(very) short book review, #13- The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest
Are you going to read this? Of course you are, because you read the first two and you need to find out what happens. It’s a bit slow to start and not my favorite of the three, but it’s good. Even though this wraps things up pretty well, I almost threw a chair when I found out that Larsson had the outlines for ten books in the series when he died.
(extremely) quick book review, #12- The Girl Who Played With Fire
I think this is my favorite of the three. Just shut up and read it. There’s even a link to the audiobook on the book list page.
quick book review #11- The Death of Bunny Munro.
Comparisons between Cave’s two novels are inevitable, so let’s get it out of the way. If And the Ass Saw the Angel was Cave’s rambling, epic Blood Meridian, then this is his cleaner, more clear-eyed ..Road. Completely different but still completely gruesome and great. Eucrid Eucrow may have been an anti-hero, but Bunny Munro is not. He’s just…anti.
(See the rest of the book list here.)
quick book review #5- Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood.
I can’t believe it took me so long to read this book. I loved The Handmaid’s Tale and Cat’s Eye but I think this one is even better. I hesitate to call it “science fiction” or “dystopia” but of course it is both. It’s just that it’s so original. Genetic manipulation, nature vs nurture, the end of humanity as we know it, what parents do and what it means, class warfare, the things we do to each other. Highly recommended.
(rest of the book list here.)
(UPDATE- see a note on The Year of the Flood here.)
“What is toast?” says Snowman to himself, once they’ve run off. Toast is when you take a piece of bread- What is bread? Bread is when you take some flour- What is flour? We’ll skip that part, it’s too complicated. Bread is something you can eat, made from a ground-up plant and shaped like a stone. You cook it… Please, why do you cook it? Why don’t you just eat the plant? Never mind that part- Pay attention. You cook it, and then you cut it into slices, and you put a slice into a toaster, which is a metal box that heats up with electricity- What is electricity? Don’t worry about that. While the slice is in the toaster, you get out the butter- butter is a yellow grease, made from the mammary glands of- skip the butter. So, the toaster turns the slice of bread black on both sides with smoke coming out, and then this “toaster” shoots the slice up into the air, and it falls on the floor…
“Forget it,” says Snowman. “Let’s try again.” Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained by any rational means.
Toast is me.
I am toast.
-(excerpt from Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood)
quick book review #4- Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo.
One of my very favorite novels. While most definitely a testament against war, this is not an “anti-war” book in the usual sense. I don’t do bullshit sentimentality and this novel has none. It’s fucked up, hallucinatory, beautiful, and brilliant. Our narrator, Joe, is in a hospital bed, having had his limbs and face (and with it, his ability to see, hear, and speak) blown off while fighting in World War 1. He remains conscious and able to reason. Trumbo also directed the 1971 film adaptation which is worth watching. (PS: skip the absolutely dreadful and tacked-on Cindy Sheehan intro in the recent editions of the book.)
See the rest of the book list here.
quick book review #3- The Stranger, Albert Camus
Short, fiction, pre-war Algiers, heat, ennui, doom, prison. Of course it is great. One note: I prefer the Stuart Gilbert translation to some others. (example: Gilbert’s “the benign indifference of the world” vs another translation, “the gentle indifference of the world.” Indifference is not gentle and that doesn’t sound like the tone of the rest of the book anyway. So I forgive Gilbert a few British-isms like “good and proper.”)
You can see the entire book list here.
(I post short reviews as I finish books from The Book List.)
I don’t really think that Judith Butler has weak ideas or poor reasoning. But seriously: impenetrable fog. I’m not an idiot or afraid of dense/challenging works. Elaine Scarry, Michel Foucault and Susan Sontag aren’t easy reads, for example, but the experience isn’t like pulling toenails. I agree with much of what Butler has to say but reading this was almost unbearable. Check this out first/instead.
Goal #11- read everything on the book list.
(Please note that this is not a “recommended reading” list. I expect the majority of these books to be good if not great, but I’m sure I’ll give some of these books shitty reviews & wont even complete others. Getting through the book list is just one of my goals.)
Completed books link to their short review.
