss of his dynamic brother and trying desperately to keep his girlfriend alive long enough for her to have the baby that he feels will be the bridge to the future. ”I’m about to take a shrapnel spray to the face. The knowledge doesn’t stop me from screaming. This acne-scarred kid, a hell of a war-fighter named Lark Iron Cloud, used to say that if you don’t die screaming in this war, then you’re fuckin’ doing it wrong. At least I’m fucking doing it right.” There are all kinds of variables that have been let loose on the war. Creatures that are weaponized in creative and terrifying ways. Until they make a move you really don’t know what is coming at you. ”The monster is made of razored sheaths of ashen metal, coiled and layered and glistening like a millipede. The sheaths flare into a hood on its head. A cluster of small holes are embedded where a face would be. I feel a tingling on my skin as they sweep over me. On its hind legs the machine stands seven feet tall, swaying, writhing in place.” The war is over, but the new phase is only beginning. Humanity, understandably, is suspicious of anything not completely organic. Modified humans that were so important in victory are now being hunted by the very people they saved. Tribal units are formed and anyone not a part of your clan is someone who probably needs eliminated. Arayt Shah is there to take advantage of the temporary respite, the world is weary of war, and willing to ignore the signs of a new resurgence. A jumble of old Robots, new Robots, modified humans, humans, and artificial intelligence all form uncertain alliances to fight on one side or the other. Winning has never felt so much like losing. [image] Daniel H. Wilson Daniel H. Wilson has a PHD in Robotics from a fancy school called Carnegie Mellon University. Not bad for an Okie from Muskogee (well not really he is from Tulsa). His brain conceives the most terrifying and amazing things out of plastic, metal and computer chips. What makes him even more impressive is that he can convey that knowledge into a pair of books that kept me riveted to the pages. He understands pacing and suspense. Science meets literature and they have conceived twins called Robopocalypse and Robogenesis. Wilson does a great job summarizing the first book at the beginning of this book so Robogenesis can technically stand alone, but I would highly recommend starting with the first book. Why just ride one roller coaster when you can ride two? Steven Spielberg has optioned the rights to the first book, but for some reason the filming keeps being delayed. :-( ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 19, 2014
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Jul 24, 2014
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Jul 19, 2014
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0385528078
| 9780385528078
| 0385528078
| 3.26
| 25,161
| Oct 06, 2011
| Oct 18, 2011
|
really liked it
|
”He hooked up with strangers for a while, exchanged a grimy jar of cranberry sauce or a juice box per the new greeting ritual, and swapped information
”He hooked up with strangers for a while, exchanged a grimy jar of cranberry sauce or a juice box per the new greeting ritual, and swapped information on the big matters of the day, like dead concentrations, and small things like the state of the world. A few months into the collapse, only the fools asked about the government, the army, the designated rescue stations, all the unattainable islands, and the fools were dwindling every day. He hung with them until they decided on divergent destinations, got into an argument over skel behavior theories or how to spot lurking botulism in a dented can. People were invested in the oddest things these days. He hung with them until they were attacked and they died and he didn’t. Sometimes he ditched them because they talked too fucking much. He stopped hooking up with other people once he realized the first thing he did was calculate whether or not he could outrun them.” Mark Spitz keeps living. The end of the world has come and gone and somehow he has survived. The zombie apocalypse (Those of you who don’t read zombie books don’t quit reading yet.) has pared the world down to the core, to the ones that instinctively have found ways to survive. There has never been anything special about Spitz...until now. ”He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its unexceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect. He asked himself: How can I die? I was always like this. Now I am more me. He had the ammo. He took them all down.” Names are unimportant now. No one calls themselves by their given name. Their full names have disappeared replaced by nicknames or names evoking a nostalgic bit of pop culture. When Mark and a couple of his friends are trapped on a bridge by a herd of Skel (aggressive zombies) his compadres jump in the river to escape. He stands and keeps shooting. When they ask him later why he didn’t jump he said he couldn’t swim, but in reality it is because he truly believes he can’t die. His name was conceived in that moment. If you don’t remember Mark Spitz here is a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Spitz. Spitz meets a girl named Mim, and even though he knows better he falls in love with her. They hole up in a toy store which certainly added a bit of that lost world magic to their burgeoning romance. Skull faces had replaced human faces in his mind’s population, tight over the bone, staring without mercy, incisors out front. The stubborn ordinariness of her soft eyes and round, vigorous features were a souvenir. The yellow bandanna tight around her scalp tokened weekend chores, plucking acorns and twigs from the sputtering gutter, scraping last summer’s black residue from the grill. The ancient rites. She was like him, one of the unlikely ones, pushing through, normal.” She goes out to get pepper and he never sees her again. [after surviving the bus explosion] Annie: You're not going to get mushy on me, are you? Jack: Maybe. I might. Annie: I hope not, 'cause you know, relationships that start under intense circumstances, they never last. Jack: Oh yeah? Annie: Yeah, I've done extensive study on this. From the 1994 movie Speed. Everyone has lost so much that with each new loss it becomes harder to tabulate the true cost anymore. Scars can be picked at, but it is difficult to make them bleed anymore. Some reviewers have noted that the prose comes across as flat. I agree. I think that is exactly what Colson Whitehead intended. This is a survivor’s journal. I have talked to people who have experienced long term trauma, in a war, with drugs, with disease etc and one thing that usually happens is their eyes harden and their voices flatten out. They are achieving distance. I’ve also talked to people who tell those stories with animation, with the rat tat tat of the machine gun and the Hollywood explosions. I wonder if that isn’t another way of achieving distance. ”Judge not the dysfunctions of others, lest ye be judged.” ”Two of them got the old man down and then all of them were on him like ants who received a chemical telegram about a lollipop on the sidewalk. There was no way the old man could get up. It was quick. They each grabbed a limb or convenient point of purchase while he screamed. They began to eat him, and his screaming brought more of them teetering down the street. All over the world this was happening: a group of them hears food at the same time and they twist their bodies in unison, that dumb choreography. A cord of blood zipped up out of their huddle, hangin-- that’s how he always recalled it….” The skels are dangerous, but so are people. Messianic people are maybe the most dangerous of all. Spitz has finally found a community where it feels like civilization is returning. ”Their idyll was terminated by one of the number. Abel, who had developed some theories about the plague and its agenda. He was one of those apocalypse-as-moral-hygiene people, with a college-sophomore socialist slant. The dead came to scrub the Earth of capitalism and the vast bourgeois superstructure, with its doilies, helicopter parenting, and streaming video, return us to nature and wholesome communal living. No one paid much attention.” Until he opened the gates, in an act of further purging the earth. It might have been more apt if he had taken the name Cain. Buffalo has emerged as the new capital and after sending the Marines through Manhattan killing skels and wanderers (zombies that return to their work or home and stay), they have decided to turn over the rest of the cleanup to contract civilians. Spitz volunteers, not because he believes in the job, but because he remembers his uncle’s beautiful apartment and wants to see it one more time. I’ll paraphrase Spitz from the first quote above. “People are invested in the oddest things.” As they move through the corridors of Wall Street he starts to ennoble the process. ”He was performing an act of mercy. These things might have been people he knew, not -quites and almost-could-be’s, they were somebody’s family and they deserved release from their blood sentence. He was an angel of death ushering these things on their stalled journey from this sphere. Not a mere exterminator eliminating pests.” Just as they start to believe they have control of the city. ”Looking down at them through the twisted ash, Mark Spitz shuddered. The dead streamed past the building like characters on an electronic ticker in Times Square…. Close to the ground, almost at their level, he read their human scroll as an argument: I was here, I am here now, I have existed, I exist still. This is our town.” [image] Colson Whitehead chowing down while he can. You can’t see it, but there is a backpack on the seat beside him with all the essentials...just in case. I’ve been pondering why I like to read post-apocalyptic books. It can be zombies or a threat to our food supply ( No Blade of Grass) or pandemic flu. If it is well written I’m game to read it. I’ve been reading this book called Red Mars which didn’t really take off for me until the expedition actually lands on Mars and they start building a community. They are fighting an internal battle between various factions with different visions for the direction of the colony. They are contending with a harsh, unforgiving climate. Every day they fall into their bunks absolutely exhausted, but contented with the knowledge that they did something; they built something. I had an epiphany. There must be a yearning in me for the opportunity to do what my ancestors did. I have a strange need to carve out a place for myself in the wilderness, or out of chaos. I want to pit myself against the elements and figure out a way to survive. Luckily I don’t need civilization to fall for me to have that experience. I can read books like this one, and think about what I would do; what would be important to me; could I become who I needed to become? So we can scoff at the idea of a zombie apocalypse, but really it is just a vehicle for a fine writer like Colson Whitehead to do some intelligent speculating. I can place yourself in these worlds. For a few hours I can heed the call, try to beat the odds, be relevant, and earn a place among a new set of pioneers who are rebuilding the world in our image...without the clutter. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 27, 2014
