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the occasional update
Jun. 1st, 2015 05:23 pmMy life is still boring!
1) Reading
I ended up liking Reif Larsen's I Am Radar quite a lot, because it turned out not to be so desperately pretentious as its summary makes it sound. On the other hand, it's not nearly as deep as it wants to be or as its reviews make it sound. It gestures towards a lot of ideas that never quite coalesce; it also suffers from the main protagonist, whose story is supposed to tie all the rest together, being a deeply uninteresting straight-white-nerd-guy whose supposed growth during the narrative doesn't compel or even ring true. The secondary characters, however, are all much better and their stories, which take up a large chunk of the book, are mostly why I liked it.
I gave up on Hanif Kureishi's The Last Word after about ten pages, upon realizing that I did not give a damn about any of these people and couldn't bear another hundred pages in their company. I get the impression the book has garnered a reputation for audacity, perhaps because the antagonist is a lightly disguised avatar of Salman Rushdie, but I think unless you approach it from the position that saying Rushdie is an overrated jerk is shocking, there's nothing interesting here.
As always, I've had much more fun with genre fiction.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
graculus recced me Max Gladstone's Craft sequence (Three Parts Dead, Two Serpents Rise, and Full Fathom Five), and they're pretty great. The worldbuilding is deliciously deep, but here's the basic premise: gods exist, but some human beings have learned the Craft (which is magic, only both magic and divinity work essentially by contracts and have a strong legal component), which has allowed some people in some places to defeat their local gods. Sometimes this is a good thing, but not always/necessarily, and in any case it always creates new problems. Each of the three books has a different protagonist and is set in a different place, so the worldbuilding continues to be rich and juicy throughout. One thing I love about these is that the setting is recognizably modern despite the magic (there are corporations, lawyers, a global economy) and not some vaguely-imagined Middle Ages. Plus the stories are gripping, the prose is very good, and the characterization's strong. As a bonus, there are a lot of well-written women characters (including the protagonists of two of the books), many people of color including most of the main characters (the protagonist of Two Serpents Rising is whitewashed on the cover, but he's not white), and several queer characters (none in the first book, but the second and third make up for it). I recommend these highly.
2) Listening
I've discovered BBC radio's In Our Time podcasts, and now I know what I'm doing for the next year or so. These are roughly 45-minute discussions on various topics, with genuine major scholars in the field, geared towards the layperson who may not have much background. Since I'm at least mildly interested in almost everything, these are catnip to me. I've recently listened to episodes about the Aztecs, the samurai, the Nicene Creed, the Cambrian explosion, and the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and I just downloaded a ton more.
Cooking:
Nothing very interesting. I've been eating a lot of pasta + vegetables, couscous + vegetables, and that sort of thing. I've been trying not to do much new baking because I still have brownies and rugelach in the freezer, though I did make a peach crisp because I had rapidly-ripening peaches and was too lazy to make a proper crust. (I should have made the crust.)
1) Reading
I ended up liking Reif Larsen's I Am Radar quite a lot, because it turned out not to be so desperately pretentious as its summary makes it sound. On the other hand, it's not nearly as deep as it wants to be or as its reviews make it sound. It gestures towards a lot of ideas that never quite coalesce; it also suffers from the main protagonist, whose story is supposed to tie all the rest together, being a deeply uninteresting straight-white-nerd-guy whose supposed growth during the narrative doesn't compel or even ring true. The secondary characters, however, are all much better and their stories, which take up a large chunk of the book, are mostly why I liked it.
I gave up on Hanif Kureishi's The Last Word after about ten pages, upon realizing that I did not give a damn about any of these people and couldn't bear another hundred pages in their company. I get the impression the book has garnered a reputation for audacity, perhaps because the antagonist is a lightly disguised avatar of Salman Rushdie, but I think unless you approach it from the position that saying Rushdie is an overrated jerk is shocking, there's nothing interesting here.
As always, I've had much more fun with genre fiction.
graculus recced me Max Gladstone's Craft sequence (Three Parts Dead, Two Serpents Rise, and Full Fathom Five), and they're pretty great. The worldbuilding is deliciously deep, but here's the basic premise: gods exist, but some human beings have learned the Craft (which is magic, only both magic and divinity work essentially by contracts and have a strong legal component), which has allowed some people in some places to defeat their local gods. Sometimes this is a good thing, but not always/necessarily, and in any case it always creates new problems. Each of the three books has a different protagonist and is set in a different place, so the worldbuilding continues to be rich and juicy throughout. One thing I love about these is that the setting is recognizably modern despite the magic (there are corporations, lawyers, a global economy) and not some vaguely-imagined Middle Ages. Plus the stories are gripping, the prose is very good, and the characterization's strong. As a bonus, there are a lot of well-written women characters (including the protagonists of two of the books), many people of color including most of the main characters (the protagonist of Two Serpents Rising is whitewashed on the cover, but he's not white), and several queer characters (none in the first book, but the second and third make up for it). I recommend these highly. 2) Listening
I've discovered BBC radio's In Our Time podcasts, and now I know what I'm doing for the next year or so. These are roughly 45-minute discussions on various topics, with genuine major scholars in the field, geared towards the layperson who may not have much background. Since I'm at least mildly interested in almost everything, these are catnip to me. I've recently listened to episodes about the Aztecs, the samurai, the Nicene Creed, the Cambrian explosion, and the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and I just downloaded a ton more.
Cooking:
Nothing very interesting. I've been eating a lot of pasta + vegetables, couscous + vegetables, and that sort of thing. I've been trying not to do much new baking because I still have brownies and rugelach in the freezer, though I did make a peach crisp because I had rapidly-ripening peaches and was too lazy to make a proper crust. (I should have made the crust.)