Fiction/Poetry:
Margaret Atwood- Oryx & Crake
John Joseph Adams, ed.- Wastelands
Russell Banks- The Darling
The Sweet Hereafter
William Burroughs- Junky (free audio download)
Albert Camus- The Stranger
The Plague
Nick Cave- The Death of Bunny Monroe
Louis-Ferdinand De Celine- Journey to the End of Night
Death on the Installment Plan
Amber Dawn, ed.- Fist of the Spider Woman
Fyodor Dostoyevsky- The Brothers Karamazov
Notes of the Underground
Leslie Feinberg- Stone Butch Blues
Gustav Flaubert- Madame Bovary (free audio download)
Jonathan Franzen- Freedom
Stieg Larsson- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Girl Who Played With Fire (free audio download)
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (free audio download)
Cormac McCarthy- Suttree
Francis Picabia- I am a Beautiful Monster
George Reavey- The New Russian Poets
Peter Rock- My Abandonment
Penelope Scambly Schott- The Pest Maiden: A Story Of Lobotomy
Jonathan Swift- A Modest Proposal (free audio download)
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore- So Many Ways to Sleep Badly
Dalton Trumbo- Johnny Got His Gun
Non-fiction:
C.B.S. Alife Allah- The Hood Health Handbook
Theodore W. Allen- The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control
The Anarchist Tension (free audio download)
Patrick Anderson- So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, & the Morbidity of Resistance
Anti-Work Essays (free audio download)
Hannah Arendt- The Origins of Totalitarianism
David Bakan- Disease, Pain, & Sacrifice: Toward a Psychology of Suffering
Fray Baroque & Tegan Eanelli- Queer Ultraviolence: A Bash Back Anthology
Rudolph M. Bell- Holy Anorexia
Nellie Bly- 10 Days in a Madhouse (free audio download)
Charles Bowden- Dreamland: The Way out of Juarez
Daniel Burton-Rose & Ward Churchill- Creating a Movement with Teeth
Judith Butler- Gender Trouble
Caroline Walker Bynum- Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women
Ching en Chen, eds.- The Revolution Starts at Home
Kim Chernin- The Hungry Self
The Obsession
Voltairine deCleyre- Selected Writings
Written In Red: Selected Poems
Antonio D’Ambrosio- Let Fury Have the Hour
Guy Debord- Society of the Spectacle
(free audio: Thoughts on Society of the Spectacle)
Virginie Despuentes- King Kong Theory
Phoolan Devi- Bandit Queen
Bram Dijkstra- Idols of Perversity
Rosemary Dinnage- Alone! Alone!: Lives of Some Outsider Women
Eknath Easwaran- Meditation
Maud Ellmann- The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment
Sylvia Federici- Caliban and the Witch
Leslie Feinberg- Trans Liberation
Michel Foucault- The Foucault Reader
Peter Gelderloos- How Nonviolence Protects the State
Sander L. Gilman- Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS
Peter Glassgold- Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth
Ted Gott- Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS
David Graeber- Possibilities
John Michael Greer- The Long Descent
Dianne Grob- What the Heart Wants
Judith Lewis Herman- Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence- from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
Thea Hilman- Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word)
Christopher Hitchens- The Portable Atheist (free audio download)
John Holloway- Crack Capitalism
The Invisible Committee- The Coming Insurrection
Alejandro Jodorowsky- The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky…
Ian Johnston- Bad Seed: The Biography of Nick Cave
Annette Kobak- Isabelle
Jon Krakauer- Under the Banner of Heaven
Jaron Lanier- You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
Nella Larsen- Passing (free audio download)
Chris Lehmann- Rich People Things
Lawrence LeShan- How to Meditate
Daniel J. Levitin- This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
David Lynch- Catching the Big Fish
Tommi Avicoli Mecca- Smash the Church, Smash the State
Joan Nestle- GENDERqUEER
Saul Newman- From Bakunin to Lacan
Freddy Perlman- Letters of Insurgents (free audio download)
Kembra Pfahler & Kathy Grayson- Beautalism
Simon Read- Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Anarchism, But Were Afraid to Ask…
Roselyne Rey- The History of Pain
Anne Rothe- Popular Trauma Culture
David J. Rothman- The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic
Geneen Roth- Appetites
Breaking Free
Feeding the Hungry Heart
When Food is Love
Richard D. Ryder- Painism: A Modern Morality
Oliver Sacks- The Mind’s Eye (free audio download)
Edward W. Said- Orientalism
Elaine Scarry- The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
Resisting Representation
Julie Serrano- Whipping Girl
Rebecca Sonlit- A Paradise Built in Hell
Susan Sontag- Regarding the Pain of Others
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore- Nobody Passes
That’s Revolting
Why are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots
Camille de Toledo- Coming of Age at the End of History
Bob Torres- Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights
Walter Vandereycken- From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls: The History of Self-Starvation
Kristin Williams- Our Enemies in Blue
Jillian Wise- The Amputees Guide to Sex
Marion Woodman- The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation
Carla Yanni- The Architecture of Madness