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Mar 2014
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Feb 27, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 0374104093
| 9780374104092
| 0374104093
| 3.77
| 239,003
| Feb 04, 2014
| Feb 04, 2014
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it was amazing
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”...but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in t
”...but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive…” [image] An Anthropologist, a Surveyor, a Psychologist, and a Biologist, all female, make up the 12th expedition to AREA X. The expeditions that have come to this region before have not fared well. They have disappeared. They have come home mere shells of themselves and died of cancer. They have turned on one another and killed each other. There is a reason why the expedition members are only known by their field of expertise. ”I had not seen a name or heard a name spoken aloud for months, and seeing one now bothered me deeply. It seemed wrong, as if it did not belong to AREA X. A name was a dangerous luxury here. Sacrifice didn’t need names. People who served a function didn’t need to be named. In all ways, the name was a further an unwanted confusion to me, a dark space that kept growing and growing in my mind.” It does make you wonder why someone would volunteer knowing the outcomes of the previous missions. The problem is AREA X keeps expanding and there is a growing concern that it will continue to encroach on the rest of the world. The expeditions, though unsuccessful, must be achieving something. Our narrator is the Biologist. We find out as the story continues that her husband had volunteered to go on the previous expedition. He had returned like the others with something essential missing inside. A part of her believes, as crazy as it seems, that the segment of him that is missing is still in AREA X somewhere. The area is also filled with unlikely plants, insects, and as it turns out one species that doesn’t belong anywhere. [image] ”As I adjusted to the light, the Crawler kept changing at a lightning pace, as if to mock my ability to comprehend it. It was a figure within a series of refracted panes of glass. It was a series of layers in the shape of an archway. It was a great sluglike monster ringed by satellites of even odder creatures. It was a glistening star. My eyes kept glancing off of it as if an optic nerve was not enough.” What do you do when nothing makes sense? What do you do when the most basic sensory parts of yourself are not functioning properly? You process information and more gaps come up than explanations of something you desperately need to understand. ”What can you do when your five senses are not enough? Because I still couldn’t truly see it here, any more than I had seen it under the microscope, and that’s what scared me the most. Why couldn’t I see it?” She can feel the area changing her. She calls it “the brightness”. She isn’t sure what it is doing to her. She just knows she feels different. ”There shall be a fire that knows your name, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you.” [image] There is a tower or is there a tunnel? The expedition members disagree about what to call it. A bit of a mind bend because one is decidedly different than the other. There is a lighthouse and signs of the previous expeditions are etched in the red splatter on the walls and the bullet holes in barricades. The Biologist finds evidence that the information they had been told was not just lies, but epic untruths. As the expedition gets smaller she becomes more and more desperate to understand why AREA X exists. ”We all live in a kind of continuous dream, “ I told him (her husband). “When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality.” She needs a pinprick, a slice of reality, a garden variety truth that will realign her thoughts and allow her to understand something, anything. [image] I’ve read several Jeff Vandermeer books and been blown away each and every time. His vision is so unique; and his ability, as he does in this book, to have me holding my breath with each new revelation is startlingly, unnervingly, brilliant. He conceives the inconceivable and totally convinces you that it... can... exist. You shudder and shake for a few days and then after a few interesting nightmares you start to recover your equilibrium. Your mind has been permanently altered. You might feel a “brightness”. You might start a journal, logging all these unusual thoughts that keep buzzing around in your head....like spores sliding down the slopes of your brain. You might even decide you need to volunteer for Expedition 13 as... The Reader. 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 25, 2014
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Feb 27, 2014
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Feb 25, 2014
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Paperback
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| 0380480093
| 9780380480098
| 0380480093
| 3.88
| 9,941
| 1956
| Jan 01, 1980
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really liked it
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”Pity always was a luxury. It’s all right if the tragedy’s a comfortable distance away--if you can watch it from a seat in the cinema. It’s different
”Pity always was a luxury. It’s all right if the tragedy’s a comfortable distance away--if you can watch it from a seat in the cinema. It’s different when you find it on your doorstep--on every doorstep.” [image] Red Rice Field It was called the Chung-Li Virus and first appeared by destroying the rice crops in China. "That is too bad, those poor Chinese." "What did you think of the coffee today wasn’t it bold? It is from somewhere in Africa. We’ll have to get more of that." "I hear the Americans are sending some cargo ships of food to China." "Terrible about the rioting and the killing. I’ve heard as many as two million are dead already. " "So are we still on for tennis tomorrow?" "You don’t suppose that problem in China is going to become an issue for us?" "The Americans say they have a line on it. Hopefully the whole frightful mess will be cleared up by spring." "What did you think of that kid from Liverpool last night? That goal he made was nearly impossible." ”A long time ago. I came to the understanding that all men are friends by convenience and enemies by choice.” When the grass turns brown you might think to yourself...damn my lawn looks like crap quickly followed by woohoo no more mowing...followed by wait don’t cows eat grass?...followed by, but I like cheeseburgers. Of course as the landscape continues to turn brown you might start to become more educated about grass. It isn’t just the green stuff we cultivate all summer. In my case, due to frequent drought I water, cut, water, cut (sort of ridiculous if one gave it much thought), and I do this because green grass looks pretty. Grass happens to also be the stuff we eat. Rice, Wheat, Barley, and Corn all evolved from grass. Humans found these tiny seeds tasty. Instead of slogging all over the place and finding them by chance they decided to start growing these grains closer to where they lived. They kept the sweetest tasting kernels to plant the next year, slowly evolving each crop into the best grain to fit their palates. These grasses were not having to fight for survival any more. They had convinced humans to be their caretakers. It was a fiendish plot of survival that worked extremely well. [image] Now there is a city girl getting prepared. Eventually this all leads to more and more people having time to do other things instead of spending all day trying to find something to eat. This brings us to John and David, grandsons of a farmer. In the not so distant past both boys would have been needed on the farm. In fact it would have been helpful if their mother had conceived a brood instead of a duo. In 1956 only one is needed on the farm, and the other is allowed to pursue his dreams in London as an engineer. The grass turns brown all over England and suddenly China isn’t this distant land with terrible problems. It is now on England’s doorstep. All the staple crops turn brown. Civilization, so carefully conceived from our brilliant nurturing of our food supply, teeters, and falls practically overnight. The powers-that-be, governments, police, elected officials only have power as long as we let them. Suddenly everyone is a government of one. A grass virus is very, very bad. So who do you save? John has an ace in the hole. He still has direct ties to a farm. His brother David will take him and his family in, but who else? To reach the farm, John is going to need friends and form alliances with people he doesn’t know. He is going to have to make choices about who he will save and who he can not. He will have to do things he never even in his darkest nightmares ever thought he would have to do. As he amasses more and more people who turn out to be essential for actually achieving his goal of reaching the farm he is creating a new problem. Too many mouths to feed. So who do you save? [image] Wheat Field I was watching this show the other day about this guy who bought this old cold war missile silo in the middle of Kansas. He has built a premium self-sufficient shelter against the next insert name disaster. He is selling suites of rooms in this structure for $2million each. He has a fence. He has state of the art filtration system. He has retired navy seals. He has hydroponics, but you better like fish...a lot. I came away with two questions. First how are these A-Listers going to make it to Kansas to survive the next plague? This book explores that very concept and it turned out to be an excellent choice of reading after seeing this show. Two, I personally am not sure that I want to survive the next epic disaster. Surviving for what? And what will I be forced to do to survive? Who will I become to survive? Civilization, as creaky as it seems at times, is a wonderful, wonderful thing. So when you shell out $2million for your deluxe apartment underground in Kansas you can bring nine people with you. If you really want to scare yourself sometime sit down and put together your list. Think about all the people you care about and also the people that you feel could be essential to your future survival. Weight and measure all of them and for just a moment play GOD. Who do you save? Maybe the person you don’t save is yourself. 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 17, 2014
