Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
If Raymond Chandler tried his hand at science fiction, I think this would be the result. Jonathan Lethem channels Chandler's detective noir and hard-boiled writing style, and adds a kangaroo on the side. The fast and easy quips of Conrad Metcalf are Marlowe incarnate, with a little drugs to smooth out the inconsistencies. At first, I couldn't see the connection Newsweek attributes to Philip K. Dick; the drug use was the obvious choice, but paranoia, puppets, and a mysterious leader pulling the strings are so indicative of any detective mystery that the implication falls a little flat for my taste.

Lethem has given us as much of the bizarre and weird as he has of dark alleys, backroom offices, and deadly dames. The Oakland Easy Bay is sensitive to questions, freely distributing personalized concoctions of a new type of drug that makes forgetting commonplace. Add to this the government's watchful eye on the population's karmic levels and Lethem's California is a breeding zone of docility.

In this dystopic landscape of evolutionary advanced animals and humans, kittens can go to school, lambs can wear clothes, and babies walk the streets with bodies fully mature and grotesquely at odds with their bald, soft heads. If you're not disturbed by this (and really, if you try not to think of how disgusting a walking baby head would actually be), the characters are sound, convincing, a little of something out of one world and into another entirely as accepting as the first. The mysterious murders bring Conrad to such a convoluted and complicated solution, I didn't understand myself how someone so addicted to variations on forgetall could have remembered the details of his clients, much less pieced it all together. But the bottom line? I believed it.


View all my reviews.

Okay guys, so my boyfriend who hasn't read a book since 9th grade wants to read something.

I have no clue what to pick out for him, maybe something by Robert Ludlum??

Advice please! :)

It was bright sunshine in the afternoon, but as I walked down to the department store with my friend, the first couple of clouds moved across the sun:





The massive thunderheads began forming, but they still had their golden lining from the solar light:






Then, behind the water-bearing clouds, the ice-formations started showing, breaking the sunlight into prismatic rainbow colours.




Later on in the evening, it rained heavily..the steady pour of the monsoon rain...clouds are so very beautiful.

I don't have to say to whom this post is dedicated....A-------e!

Bengali literature is full of descriptions of the beauty of the monsoons....

The Mark on the Wall

PERHAPS it was the middle of January in the present that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have been the winter time, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.
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I've been thinking about books that make my mouth water. Not recipe books or specifically foodie books, but fiction books that contain simply lush, amazing descriptions of food.

The first author to spring to mind is Enid Blyton. I loved the Twins at St Clare's series growing up, and I especially loved when the girls had a "midnight feast". They ate wonderfully British things, like tinned peaches, condensed milk, cakes from home, and (on one glorious occasion) sausages. Somehow they located a little portable stove to cook on and they fried up some sausages, trying not to wake the teachers with the smell and the crackling sound.

The other Blyton book series that I remember being great for food-ness was the Magic Faraway Tree series. Remember pop biscuits? The biscuits with a centre of honey that flowed into your mouth when you ate them? Or toffee shocks, which got bigger and bigger and bigger until they exploded into your mouth?

John Grisham books were a delight of my early teen years, and not least because of Grisham's habit of describing exotic (to me, anyway) Southern American food. In The Runaway Jury, for example, there's a scene where the jurors don't get served lunch, so they end up with the judge at a high class Mississippi restaurant, eating amazing seafood, chowder, bisque... Grisham was also a big fan of "sacks" of fast food, such as Mexican and Chinese, and I have to admit that, even though I know fast food like that is fake and plastic-y and horribly bad for me, I'm a sucker for it.

Joanne Harris's Chocolate is a bit obvious, but too mouth-watering to skip over.

Can anyone else think of any books where the food descriptions just make them need to eat?

