Books
what i've been reading
The Brave Cowboy -- Edward Abbey
The strongest points were the aesthetics of the writing. By this I mean the way that things like landscapes and characters were described. Abbey did a great job of creating vivid scenes
with vivid characters. Early on in the book as Jack is riding into town he hops of his horse speaking quietly and affectionately to it as he hand rolls a cigarette and tosses some coffee
beans into a pot, he smokes through the cigarette and drinks the coffee straight from the pot with the grounds still in the water and you immediately get a feel for the character. I also
appreciate the directness of the themes and metaphors used throughout the book.
The Sun Also Rises -- Earnest Hemingway
A perfectly meaningless plot. The style of writing characters that are almost self inserts has become very fascinating to me. I've heard that was what this book is though I am not sure
exactly to what degree. The conversation with the protaganist has with the young bullfighter is left in my head since reading this. Each character is very well crafted and fits together in
such a dysfunctional way that it makes for a great character driven story even as the characters don't seem to be especially interested in much as they travel Europe. A friend who read
this book would regularly order hard boiled eggs at coffee shops because of Bill, I'm confident nobody ever understood the joke of that.
Post Office -- Charles Bukowski
My favorite scene was when the streets start to flood and Bukowski has to swim out of the delivery van and abandons it and goes home. A great book, along with many of his other book,
about working meaningless jobs and finding it near impossible to care beyond what it takes to stay employed. In this book though being a postal worker took increasing physical and
mental effort as Bukowski is forced to memorize streets and intersections and take tests on neighborhoods as other employees are regularly dropped for failing these high stakes tests. I
read later that this had at least some grounding in reality which seems bizarre in modern times with maps on phones.
Ham on Rye -- Charles Bukowski
Among my favorite endings to any book. Bukowski goes through his childhood as he describes himself as being horrifically scarred and disfigured from a special type of acne, he is
socially outcast and his only friends are other outcasts. He goes along with them with an extremely judgmental internal dialouge never acknowledging the irony that he is not around them by
choice but because of his own circumstances. At one point him and his friend go to an airshow that culminates in a race where most of the planes fall out of the sky killing or severely
injuring the pilots. I love this scene because of the absurdity of the event but more so because of the audience reaction or lack of reaction to the tragedy. In the end of the book
Bukowski goes to an arcade and challenges a disabled child to a game of rock em sock robots and loses because his robot in the game has only one working arm.
Junkie -- William S. Burroughs
Burroughs writes about an exagerated version of himself in this book. It is such an honest book in some ways, maybe not even necessarily about his own life entirely, but in the telling
of the story. It is fair to say that anyone going through the events of this book would not give such an honest account of the events as the narrator does here. Starting off as a trust
fund kid he loses all his money going to school, the bumming in Europe, then coming home and still not finding work. Once his trust runs out, he becomes a NY bum. He starts doing Heroin
and "lushing" which is jive for pickpocketing drunk people on the subway. He tries to get clean a couple times and fails, starts selling for a while and being very critical of his
"lowlife" customers of which he is largely identical. The book ends with everyone he was close with dead or estranged and he talks for a bit about a telepathic drug called yage which he
wants to set out to acquire.
Naked Lunch -- William S. Burroughs
This book was the subject of a profanity trial when it was published and the supreme court luckily ended up siding with free speech but many people wanted this book banned because of
its extensive discussion of sex, drugs, and violence in a manner that didn't form into a single cohesive narrative. Rather the book functions as a comprehensive criticism of various forms
of societal control through short sometimes interconnected stories. There was a lot I missed when reading this book initially and online discussions of the book are helpful in
understanding the nuances of the messages. The wikipedia page for the book is a great start. The book itself entertaining, it feels like the novel version of todays short form content in a
way; with jarring switches between scenes each crafted to jump out and demand your attention.
The Left Hand of Darkness -- Ursala K. Le Guin
I've never been so jealous of a fantasy/sci-fi society as I have with Karhide in this book. The environmental storytelling portrays a culture of people who have more faith in eachother
than institutions. This is demonstrated by the monarch's impotence when it comes to enforcing laws in his country or demanding things from his citizens. Demonstrated further by the fact that
in their entire history there has never been a war. The greatest part of this book above all was the parables. These short biblical style stories serve to show the creation of the
culture. From the bizarre creation myth to the story of the two opposing tribe leaders, each one of these is impressively well crafted to demonstrate how environment, gender, and oral
tradition shaped the rich society that Le Guin crafted.
Kindred -- Octavia Butler
Kindred is a fast paced book that is hard to put down once you've picked it up. The thing that stuck out to me the most when reading this was the nuanced depiction of christianity in
the book. We see white and black members of the clergy interact with slaves and it demonstrates of the roles that religion can play as a source of community or as a source of oppression
and institutional strength. The white clergymen come to the plantation that Dana has been transported back in time to and they give the kids candys and teach the specific cherry picked
bible verses that seem to justify the institution of slavery. This is contrasted to the black priest who speaks at a slaves funeral and reads from Ecclesiastes and book of Job which both
can be interpretted as being against slavery with Ecclesiastes saying to toil endlessly is to waste life and Job remarking that in death slaves are free from their masters. The one thing
that held this book back for me was the infallibility of Dana, the main character, who seems too perfect and too easily adaptable though this is more of an issue earlier in the book.