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Feb 17, 2014
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Feb 17, 2014
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1594486107
| 9781594486104
| 1594486107
| 3.50
| 11,574
| Jan 07, 2014
| Jan 07, 2014
|
really liked it
|
”It couldn’t have been just Reg she had gone to search out. She had no real leads as to where he might be, or if he was even alive. So why would any s
”It couldn’t have been just Reg she had gone to search out. She had no real leads as to where he might be, or if he was even alive. So why would any sane person leave our cloister for such uncertainties? He was the impetus, yes, the veritable without which, but not the whole story. One person or thing can never comprise that, no matter how much one is cherished, no matter how much one is loved. A tale, like the universe, they tell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there’s finally no telling exactly where it begins, or ends, or where it places you now.” [image] Vincent Van Gogh’s Branches with Almond Blossoms can be found on the wall of almost every B-Mor household. Fan lives in the B-Mor colony formerly known as Baltimore. It is a high walled, safe community made up primarily of people of Chinese descent who were brought over, out of the ruins of their country, to raise fish for the Charter Communities. "It is known where we come from, but no one much cares about things like that anymore." The Charters live in elite villages that ring the labor colonies (repurposed suburbs) of the communities that grow their food. Beyond the walls of these villages lie the Open Counties of which little is known, but much is feared. Fan is a fish tank diver. She cleans the tanks and retrieves the dead. She lives in a house of her extended family. ”...in the thinly partitioned row house back in B-Mor, her uncles and aunties and cousins pitching their nightly calls in a an unmelodious orchestration that heralded her blood” She pairs with Reg, a gangly, tall, young man not particularly good at anything, but such a beautiful soul that everyone adores him. Reg disappears without a word, without a trace. No ones knows where he is. Fan asks questions, but as she moves up the chain of command the answers become more and more nebulous and dismissive. Fan has an inkling, I do believe, because she poisons the fish tanks that were her responsibility before she strikes out in search of her man. This was an act of defiance that had no precedent in the history of the community. She goes into the lawless country and leaves in her wake the beginnings of a revolution. Her odyssey becomes a fixation for her community as any story of her travels is amplified throughout the community, and added to her growing legend. ”Suddenly all the sturdy engineering and constructing, from the originals to now, feels as though it’s been resting upon an insufficient base, the same way a thoroughly elaborate and convincing dream can hinge upon an entirely impossible premise, which, once examined, exposes the rest as a mirage. The pilings are dust, the slab of matrix of silken spiderwebbing, and the very place we reside, our narrow row houses that have stood stalwartly wall-to-wall through a checkered history of caring and neglect, are but cells in a chimera, some bloodless being in whose myth we have believed too deeply and too long.” After a cataclysmic event it would not be difficult to convince people to exchange their personal liberties for a steady supply of food, shelter, and safety. Who wouldn’t take it and actually be grateful for the opportunity? The thing is people in the future are going to be the same as people were in the past and the same as they are in the present. Eventually we are always going to reach a point where we will want more. The Charters do allow the top 1.2% of children from the labor communities to ascend to their villages. They are adopted by Charter families and allowed to become full members of the community. Frankly, it is brilliant, you strengthen your own community and continue to deplete the people from the gene pool of the labor communities that would be most likely to take stock of their life and decide things had to change. (This reminds me of the decades old policy of the United States to steal the very best and brightest from all over the world by dangling citizenship before them, and convincing them that their contributions to society will be better rewarded in the United States. We become stronger and the communities they come from become weaker in the process.) These bright children from B-Mor and from other labor communities are assimilated and made to feel special. Their claws are pared before they can grow into something that could be used to slash. Fan’s brother was one of those bright children who became a Charter member. She realizes that if she has any hope of finding Reg she first has to find her brother. [image] Chang-Rae Lee She begins by navigating the lawless Open Counties and almost before her odyssey starts it is nearly ended as she is sideswiped by a speeding vehicle. Now fortunately for her she is hit by possibly the only person in the Open Counties that can heal her wounds. His name is Quig. He is a veterinarian by trade, a disgraced Charter citizen who now makes his living helping the sick and the wounded...for a price. His story, as it it revealed to us, is tragic. ”Fan looked up but in the dimness and rain could just make out the contours of his face under the dark shadow of his baseball cap’s bill. He was bearded and had a wide frame to his jaw, and his nose looked like it had been broken multiple times, and the expression in his eyes was that of someone who has seen the worst of the life and would not be disturbed to see whatever measure more.” He will heal her, feed her, and keep her until he figures out what to do with her. He trades her to Miss Cathy and Mister Leo, a Charter family. Now when is anything what it seems. On the surface their household seems normal, but there are strange things behind the curtain. There are seven girls of various ages living on the top floor of this house. They have all been bartered for from the Open Counties. They have all been raped by Mister Leo. Miss Cathy was raped as a child, and in some sick fashion the girls are all slices of her shattered self suspended in life, regardless of their age, at the point of when her trauma occurred. She is complicit in their molestation. ”Some were grown women, twice as broad as the youngest. But something was different about all of them, and not just that they had grown old. All of their eyes were huge and shaped in the same way, half-moons set on the straight side, like band shells but darkened, their pupils being brown. They were all giggling now, shoulders scrunched, their high pitch cutesy and saccharine. They crowded about Fan, bright of teeth. They smelled laundered and dryer-fresh. And now one of them was gently touching her face, others her hair, the rest clasping her arms, her hands, already vining themselves through her, snatching Fan up.” [image] Chang-Rae Lee Fan is stoic, certainly courageous, through all her trials and tribulations. She is petite and quiet, a person easily overlooked. People sense something more in her that is larger than her size, something powerful. Chang-Rae Lee paints a world where on the surface you might think any one of these places is a utopia, but as you dig deeper you discover they are really all dystopias. There are benefits, despite the problems, to all three segments of this universe and I’m still not sure, if I were to find myself in this world, which scenario I would strive to call my home. Fan’s journey gives Lee the means to show us the layers of his creation, a real look at one possible future. This is the first book I’ve read by Lee, but it will most certainly not be my last. He holds a mirror up. It is our responsibility to look into our own eyes. 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 08, 2013
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Dec 15, 2013
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Dec 08, 2013
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 4.04
| 191,466
| Mar 27, 2014
| May 13, 2014
|
really liked it