Series: Bewitching the Dark
Publisher: Silhouette, 2008
Genre: Romance
Sub-genre: Paranormal



Initially, I was amused by the frequent tongue-in-cheek mocking of the genre, in particular when Truvin finds Lucy's stash of romance novels and can't believe the pink floral depictions of vampires. After awhile, though, I found myself starting to wonder how exactly Truvin thought his life was different from any of Lucy's novels. He's a two hundred year old vampire, paranormal bad boy, who meets a delicate mortal woman, falls instantly in love and tones down his violent ways both to protect her and to be a better man, worthy of her love. Which... all seems pretty par for the course. His book might not have pink flowers on the cover, but there are purple butterflies, so I don't know who he thinks he's fooling.

His Forgotten Forever was a light, quick read, and a nice balance between dark and fluffy. The supernatural world took some interesting new twists on the standard, like vampires not being susceptible to crosses or holy objects unless they'd previously been baptized. The bits about the vampires, witches, and werewolves were really well done, and I was a little disappointed these parts weren't more central to the novel. I know what I'm getting into when I pick up a romance novel, the focus is meant to be on the couple and their relationship, but the paranormal bits so far outstripped the rest of the book it wound up being what kept me turning pages.

That's not to say that the characters or the romance between them is bad, but Lucy and Truvin both struck me as being very typical of the genre. Lucy is the sweet, naive philanthropist who has an incessant need to take care of everyone around her, regardless of the cost to herself. She has a tendancy to jump headfirst into everything, relationships included, and is convinced she's in love with Truvin before he even rediscovers he's a vampire. Truvin is a loner, keeping himself distanced from vampires and mortals alike, bent on vengeance for those who have wronged him. Together they find balance somewhere between fluffy puppies and bloodied fangs.

Full review here, spoiler-free.

His Forgotten Forever will be enjoyed by fans of paranormal romance, but ultimately fails to stand out from the sea of vampire love affairs currently saturating the market.

113. Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea: If you're interested in word games or being creative with language, you will absolutely love this book! The action takes place on the fictional island of Nollop, which is named for Nevin Nollop, creator of the famous sentence that contains all 26 letters of the English alphabet: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Nollopians are a hyper-literate bunch who delight in the written word, and they admire their glorious founder with a zeal bordering on idolatry, to the extent of building a monument in his honor with the famous sentence blazoned on it. Then the trouble begins: letters from the monument begin falling off, and the Island Council decides that Nollop is trying to speak from beyond the grave. As a result, each fallen letter must be eradicated from both speech and writing in Nollop. Displeased with the growing atmosphere of totalitarian censorship and terror, young Ella Minnow Pea and her family and friends must race against time to save their beloved language. Since the novel is epistolary in form and consists only of letters to and from Nollopians, fewer and fewer letters are used as the novel progresses. I was amazed at Dunn's ability to communicate meaning without some pretty important letters: at first it was okay, because Z was the first letter to fall, but when they lost D, for example, things got a lot harder! It was an incredibly fun intellectual exercise to read this book and try to discover the solution to Nollop's plight. The book also discussed some serious ideas, including censorship, religion, and civil disobedience. I would definitely recommend this book!

114. Evelyn Waugh, Helena: This novel is a fictionalized account of the life of St. Helena, mother of the Roman emperor Constantine and, as the story goes, finder of the True Cross. In his preface, Waugh states that he's not trying to write history, and admits that there might be some inaccuracies. Rather, he approaches the material as a legend, freely adapting some of the less plausible stories of St. Helena if they were more interesting. As a novel, it's not terribly exciting, but Waugh creates some great characters in Helena herself, her husband Constantius, and most of all Constantine. I thought Waugh's interpretation of his character was very interesting, and not the standard textbook depiction of him. One other thing I really like about this book is that Waugh doesn't try to make his characters speak forced, "ancient-sounding" dialogue. Instead, they use idioms that are contemporary to Waugh's own time, which is a little funny in places ("Bosh," says Helena at one point), but I think it works. It's a good book if you like that kind of thing.

