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What I Just Finished Reading
The Great Firewall of China – James Griffiths
This book was engagingly structured and written but suffered from increasingly lackadaisical editing in its latter chapters.
House of Leaves - Mark Danielewski
The experience of reading House of Leaves is just as important as—sometimes moreso than—the plot itself. If you’re at all interested in reading this book, it’s best to go in completely blind (but for those who aren’t, TV Tropes does the best job I’ve yet found of communicating what it’s like to read this thing). In some ways that’s good, because when you strip away Danielewski’s experimentation House of Leaves is ( cut for spoilers. )
The neat thing about House of Leaves is, of course, how the text on the page mimics the narrative: the typesetting grows increasingly disordered as one character’s grasp on sanity diminishes, readers have to physically manipulate the book to read the section where another character plummets through space, and the text in the chapter where the protagonists explore a chthonic labyrinth is itself a maze that readers must puzzle their way through. Danielewski does a great job skewering critical theory—so great that his parody footnotes and exegesis can be as stupefyingly dull as the academic bloat he’s mocking, even with the puns and other Easter eggs he incorporates. That said, the mock interviews with pop culture darlings including Camille Paglia and Stephen King are about as funny as it gets, and the chapter in which Danielewski foresees both the Black Lives Matter movement and fake news (he wrote House of Leaves in the mid-90s) induces goosebumps.
I’ve read this book twice and I’m not sure whether I’ll read it again, even though I put new pieces of the puzzle together on the second go-through; I’m still not sure whether it’s brilliant or if there’s ultimately no “there” there...or even if that’s its main point. I will say, however, that I’m entirely bemused by readers’ reactions to the house, because ( cut for spoilers. )
The End of Karma – Somini Sengupta
This volume examines the issues confronting India’s post-partition generations, framed through the stories of seven youth including a Maoist insurgent, an adivasi migrant worker, a Hindu nationalist, and a cross-caste couple. Somini was a former New York Times journalist and it shows in her clear, effective prose that seamlessly contextualizes her subjects’ individual experiences in India’s larger societal upheavals. This is just an all-around excellent book.
What I Am Currently Reading
Follow Me to Ground – Sue Rainsford
Still pretty creepy. I should probably stop reading this right before I go to bed.
What I'm Reading Next
This week I picked up Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein, Emily Tesh’s Silver in the Wood (courtesy of Tor), and Wiebe, Upchurch, and Brisson’s Rat Queens vol. 1.
これで以上です。
The Great Firewall of China – James Griffiths
This book was engagingly structured and written but suffered from increasingly lackadaisical editing in its latter chapters.
House of Leaves - Mark Danielewski
The experience of reading House of Leaves is just as important as—sometimes moreso than—the plot itself. If you’re at all interested in reading this book, it’s best to go in completely blind (but for those who aren’t, TV Tropes does the best job I’ve yet found of communicating what it’s like to read this thing). In some ways that’s good, because when you strip away Danielewski’s experimentation House of Leaves is ( cut for spoilers. )
The neat thing about House of Leaves is, of course, how the text on the page mimics the narrative: the typesetting grows increasingly disordered as one character’s grasp on sanity diminishes, readers have to physically manipulate the book to read the section where another character plummets through space, and the text in the chapter where the protagonists explore a chthonic labyrinth is itself a maze that readers must puzzle their way through. Danielewski does a great job skewering critical theory—so great that his parody footnotes and exegesis can be as stupefyingly dull as the academic bloat he’s mocking, even with the puns and other Easter eggs he incorporates. That said, the mock interviews with pop culture darlings including Camille Paglia and Stephen King are about as funny as it gets, and the chapter in which Danielewski foresees both the Black Lives Matter movement and fake news (he wrote House of Leaves in the mid-90s) induces goosebumps.
I’ve read this book twice and I’m not sure whether I’ll read it again, even though I put new pieces of the puzzle together on the second go-through; I’m still not sure whether it’s brilliant or if there’s ultimately no “there” there...or even if that’s its main point. I will say, however, that I’m entirely bemused by readers’ reactions to the house, because ( cut for spoilers. )
The End of Karma – Somini Sengupta
This volume examines the issues confronting India’s post-partition generations, framed through the stories of seven youth including a Maoist insurgent, an adivasi migrant worker, a Hindu nationalist, and a cross-caste couple. Somini was a former New York Times journalist and it shows in her clear, effective prose that seamlessly contextualizes her subjects’ individual experiences in India’s larger societal upheavals. This is just an all-around excellent book.
What I Am Currently Reading
Follow Me to Ground – Sue Rainsford
Still pretty creepy. I should probably stop reading this right before I go to bed.
What I'm Reading Next
This week I picked up Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein, Emily Tesh’s Silver in the Wood (courtesy of Tor), and Wiebe, Upchurch, and Brisson’s Rat Queens vol. 1.
これで以上です。
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