| ”Creatures… [image] W ”Creatures… [image] Whatever you do DON’T OPEN YOUR EYES!! Malorie has just confirmed she is pregnant the very day that people begin killing themselves. News travels so fast now. Something can happen in Cairo. Someone can film it, load it to the internet, and within minutes of the event occurring someone in Des Moines is watching what happened. News, mostly tragic news, from around the world now impacts us instantaneously. The world, consequently, feels like a much more dangerous place than it did 50 years ago. So when this new phenomenon starts happening everyone knows about it very quickly. Terror escalates exponentially, and has reached a highly sustained level long before this catastrophe has contaminated the whole world. ”What kind of a man cowers when the end of the world comes? When his brothers are killing themselves, when the streets of suburban America are infested with murder...what kind of man hides behind blankets and blindfolds? The answer is MOST men. They were told they would go mad. So they go mad.” It turns out everyone was right to be afraid. There is something out there. If you see it... you go insane. It goes through the world population like a pestilent storm. We have windows in our dwellings, in our work buildings,and in our schools because we WATCH the world. It only takes a moment, a need that can’t be ignored, one parting of a curtain, for us to see one of these creatures, and become deranged. We do violent things to ourselves.The lizard inside us meant to fight when flight is not an option turns inward. To live, we must reside in darkness, shrouded by blindfolds, tucked in dwellings behind blanketed windows. It is maddening to have our world reduced to so little. [image] So what are these creatures and do they know what they do to us? After Malorie’s sister Shannon kills herself with a pair of scissors, Malorie is all alone. Some kook has been offering sanctuary at his house in newspaper ads when this manifestation first started to appear. Suddenly, with her changed circumstances, the kook becomes her best option. The kook is dead, but the people he sheltered are still alive. Tom and Jules are the alpha males who take chances, range the farthest away, blindfolded and with sticks to guide them, to find necessary supplies. Don is the weakest, the one that has found it hardest to adjust. He is also the most cynical. ”They’ll eventually get us, Don said. There’s no reason to think otherwise. It’s end times, people. And if it’s a matter of a creature our brains are incapable of comprehending, then we deserve it. I always assumed the end would come because of our own stupidity.” For a few blissful months Malorie can feel reasonably safe nestled in the routine of this small group of survivors. Meanwhile her tummy is getting rounder. Then Gary arrives. He whispers things to Don. Like any good charlatan he can pick the most vulnerable out of a crowd. He can sense their doubts before he ever hears them express them.. Gary thinks he is immune. Which begs the question, if the bindings that keep our minds anchored in sanity have long been shorn away can the creatures do anymore damage? There are two time lines at play in this book. One is during the few months when Malorie is with the sanctuary group. The other is four years later when she is raising two children that have never seen...well...anything beyond the cramped world of one house. ”The same colors. The same colors. The same colors for years. YEARS. Are you prepared? And what scares you more? The creatures or yourself, as the memories of a million sights and colors come flooding toward you? What scares you more? Josh Malerman does a fantastic job building the suspense, allowing the tension to stretch nerves to the breaking point. Information is opaque. He doesn’t cheat and give the reader information before the characters figure something out. I kept thinking of the movie Monsters from 2010. There are monsters; and yet, we are not allowed to see them. We hear them. We see the reactions of the characters, and somehow the terror is more acute when our brain does not have a shape, an entity to project our fear onto. Our mounting terror is allowed to gallop unrestrained, and each of us conjures our own version of a terrifying specter. ”You add the details, she thinks. It’s your idea of what they look like, and details are added to a body and a shape that you have no concept of. To a face that might have no face at all.” Malerman has created a dystopia that will play on all your fears and will stir up all your insecurities. You will question whether you can live in a world where one glimpse of a sun dappled street might cost you your life. Highly recommended for those that like books that will cost them some sleep. As a companion volume read Blindness by Jose Saramago 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 18, 2014
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Jan 21, 2014
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Nov 22, 2013
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||||
| 184863014X
| 9781848630147
| 184863014X
| 4.14
| 170
| 2008
| Dec 2008
|
it was amazing
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”Beyond Jake, the ground was blown into sandy hillocks and dunes, a crescent of rolling beach, stretching down toward what should‘ve been a sea. Of co
”Beyond Jake, the ground was blown into sandy hillocks and dunes, a crescent of rolling beach, stretching down toward what should‘ve been a sea. Of course there was no sea, and never had been. Instead there were only miles of hardpan, yawning away toward the faraway scarp of the crater rim.” The planet is officially called R2, but the boys call it Gunpowder. They are there to turn this desolate planet into a breadbasket. They are psyformers. Their existence, though met with hard resistance from religious groups nurtured by fear, is considered the crowning achievement of mankind. There are thirty of them, all with emerging gifts except one, Charley. ”None of the boys knew what she was looking at when she pointed an ultraviolet into their eyes...that there were informational codes projected there that could only be read under diffuse UV. These codes changed from time-to-time, there were thousands of them, and it was necessary to consult a vast diagnostic program to make sense of them. But Charley’s optical displays were always the same, and required no interpretation. It was VOID now and it had been VOID since he was eighteen months old.” [image] Elaine is their caretaker, a woman that has raised them, named them, and surprisingly did not go bat shit crazy trapped on a planet with thirty boys for fourteen years. They call her mom. Jake is the most gifted, the one the boys emulate. Instead of building a core of the most promising boys around him he has chosen Charley and a sullen boy named Nils to be his friends. This creates strife born out of jealousy, an upheaval in the natural order of things, but it keeps the social dynamic from evolving out of the control of Elaine. If Jake had brought the most powerful of his brothers together she would have lost control even though the boys love her. ”But the dunes--the dunes. That morning they had been only mounds of bare sand, shifting every time the wind sighed. Now they bristled with clumps of high grass, tall dark stalks that hissed and seethed, sounding for all the world like whispering voices. The sound made Elaine think of a classroom of boys, her boys, and how sometimes, when they were taking a test, she would walk out into the hall, but then pause to listen, and the room behind her would fill up with a feverish whispering just like this. Jake had made grass grow where grass could not grow, could never grow. In the acre of sand before her, the world was no longer as it should be, as it had always been, but as Jake wanted it. Reality was a manuscript, recorded in rocks, gasses, DNA. Jake had just rewritten a few lines. War breaks out between the people who created the boys and a disgruntled group of transplanted colonists. The creators decide they need to boys for something other than terraforming. They want them to start psyforming weapons. I was wondering why all of the psyformers are boys, but then when the woman arrives to take over their studies and has a “nice arse” I can see how distracting having young women around would be to a group of fourteen year old boys. It would be hard to keep them focused on creating with hormones swimming through the air. [image] Joseph Hillstrom King Joe Hill had me hooked from the beginning and still has me hooked. There are three projected books in the Gunpowder series. This one was published in 2008 so he has obviously been distracted by other projects. If you have not read Joe Hill he is certainly someone to watch. He is a chip off the old block and has a chance to leave as deep a mark on publishing as his father. This book was published by a small publisher out of England called PS Publishing. The print run was 500 of which I have #56. The book is long sold out and copies available on the second hand market are fetching $195 to $255. Another testament to how collector’s are looking at Joe Hill’s future. Hopefully after the other editions are published, a collected version will be made available to the general public. It is a story arc that should be read by more people. 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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Jun 29, 2013
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Jun 29, 2013
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Jun 29, 2013
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0230748643
| 9780230748644
| 0230748643
| 3.89
| 12,221
| Aug 03, 2010
| 2010
|
it was amazing