115. Rebecca Shaw, A Country Affair: I wasn't too terribly impressed with this book. The main protagonist is nineteen-year-old Kate, whose A-level scores were not quite good enough to get her into veterinary school. Instead, she becomes a receptionist at a thriving veterinary practice in a small English village. She loves the job and all the people that she meets: Joy, the no-nonsense older woman in charge of staff; Mungo and Miriam Price, owners of the practice; Miss Chillingworth, a pathetically lovable old client; and handsome Australian vet Scott. The novel gets inside each character's head in turn, exposing years-old secrets and unrequited loves. In the main plotline, Kate falls in love, gets her heart broken, and is stalked by an obsessive ex-boyfriend. I just couldn't bring myself to care much about the characters. They, and their problems, all seemed to lack depth. Kate is insipid, Scott and Joy are cliches, the ex-boyfriend Adam is completely unbelievable as a character. The only person who interested me was Joy's husband Duncan, but he wasn't developed much. There are two sequels to this novel, but I don't think I'll read them.

(Cross-posted to my journal and 

100ormorebooks.)

 

Theodore Dalrymple

Novelist J. G. Ballard exposes the fragility of the affluent society.
Winter 2008

Despite unprecedented prosperity, we British are not as happy as we should be, at least if the causes of human happiness were mainly economic. It turns out, however, that ever-rising consumption is not the same thing as ever-greater contentment. Yet no one is quite sure what else is necessary. Antidepressants in the water supply, perhaps? Urban life—and in the modern world, most life is urban—has an unpleasant edge in Britain, even in the midst of plenty. You hardly dare look a stranger in the eye, lest he take violent offense; the young, poor and prosperous alike, have imposed a curfew on the old after dark, and on everyone on Friday and Saturday nights; the age at which fellow citizens provoke fear declines constantly, so that one avoids even aggregations of eight-year-olds, as though they were piranhas in a jungle river.

The British state, for its part, is able to bully and regulate at will, thanks to technology—yet it seems to carry out these actions for their own sake, not for any higher purpose. The privatization of morality is so complete that no code of conduct is generally accepted, save that you should do what you can get away with; sufficient unto the day is the pleasure thereof. Nowhere in the developed world has civilization gone so fast and so far into reverse as here, at least to the extent to which civilization is made up of the small change and amenities of life.

No contemporary British writer captures our malaise better than does J. G. Ballard. In a writing career dating back half a century now, he has explored with acuity, from the aerie of his respectable suburban home outside London, the anxieties of modern existence—of what he calls the marriage of reason and nightmare. The reason is our technological advance, the nightmare the uses to which we have put it.
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No, that doesn't mean 50 medals, it means India's position in the medal tally in the Olympics is 50!

I just read Prem's entry about this....

That reminds me of one more anecdote about my brother. The unfailingly happy boy brought home a very bad report card. One being asked why he had such low marks, he said, "But see here! I have a very high rank!" (He was 25th out of 27 children!)

It was late in the evening on Sunday, and in the twilight I saw this little sunbird trying to eat a fruit as large as itself, whole! The image is grainy and bad, but the greedy little bird made me laugh outright, so....



Food...no one is proof against gluttony.

Mari, a young, geeky student of Chinese, is reading at Denny's in the middle of the night when she's approached by Takahashi, trombonist-about-to-turn-lawyer with whom she once went on an uneventful date. Later, apparently on Takahashi's reference, she's asked for help by the former-female-pro-wrestler manager of a nearby love hotel ("love ho"): some angry salaryman just beat up a Chinese prostitute in one of the rooms, stole her clothes and scrammed. Mari helps the girl get back to her "manager", chats with the love ho staff for a while, then goes on a sort of miniature date with Takahashi.

Meanwhile, Mari's legendarily beautiful sister Eri sleeps in her room as a masked man watches her from the screen of her unplugged television set. She's been asleep for months and shows no signs of stirring. For a while she finds herself seemingly awake, alone on the room on the television screen, but then she returns to her bed. An exhausted Mari joins her.

* * *
After Dark begins with this sentence: "Eyes mark the shape of the city."