| The field is the world; the good seed are the children of The field is the world; the good seed are the children of There are people who are not going to read this book just because they don’t read books with zombies. They may not read it because it is horror, fearing that they will be exposed to graphic violence or maybe they won’t read it because it is about a fifteen year old girl; and frankly, teenagers are annoying. Whatever reason you might be thinking about using for why you are not going to read this book...well...put that thought on a back burner. The book does have zombies called slugs. It does feature a fifteen year old girl; and yes, some people have found her Southern voice annoying, but what they miss when they say that is the absolute authenticity that comes through in every sentence and every paragraph. I’m not sure how a girl that can’t read who has never been educated except with on-the-job-of-living survival skills is supposed to talk. She colors her words with wisdom, self reflection, pain, and dogged truth. She has an undisciplined mind, honed by fire, bristling with desire to see the world, and experience what others are too afraid to try. She is Temple. She is Sarah Mary. See, there’s music in the world and you got to be listening otherwise you’ll miss it sure. Like when the she comes out of the house and the night-time air feels dreamy-cold on her face and it smells like the pureness of a fresh land just started. Like it was something old and dusty and broken, taken off the shelf to make room for something sparkle-new. And it’s your soul desiring to move and be a part of it, whatever it is, to be out there on the soot plains where the living fall and the dead rise, and the dead fall and the living rise, like the cycle of life. The apocalypse happened twenty-five years ago so Temple was born after the world went to hell. She is of this world, and is not encumbered with memories of a life before of manicured lawns, bicycle paths, going to school, hanging out with friends, family dinners, or watching television. Unencumbered that is until she meets Maury. She calls him dummy because he doesn’t talk or show that much at all is being processed through his brain. She has thoughts of dumping him off at the first available moment, but then he shows her a slip a paper that was balled up in his pocket. Hello! My name is Maury and I wouldn’t hurt a fly. Temple carries her own burdens of failure and getting Maury back to his family becomes a quest that she feels will lift some of the blood from her soul. She doesn’t really understand it, but feels in the doing maybe she will. She has made enemies and one in particular keeps finding her like an angel of death. She can’t shake him. He is Moses Todd. My gut tells me that’s my old friend Moses Todd, who’s got some business he’s gonna want to finish up with me. It’s a wonder how he’s trackin me, but you can’t put nothin past these southern boys. They just sit around waiting for somebody to kill their brother so they can get started on some vengeance. It’s like a dang vocation with them. Temple finds moments of sanctuary, but knows, like a clock in her head keeping time, that she needs to keep moving or she will be found. She is nervous living in safety, walled away from slugs, but also from the wide open space of her world. Her feet start to itch and windows are reminders of what lies beyond. She wonders how people can live this kind of life, trapped inside a house with windows everywhere showing you where else you could be. Slugs are just a part of her world. They aren’t evil. Even men who find her attractive are but another component of her world that she is prepared to deal with. She does fear that there is evil inside of her. A darkness that comes out when she fights, when compassion disappears, and she is inflicting death as casually as a middle aged man at a lunch counter smacking flies with a flyswatter. In a scene that could have been lifted from a Cormac McCarthy novel she emerges victorious, but stained deeper than skin deep. Amid the hot stench of fresh offal, she rises to her feet like the dreadful ghost of a fallen battlefield soldier, her hands tacky with the thick pulpy dregs of death splayed wide. The echoes of the clamour having died on the puddled ground, the only sound in the room is the thin insectoid buzzing of the three exposed bulbs suspended in ceramic sockets from the ceiling. Even the imprisoned slugs themselves have paused in their perpetual movement to gaze with acquiescent eyes upon the scene of the massacre, as though in harmony with the inexorable and silent melodies of grim decease--as though in deferential recognition of the community of the extinct. She rises to her feet and blinks, her eyes like bleached wafers set against the brown mizzle of blood already drying in flakes on her cheeks and lips and neck. She raises no hand to cleanse herself, marked as she is with a violence, ritualist and primitive, like those hunters who would decorate themselves with the ornamental residuum of their prey. In a scene that is reminiscent of something out of a William Faulkner novel she is talking to an acquaintance who is trying to tempt her to go to California with him where things are rumored to be almost normal. You get old, Temple. The wide world is a pretty adventure for a long time, it’s true. But then one day you wake up and you just want to drink a cup of coffee without thinking about livin or dyin. Yeah, well, I ain’t there yet. Goddamnit, girl, what happened to you? You got things to tell. You could tell me. Maybe so, she says. But I ain’t there yet either. There is a reason why Alden Bell’s writing is being compared to other accomplished writers because he wrote a great book full of wonderful introspection, a character to rival Katniss Everdeen for cunning and survival skill, and a plot that kept me turning pages long after my family had nestled down to sleep. Bell is married to Megan Abbott, a lauded writer in her own right. There is magic to the way he played with me in this one. He had me dangling from his fingertips, my mind churning and rippling with anxiety, and the air crackled with the burnt rubber smell of fear. 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 10, 2013
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Feb 11, 2013
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Feb 10, 2013
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Hardcover
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| 0393066800
| 9780393066807
| 0393066800
| 4.42
| 18,902
| Sep 24, 2012
| Oct 01, 2012
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it was amazing
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”’Spillover’ is the term used by disease ecologists to denote the moment when a pathogen passes from members of one species, as host, into members of
”’Spillover’ is the term used by disease ecologists to denote the moment when a pathogen passes from members of one species, as host, into members of another.” How does that happen? ”All it required was a mango or water apple tree, laden with ripe fruit, overhanging a pigsty. An infected bat feeds on a water apple, discarding the pulp, which is besmeared with virus; the pulp drops down among the pigs; one pig snarfs it up and gets a good dose of virus; the virus replicates in that pig and passes to others; soon the whole herd is infected and human handlers begin to fall sick.” Besmeared, doesn’t that give a visual? So what are we dealing with? ”A zoonosis is an animal infection transmissible to humans. There are more such diseases than you might expect. AIDS is one. Influenza is a whole category of others. Pondering them as a group tends to reaffirm the old Darwinian truth (the darkest of his truths, well known and persistently forgotten) that humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health. Pondering them individually provides a salubrious reminder that everything, including pestilence, comes from somewhere.” The thing that I keep thinking about is that coronavirus or Covid-19, because we need to give it a name to distinguish it from all the future coronavirus outbreaks, is just a dress rehearsal for a much bigger theatrical event. From what I’m hearing from health care officials, we are not well prepared. We don’t even have enough masks for health care workers. Did we think it was not going to come here? Did we think it was just a China thing and that air travel wasn’t going to drop it like a rotting fruit basket in every human inhabited region of the world? The symptoms are like getting a cold or the flu; by the time someone knows they have it, they may have infected hundreds of people. ”’Viruses have no locomotion,’ according to the eminent virologist Stephen S. Morse, ‘yet many of them have traveled around the world.’ They can’t run, they can’t walk, they can’t swim, they can’t crawl. They ride.” The problem with finding a cure is that Covid-19 is an animal infection that has spilled over to humans. Diseases, like polio, that originate in humans are easier to cure. If we eradicate it in humans through inoculations, it disappears. With viruses that spillover from other species, there is what is called a reserve host, such as bats, rats, pigs, or birds, that will incubate the virus, keep it alive, and mutate it. Eradication is impossible. David Quammen takes us around the world to all the hot spots or, as Richard Preston calls them, the hot zones. You want some vivid, scary writing about Ebola deaths? Pick up Preston’s book. Quammen was interested in traveling to these places to discover how hosting worked with diseases and the exhaustive, frustrating, investigative work that scientists have to do to find these reservoir host creatures. It is dangerous work where a pinprick can kill. So why are we such a juicy host for invasion by a virus? ”It’s not that they target us especially. It’s that we are so obtrusively, abundantly available. ‘If you look at the world from the point of view of a hungry virus,’ the historian William H. McNeill has noted, ‘or even a bacterium--we offer a magnificent feeding ground with all our billions of human bodies, where, in the recent past, there were only half as many people. In some 25 or 27 years, we have doubled in number. A marvelous target for any organism that can adapt itself to invading us.’” I might add, at the rate that we are killing off other species of wildlife, aren’t we forcing viruses to spillover to survive? Quammen provides another stark view of the growth of the human population. ”We are prodigious, we are unprecedented. We are phenomenal. No other primate has ever weighed upon the planet to anything like this degree. In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are the outbreak.” As I’ve said numerous times in other reviews, the greatest threat to human existence is overpopulation. We don’t need more people. In fact, we need fewer people. Job growth will not keep pace with population increases. We have more value when there are fewer of us. Not to mention, food production will struggle to keep up with rampant population growth, and fresh water will not be able to keep pace either. It makes me think about deer populations when I was growing up on a farm. Whenever they had an explosion in numbers that threatened the ecosystem, an infection would spring up and reduce their numbers. Is the cosmos, at some point, going to decide we need to be reduced? Quammen’s goal with this book is not to scare people, though he understands that will be a natural reaction to his knee-knocking, inspiring descriptions of the various virus outbreaks that have already happened. He wants us to feel informed, so that we will be more careful and respect the danger of these viruses. We have been lucky so far, and there is no other way to describe it. Combinations of scientists and doctors have reacted quickly to outbreaks around the world, but even they will say they aren’t sure how and why they were able to get ahead of the contagion. Quammen is among the number of scientists who are not wondering if a major pandemic will happen, but when. My takeaways from this read. I will no longer be an exotic eater. Whenever I have traveled anywhere in the world, I’ve always been an adventurous eater. Quammen’s descriptions of the live, wild animal markets in China was more than enough to keep me from being curious about what a masked faced civet tastes like or porcupine or an exotic snake. The animals in these markets are treated horribly, and the unsanitary conditions create a perfect environment for producing a spillover. I am greatly reducing my plane travel. Not out of fear of contagion, but out of respect for the planet. I will say, though, that plane travel will be the modern conveyance that will be the carrier of our destruction. Planes can move people all over the world before they even know they are sick. Quammen mentions that scientists have received pressure to edit from their essays assertions about the dangers of a pandemic traveling by plane. We’ve seen it happen!!! I will no longer shake people’s hands. I love the historical significance of what a handshake means. By presenting a naked hand, men were showing they were unarmed and meant no harm. Even without a pandemic, how many colds and flus are passed through a handshake? Maybe it is time to dispense with handshakes and replace it with a nod of the head. I certainly don’t want to be responsible for unintentionally making other people sick...potentially terminally sick. I like the energy of crowds, but as I’ve gotten older, I feel more uncomfortable in large groups of people, and so it will be no great loss for me to avoid crowded events. I will drive as little as possible. One of the reports in recent days that has made me smile was hearing about the clearing of pollution over cities where people have been asked to stay home. Think if we made a conscious effort, all the time, to reduce our driving time every week. Personally, I’m going to make an effort to condense my errands into one day and as brief an amount of time every week as I can. Let’s give the oil companies a cut in profits. Times like these are a good time for self-reflection. Quammen is a vivid and compelling writer who doesn’t indulge himself in hyperbole. He sticks with the facts and gives the reader context without glazing their eyes over. I learned about several viruses that I’ve never heard about and shivered whenever demon viruses I am very familiar with, like Ebola, SARS, or MERS, are mentioned. Oh, and he also mentions another virus. ”The team had electron microscope images of round viral particles, each particle encircled by a corona of knobs.” There’s the current devil we are dealing with. I want to close the review with an example of Quammen’s ability to make a reader feel like she has been there with his evocative writing. ”Before I knew it, I was helping Lisa Jones-Engel and Gregory Engel trap Macaque monkeys at a shrine in northeastern Bangladesh. We had come to a city called Sylhet, along the banks of the Surma River, an area where the Bangladesh lowlands begin to wrinkle up into hills. The hills rise northward into mountains, beyond which lie Assam, Bhutan, and Tibet. Sylhet is a district capital, home to a half million people and an indeterminate number of other primates. Its streets are flooded with traffic that somehow manages to move despite a near-total absence of stoplights. Hundreds of green motorbike taxis, powered by natural gas, and thousands of brightly decorated bicycle rickshaws, powered by long-suffering men with skinny brown legs, jockey for position alongside the bashed-up busses and creeping cars. In early morning, two-wheeled push carts also roll through the streets, moving vegetables to market. At the bigger intersections loom shopping complexes and upscale hotels behind gleaming glass. It’s a thriving city, one of the richest in this poor country, thanks much to investment and spending by emigrant families, with roots here, who have thrived in Great Britain. They often return home, or at least send money back. Many of the curry shops in London, a man told me, are run by expat Bangladeshis from Sylhet.” Be smart. Be respectful. Be safe. Take a moment and watch this short video from Professor Hugh Montgomery about the coronavirus. Thank you, Michael Perkins, for sending this to me. Please share this video with the young people you know who may feel impervious to the flu and don’t fully grasp the greater ramifications. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg7Rn... Here is also a short informative video from David Quammen discussing the purpose of this book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgsqf... 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 and an Instagram account https://www.instagram.com/jeffreykeeten/ ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 14, 2020
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Mar 17, 2020
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Oct 22, 2012
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Hardcover
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| B005OI072O
| 4.17
| 295,304
| 1995
| Sep 01, 1998
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it was amazing
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”The advantage enjoyed by these blind men was what might be called the illusion of light. In fact, it made no difference to them whether it was day or
”The advantage enjoyed by these blind men was what might be called the illusion of light. In fact, it made no difference to them whether it was day or night, the first light of dawn or the evening twilight, the silent hours of early morning or the bustling din of noon, these blind people were for ever surrounded by a resplendent whiteness, like the sun shining through mist. For the latter, blindness did not mean being plunged into banal darkness, but living inside a luminous halo.” [image] We have all experienced blindness. Not that long ago I woke up in the middle of the night. There was no reassuring red glow of the digital clock by my bed nor the diffused yellow light from the streetlight making slat patterns across my floor . The dark was ink vat black, not gray or any other color on the spectrum, dark soul black. [image] My eyes ached from holding them open so wide trying to capture any stray light that could reassure me that the wonderful array of cones and rods in my eyes were still functioning. Any creak or thump took on so much more significance giving my active imagination ample incentive to flash an array of possible horrible scenarios. My heart rate climbs. I wondered if I’ve went blind. I think about the room full of books that will have no more significance to me than a pile of bricks or cement blocks, something I held reverence for that is now less than useless. I lay there in various stages of disbelief and reassurances until a sliver of light announced the dawn and my eyes, my beautiful eyes, luxuriated in those first rays of a new day. I could see. The influenza epidemic of 1918 was one of the most terrifying events to happen to humanity in the 20th century even eclipsing two horrific world wars. 50 million people worldwide died suffocating from fluid filled lungs. Doctors were baffled, unable to find a cure or slow down the symptoms to allow the human immune system to have a chance. The disease had no compassion or any sense of a person’s economic situation, rich, poor, young and old all died. The average life expectancy in the United States dropped by twelve years. And then it just disappeared. As if a magic number of dead had been reached. Can you imagine the fear that any flu symptoms must have inspired in people for years after the event? [image] The Blind Eyes Looked Fine. This book is about such an epidemic. An epidemic that spares no one. It begins with a man going blind while sitting in his car at a traffic light. He is brought to an opthamologist and his trip to see the doctor spreads this contagion at the speed of a prairie fire. The opthamologist is in the midst of researching this baffling disease when he goes blind as well. The government on the verge of panic rounds up all those infected in an attempt to contain the spread of the disease. The wife of the eye doctor packs his suitcase and even though she can still see packs her own clothes as well. When the government people come to get him she goes with him. They are taken to a vacant mental hospital. At first there are only a handful of people and then there are hundreds of people crammed into this facility. Soldiers are left to guard them and feed them. As more soldiers go blind fears become reality and in one such moment of desperation the soldiers fire into the crowd of blind people. The soldiers retreat and the blind are left with dead bodies to bury and spilled food to collect. ”Their hunger, however, had the strength only to take them three steps forward, reason intervened and warned them that for anybody imprudent enough to advance there was danger lurking in those lifeless bodies, above all, in that blood, who could tell what vapors, what emanations, what poisonous miasmas might not already be oozing forth from the open wounds of the corpses. They’re dead, they can’t do any harm, someone remarked, the intention was to reassure himself and others, but his words made matters worse, it was true that these blind internees were dead, that they could not move, see, could neither stir nor breath, but who can say that this white blindness is not some spiritual malaise, and if we assume this to be the case then the spirits of those blind casualties have never been as free as they are now, released from their bodies, and therefore free to do whatever they like, above all, to do evil, which as everyone knows, has always been the easiest thing to do.” Any supernatural element, spirits or otherwise take a backseat to living breathing humans when it comes to perpetrating evil. A gang of men, empowered