Aw, sheezis. If I didn't know this was a Murakami book — or at least just a Japanese book, which lets me explain it away as a linguistic incompatibility — I'd have set it right down after reading those first seven words. I cannot stand — cannot stand — these sentences you find in literary novels whose components seem to add up to a coherent whole but don't. "Eyes mark the shape of a city"? I mean, zuh? So are someone's eyes tracing the outline of a city, maybe? Or is someone using their laser-beam eyes to etch a city skyline into something? Or is someone passing a road sign depicting a pair of eyes, which somehow signifies the approach of the shape of the a distant city? As Lisa Simpson once said in response to a theater marquee advertising a "Yahoo Serious festival", "I know all those words, but that sign makes no sense."

But this is a Murakami book, so I hung in there, desperate for another hit of his calm, precise prose. I'm happy to report that "Eyes mark the shape of the city" is the only "Eyes mark the shape of a city" sentence in the entire book; all the rest of them activate actual brain states. Good brain states, too; this is a much better book than the break-even Kafka on the Shore.

Now, these aren't meant to be reviews, per se, so I'll try to keep the evaluative stuff to a minimum, but it's worth noting that Murakami gets a much more enjoyable result from a structure very similar to that of his previous novel: two threads, one mostly realistic and one mostly surrealistic, that ultimately converge. (I doubt I need to indicate which, here, is which.) Also as with Kafka, I found the realistic thread grippingly well-observed and the unrealistic thread kind of enh; every chapter about Eri I took as a breather between the real chapters, the ones about her much more conscious sister.

The book's weaker half does have style to recommend it, though; in it, Murakami switches to a pumped-up screenplay-like prose that describes how the reader would be viewing the "action" — primarily a motionless, expressionless man and a sleeping girl, after all, though not solely — were it depicted in a film rather than in text. For example:

Just now, it seemed there might have been a tiny movement at the corner of Eri Asai's mouth. No, we might not even be able to call it a movement. A tremor so microscopic we can't be sure we even saw it. It might have been just a flicker of the screen. A trick of the eyes. A visual hallucination aroused by our desire to see some kind of change. To ascertain the truth, we focus more intently on the screen.

As if sensing our will, the camera lens draws nearer to its subject. Eri's mouth appears in close-up. We hold our breath and stare at the screen, waiting patiently for whatever is to come next. A tremor of the lips again. A momentary spasm of the flesh. Yes, the same movement as before. Now there is no doubt. It was no optical illusion. Something is beginning to happen inside Eri Asai.

He's an ace at this, which, considering his descriptive strength and ability to conjure up a mood even in more standard writing, comes as no big surprise; were I in the mood, I bet I could construct some grandiose argument about how Murakami is "artistically" a filmmaker, but just happens to manipulate words instead of celluloid, that he makes "prose films", etc. But I'll leave that one as a freebie for the lit grad students out there. You're welcome.

"Evocative prose" is a fairly common phrase to associate with Murakami, and on reflection, yep, evocativeness is his forté. As an exercise in sketching the feel of life for those who operate nocturnally in the big city, After Dark succeeds: the alienated student, the quitting jazz musician, the retired brawler, the runaway love ho staff, the intense programmer; they're all here, living and working in that isolated, focused-yet-floaty way you do when it's 3:00 in the morning. And at no extra charge, Murakami'll throw in a whole other section where, in contrast to the characters who stay awake when society expects them to be asleep, one character stays asleep when society expects her to stay awake! And if you call now, you'll get some Ginsu knives too.

Also, since the story linearly covers the time period of 11:56 p.m. through 6:52 a.m. and is told in only 191 pages, you can read it in faster than real time. There aren't many books you can say that about. (I suppose Nicholson Baker got there first.)

* * *
Though I'm not enough of a transhumanist to convince myself that I'll one day eliminate sleep entirely, I've long fantasized about the idea of a 24-hour world. (This, alongside being able to freeze time — which Nicholson Baker also took on, though he fumbled it — ranks as my top fantasy.) In a 24-hour world, no business or public service closes. No service is ever unavailable. Some people work the standard 9-5, sure, but others work the 5-1, or the 1-9, or the 9, 11, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 10; they work any schedule imaginable, in fact. With human activity spread around the clock, road traffic and human crowding during the rush hours both thin out. There's less crush, and there's also less desolation; no more walking down dark, deserted streets, because at least a decent fraction of the population will still be up and around taking care of business at any time, no matter how 3:00 a.m.-y. Best of all, we do away with the dreadful "lunch hour", which today puts you in line behind ten khaki'd, polo-shirted guys at the Quizno's at noon. Man, I hate the lunch hour.