by a gun wielding leader, take control of the food. All of the internees are asked to bring all their valuables to be assessed and traded for food and water. I had to almost laugh at this point because these thugs are trapped in pre-blindness thinking. What value will jewelry or paper money have with people that can’t see? A good belt or a pair of shoes or a glass of water or a sandwich are the only things of any real value anymore. Well there is one other thing that will continue to have value. Women. The inmates have been split into groups by rooms. After the valuables have been exhausted as a bartering tool for food and water the thugs tell the groups that if they want to eat they need to send their women to them. Hunger is all consuming. When you are hungry you can not think about anything else other than finding food. Your body, as part of our survival instinct, makes you very uncomfortable. We can all say what we would be capable of doing and not capable of doing when we are sitting in a bar casually munching on free peanuts and pretzels between pints of beer. The fact of the matter is most of us have never felt real hunger. We have had moments where our stomachs rumble or experienced a headache due to a missed meal, but true hunger, not eating for days hunger we can only speculate about what that is like. One man in the group sounding like some of the Republican candidates in this last election said: ”What did it matter if the women had to go there twice a month to give theses men what nature gave them to give.” I think even the women had no idea what it really would mean to be raped. They have all had sex, no blushing virgins among them. They were hungry too and after some speculation decide that they need to do this not only to feed themselves, but also their men. It is way beyond anything they could even imagine. It was horrible and Jose Saramago pulls no punches. Being raped by one man is bad enough, but when being raped by several men a woman has become an object, not even an object of desire, but merely a receptacle for lust. Being attractive, or smart or any of the things that made men desire her, in the world before blindness, are suddenly immaterial. She is faceless, a base unit to be used and abused devoid of the uniqueness that identify all of us beyond being just a male or a female. [image] As the world goes blind the wife of the doctor is left unaffected. She continues to help where she can, but is reluctant to let everyone know she can see. She would be a slave to the group if they ever found out she could still see. She breaks out with a group of people all identified by their past professions or by some other identifying marker. We never do learn any of their names as if their identities have escaped them with their loss of vision. There is a sweet scene when the doctor and his wife first arrive back at their home. ”The doctor put his hand into the inside pocket of his new jacket and brought out the keys. He held them in mid-air, waiting, his wife gently guided his hand towards the keyhole.”The world is in chaos as blind people stumble everywhere looking for food and shelter. It is truly a horrific vision of a world disintegrating and brings home to me just how vulnerable we all are to a pandemic event or the loss of the electrical grid or for those with more fanciful terrors a zombie apocalypse. Will you kill someone to live? [image] Jose Saramago Jose Saramago by keeping the wife of the doctor immune to the disease gives himself a conduit to describe events. Without her the novel would have been difficult to write and would have been more difficult for us to read. We need vision and if we don’t have it ourselves we certainly need someone to provide it for us. There are lots of great themes in the novel, exploring the human condition and how we fail ourselves; and yet, eventually overcome the most severe circumstances. The text is a block of words with few paragraph breaks or markers to help us keep track of who is talking. This certainly adds to the difficulty of reading the novel, but I must counsel you to persevere. You will come away from the novel knowing you have experienced something, a grand vision of the disintegration of civilization and certainly you will reevaluate what is most important in your life. This is a novel that does what a great novel is supposed to do; it reveals what we keep hidden from ourselves. To see all my latest book and movie reviews visit my blog at http://www.jeffreykeeten.com. You can also like my Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 17, 2012
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Nov 23, 2012
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Sep 03, 2012
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0385528779
| 9780385528771
| 0385528779
| 4.06
| 126,005
| Sep 22, 2009
| Sep 22, 2009
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really liked it
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"Glenn (Crake) used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I
"Glenn (Crake) used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul--it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there's a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don't know; and that's what God is." Animals have evaporated from the planet crushed under the dominance of the human race. Scientists have unraveled the DNA of life and are populating the world with creatures that are blends of several species. The future is about gene splitting and synthetic drugs and powerful corporations with names like CorpSeCorps have been formed around the creation of a flood of genetically mutated products. There is an addictive form of coffee called Happicuppas and an equally addictive form of a mysterious meat source burger called, with no deception, Secretburgers. There are Liobams (cross between a lion and a lamb), pigoons (creatures engineered for organ harvest), Mo'hair (sheeps with human hair),pigs with human brain tissue, rakunks (animals bred to be good pets), green haired glow in the dark rabbits, and snats (an experimental hybrid of a snake and rat). There are a genetically engineered blob-like chicken that produces only breast meat. This creature, if you can call it a creature, is the source for the popular take out food outlet ChickieNob Nubbins. [image] The story revolves around two women/girls named Toby and Ren who at bisecting points spend time under the protective wing of The God's Gardners. A group of naturalists that are vehemently vegetarian. They are lead by Adams and Eves, differentiated by numerals, who see themselves as the beginning of the rebuilding of the Earth. Neither woman is a firm believer, but stay because the alternatives in this chaotic world are rather grim. Toby escaped from the drudgery work of a Secretburger outlet where the manager, Blanco, demands degrading acts of sexual gratification for her continued employment. Even after she escapes his clutches he continues to be a menacing presence in her life. Blanco is like the Terminator... he just won't die. He is punished for his many criminal acts by being sent into a game called Painballer where instead of paint pellets participant's weapons are loaded with an acidic compound. He survives not only one, but several campaigns into the arena and when not creating mayhem for other people he continues to hunt for Toby. Ren's mother falls in lust with one of the Gardeners and leaves her cushy position as the wife of a corporate executive to join The God's Gardeners. She takes Ren with her and when the relationship sours she takes Ren back to her father with a dramatic story of her abduction and degradation by the Gardeners. Ren later becomes a trapeze artist at a high end sex club called The Scales and Tails. The world unravels when Crake releases the Blysspluss pill that is advertised as the greatest sexual experience of your life. It activates a plague that effectively wipes a large percentage of the population off the planet. Through luck, more than skill, both Toby and Ren survive the outbreak. This book weaves around the book Oryx and Crake and is the second book in a proposed trilogy. It isn't even really a continuation of the story, but tracks over the same ground from a different perspective. We learn more background about Jimmy (the Snowman)and Glenn (Crake). I loved Oryx and Crake and this book is a shadow of O&C mainly because even though I am exposed to more elements not covered in the first book...the plot does not advance. If you liked O&C you probably should read this one. It reads fast and you will appreciate having your view of this world expanded. I believe the third book will determine how highly elevated this trilogy will be regarded. I highly recommend reading O&C before embarking on The Year of the Flood. [image] The thing of it is Margaret Atwood is brilliant, and I have a feeling she has a wonderful surprise in store for us with the much anticipated conclusion. You will only be slightly disappointed in this book, maybe my expectations were too high for a middle book, but it is well worth the few hours of your time. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 30, 2012
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Jul 02, 2012
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Jun 30, 2012
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0720612683
| 9780720612684
| 0720612683
| 3.67
| 9,188
| 1967
| Jul 01, 2016
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it was amazing
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“As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of the world.” “As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of the world.” [image] Her hair was a blizzard, a shimmering cascade of pale luminous moonlight. She was fragile as if made of glass and crystal, built like a waif with pallid skin and bruised eyes. She is an ice sculpture carved out of a glacier that is shattered and reassembled time and time again. He needs her, desires her, craves her. He wants to clench the slender bones of her wrist and grip the gaunt thrust of her hip. He finds her as the world is ending. She belongs to another, but then he realizes that she is discontented. ”While she was happy I had dissociated myself, been outside the situation. Now I felt implicated, involved with her again.” HE? The unreliable narrator of this tale is suffering from daytime apparitions and nighttime terrors. The lurid concoctions of his agitated mind bleed certainty into the fantastical fooling, not only himself, but also this reader. He has seized his own deceptions and sees them for what they are, but understanding and containing them are two very different things. ”The hallucination of one moment did not fit the reality of the next.” Ice is advancing across the Earth. He has the means to save her or at least put off the inevitable. He is chasing a wraith. He loses her and finds her again only to have her turn to smoke in his hands. He knows she is real though everything must be questioned. She hates him. She misses him. She expects him to save her as she bashes him with her animosity. When he dreams of her, she is dead. ”I felt I had been defrauded: I was the only person entitled to inflict wounds. I leaned forward and touched her cold skin.” He has a rival. A doppleganger. The split half of himself who is assertive, brutal, and obsessively possessive, The Narrator refers to him as The Warden, but it is unclear exactly who he is. I have lingering doubts about The Warden’s identity. Is he separate from The Narrator or is he merely just another personality that he jumps to when he needs to be someone else? Someone who can control the girl. The one who can remind her of who she is. ”Systematic bullying when she was most vulnerable had distorted the structure of her personality, made a victim of her, to be destroyed, either by things or by human beings, people or fjords and forests; it made no difference, in any case she could not escape. The irreparable damage inflicted had long ago rendered her fate inevitable.” She is a victim, but he is starting to understand that he is a victim too. In her presence, sometimes he becomes someone unacceptable. Her very delicacy, her fracturability makes him want to hurt her, makes him need to hurt her. Kindness is something he learns too late. The world is so disturbing because he knows it comes from within his own mind. Bruce Sterling termed the phrase slipstream to describe this type of writing long after this novel was published. He wrote: "...this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility." I knew after reading only a few pages that I was going to have to read this novel quickly, feverishly, if I had any chance of staying in the boat as I swirled without paddles through the mind of Anna Kavan. I put Franz Kafka in the boat with me, but he too is a fragile soul, and became sea sick with the changing directions of this twisted plot. There are Kafka moments, especially when The Narrator is dealing with a government bureaucracy that is becoming more and more detached as the world becomes smaller. [image] Anna Kavan was also a painter. This is her self-portrait. Anna Kavan, AKA Helen Emily Woods, AKA Helen Ferguson, suffered from depression and heroin addiction. She was in and out of treatment centers her whole life. She attempted suicide, but survived each attempt. Many people believed that she passed away from an overdose in 1968, but she actually died from a heart attack. She burned all of her correspondence and her diaries before she died. This is truly unfortunate because I have a feeling that to most of us her diaries would be like trying to read Cumbric, but to a select few it would be like finding an extension of their own brain. [image] I can’t help thinking The Girl in this story is Anna Kavan. A fragile woman herself whom both men and women found to be attractive. Ultimately, The Girl in the story accepts her fate, and I tend to think that Kavan reached the same conclusions with her own life. She lived in seclusion. Though venerated by many writers, most of her work was published after her death. She was a lost girl who became a lost woman, incapable of escaping the ebb and flow of a mind that obviously saw the world differently. Like The Narrator, the barrier that most of us have between real life and fanciful thoughts must have been breached for her. Everything was real, and everything was imaginary. The disparity between one or the other is a hair's difference. This novel is bleak and beautiful. Anna is so crafty and so lost; yet, so desperate to be found. I can already tell that I will never completely shake this novel off. I will remember the starkness of the trees, the desperate searching, the walls of ice, the escaping to be repossessed, and the nameless characters who together might form one being. I purchased a first American hardcover edition of this book from Between the Covers Rare Books in New Jersey. You can find more of my writing on my blog at http://www.jeffreykeeten.com . ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 04, 2015
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May 05, 2015
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May 30, 2012
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Paperback
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my rating |
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| 3.64
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really liked it
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Jan 29, 2015
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Jan 25, 2015
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| 4.08
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really liked it
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Jan 07, 2015
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Dec 26, 2014
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| 4.07
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it was amazing
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Dec 13, 2014
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Nov 23, 2014
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| 3.95
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really liked it
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Nov 23, 2014
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Nov 18, 2014
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| 3.95
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really liked it
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Nov 2014
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Oct 30, 2014
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|||||
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| 3.97
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it was amazing
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Oct 25, 2014
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Oct 24, 2014
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| 3.54
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really liked it
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Sep 15, 2014
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Sep 13, 2014
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| 4.12
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liked it
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Jul 29, 2014
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Jul 28, 2014
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| 3.70
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really liked it
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Jul 24, 2014
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Jul 19, 2014
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| 3.26
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really liked it
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Mar 2014
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Feb 27, 2014
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| 3.77
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it was amazing
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Feb 27, 2014
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Feb 25, 2014
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| 3.88
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really liked it
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Feb 17, 2014
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Feb 17, 2014
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| 3.50
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really liked it
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Dec 15, 2013
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Dec 08, 2013
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| 4.04
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really liked it
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Jan 21, 2014
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Nov 22, 2013
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| 4.14
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it was amazing
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Jun 29, 2013
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Jun 29, 2013
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| 3.89
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it was amazing
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Feb 11, 2013
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Feb 10, 2013
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| 4.42
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it was amazing
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Mar 17, 2020
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Oct 22, 2012
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| 4.17
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it was amazing
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Nov 23, 2012
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Sep 03, 2012
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| 4.06
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really liked it
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Jul 02, 2012
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Jun 30, 2012
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| 3.67
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it was amazing
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May 05, 2015
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May 30, 2012
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