Outside of NYC — and even in the Big Apple, the average sketchiness of those out and about shoots up, as it were, during the wee hours — America hasn't done much to instantiate my fantasy. But where has the 24-hour lifestyle made inroads? Tokyo. From all I've heard, if you're going to be nocturnal, do it there, where goods and services come your way all night and all day, and not just at Denny's, which is open 24-hours even in, say, Muskogee. Fear of looking like an animu geek is one reason why I study Korean rather than Japanese, but man, if Seoul doesn't get with the program...

After three complaints from parents, Random House is to amend 'My Sister Jodie'

* Alison Flood
* guardian.co.uk,


Parents' complaints about inappropriate language in Jacqueline Wilson's latest novel My Sister Jodie have persuaded its publisher to replace the offending word.

Random House Children's Books received three complaints from parents about the use of the word "twat" in the book, which is aimed at children aged 10 years and over. Wilson, a former Children's Laureate, is an enormously popular author, and the book has already sold 150,000 copies in the UK since publication in March. But the complaints have meant that the publisher will replace the word with "twit" when it comes to reprint the novel.
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Synopsis

It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio’s Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighbourhood butcher, seems to have gone mad – mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy.
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http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/blogs/show_entry/389


How do we make BBMP accountable for the money they spend so recklessly?

I was travelling by bus and I was idly contemplating the way women dress....here are two images.




That was the decoration on the over-everything-else black garment that a Muslim woman was wearing, isn't it beautiful?


And this is another woman's foot:




I loved the toe-ring, the anklet, the bright salwar, and the design on the sandal...

At a wedding recently, I was looking around at all the sarees and the jewellery that the women wore, and was enjoying myself immensely. But I am not a jewellery/saree person myself...the last time I bought/designed any jewellery was when my daughter got married, and have never felt the urge to buy a saree or a piece of jewellery since then. But I enjoy looking!

I think often of Asha Bhonsle's words during an interview. When asked her opinion about remixes, she said, "Buddhi kO jitnA bhee zevar pehnAO, buddhi to buddi hee hai!" (No matter how much jewellery you put on an old woman, a hag is a hag!"

When women are young..their youth is a beauty in itself, and probably they don't need jewellery at all; when they are old, no amount of jewellery will help in bringing back the radiance of youth! ....so why does jewellery sell so extremely well?!

One of the people who stands very high on my "EXPHO" (Excellent Photographers) list is yathin. I am sure he will be horrified at this compliment. But of the many people I know, he takes such excellent images, and his love of the subject just sings from every frame.

Here are some photographs he has just posted:


http://yathin.livejournal.com/254818.html


I can't compare the photographs. I just look, and enjoy each one. No matter if I have the bestest camera in the whole world...I could never, ever, produce images like these.

A couple of them brought involuntary tears to my eyes. They were not tears of joy or sorrow...it's an interesting concept I have learnt in my life, that there can be tears of beauty. I have shed tears of beauty when I finally saw the Pieta by Michaelangelo. I shed them when I was in the small public terrace in Trump Tower in Manhattan, looked up at the sun right overhead, and saw two perfect concentric rainbows, which I have never seen before or after. I have shed them when I seen the Himalayas, no matter how many times.

Thank you for those images, Yathin.

I first read Philip Roth about four months ago and thought 'now here is someone worth reading more of.' Now, apart from an escape into the occasional thriller [and a 1000+ page novel on London, naturally called 'London' and my fiction reading, I can't find an author to equal him. At this rate I'll have read his novels, all 22 before the year is out and then what? Can anyone suggest a novelist, American or English that might break my habit? I may as well plan a thesis on him!

Crossposted in bookshare