“You know, there’s a slight possibility I’m so used to not saying what I mean that I don’t really even know what I mean anymore.”
I wanna be like this guy. Preferably his creative side, not his depressive side.
Category: English
EARWORM GARDEN // OPETH – SORCERESS
Holy sheat, the opening riff is incredibly catchy. And while I dislike 60Hz for live-action video, I must say I was amazed at what it can do for animation and this music video in particular.
Also see: Haxan (related to the lyrics)
REVIEW: HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I read this on my phone.
Hey look! A novel about a guy in a corporate time machine killing/getting killed by his future/past self and getting all paradoxanalytical about it! That’s a word I just invented, by the way. It describes the way a lot of science fiction novels try to express and explain paradox just by throwing more words at you. It sort of works like writing a recipe for a cake just by using the chemical compounds and formulas involved, complete with instructions using moles for ingredient mass and the Kelvin scale for when it’s time for the cake to hit the oven.
Let’s get back to the book. It was just a ceaseless bout of self-reference. The premise was interesting and the writing had some inspired moments idea-wise, at least when it didn’t come out as narrated by a completely socially incompetent nerd – which the protagonist actually was, by the way… huh, maybe he was a well-written character after all and not just mirroring Mr. Yu himself… It didn’t take long, however, for all the meta to become too much for me. That and the oddly-used jargon too rigid to peer through, or the “science fiction” part of the story too often spoken about, described, but not represented in an engaging or memorable way. “Oh, this machine has permitted the existence, trademarking and patenting of entire universes”. Sounds great, it does, but where did you go with that Mr. YU?
It all felt like reading the diary of a Companion Cube (yes, I’m old) that suddenly through some bug in Portal’s code (the 2007 game we all loved) turned into a sentient hypercube and got existential agony. I respect the cube’s feelings but, yeah, I have no idea what being a hypercube would or should feel like. The protagonist was human, but his feelings came off as little more than the hearts the Companion Cubes have painted on them in Portal. Programmed into him, just like they were programmed into them, and just like they were programmed into the couple of sentient-like operating systems he had in his TARDIS – I mean time machine – I mean TARDIS; it even says in the book the time machine had the shape and size of a phone booth. Come on.
While in theory I should have enjoyed reading page after page of convoluted twisting thoughts on the paradoxical nature of time as part of the physical world and then some, I just couldn’t get into it.
Yes, left-brained. This book was left-brained through and through.
SHARY-CARY TAB RELEASE: CHARLIE KAUFMAN, MIND CONTROL, ZOMBIE ANTS, FUNGI AND ALCOHOL
Challenge: spot the single thematic thread running through these two videos.
By the way, that ant fungus is 100% creepy, man…
REVIEW: TAO TE CHING: A BOOK ABOUT THE WAY AND THE POWER OF THE WAY
Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way by Lao Tzu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is an edition of the Tao Te Ching adapted by Ursula K. Le Guin.
I was tempted to end my review here and now so as not to break the perfection of the above sentence. It’s an edition made with affection, seriousness and awareness of the changing permanence that has led us people of the 21st century looking for guidance and wisdom in books set in the distant future (Le Guin’s novels) and in the distant past (this book).
Tao Te Ching adapted by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s as good as it sounds and then some: in my mind the definitive version of this widely-translated ancient book of wisdom for the contemporary person.
REVIEW: THE FIRST FIFTEEN LIVES OF HARRY AUGUST
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Caught it in audiobook format.
I was expecting something in the vain of Replay, the book that, so they say, inspired the movie Groundhog Day. In Replay, the protagonist goes over the same ~25 years again and again and lives the period between the ’60s and the ’80s countless times. Here, it’s the period between Harry August’s birth in 1918 and his eventual death in the ’90s of the same illness every time (I forget what it is) that goes over and over and over.
Clearly, if you cannot see the point of time-loop stories such as these, the premise might sound boring. And in the case of Harry August it did get boring at some point. I thought character development was rather shallow for all the lives they had gone through; yes, they, because—minor spoilers ahead—Harry isn’t the only person to have the gift of apparent immortality in his world. There’s a whole club of them, in fact, but at no point during the story did I feel as if the lives and storylines of the other characters really matter. To top it all off, the bad guy’s motive was very hazy and his relationship with Harry could have been more meaningful and intricate. It was an opportunity lost, especially at a point closer to the end of the book when everything, or so I thought, pointed to Harry having actually fallen in love with the bad guy. Claire North didn’t go through with that, though.
I realise it must be very difficult to write characters that are immortal in the conventional sense while managing to weave a narrative that makes them neither amazingly powerful on the one hand— still somewhat relatable—nor too much like a mere mortal in their wishes, desires and motivations on the other. Harry August and many of the book’s other special characters seemed to fall closer into the latter part of the spectrum above—they had all this power, yet could do so relatively little with it to break their curse of what the Buddhist would call samsara, the pains of (repeating) earthly existence.
What’s more, the world itself didn’t change almost at all between Harry’s different incarnations (if you exclude the plot-related accelerating technological progress), which disappointed me a lot since half the reason I read books like this is for the alternate histories and timelines that emerge. Replay, again, did a better job.
All in all Harry August was an okay book. I found Claire North’s rationalistic, deterministic, somewhat strict writing style enjoyable and quite fitting, and props go to her for writing a book such as this in her ’20s. Regrettably though it fell short in most other respects. It didn’t use its own material sufficiently well, I found.
In other words, I would recommend Replay before The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August if you want to read about a character who goes through time loops.
PS: I went back and read my review for Replay. I seriously remember I had enjoyed it more. Well if you look at that!
REVIEW: INVISIBLE CITIES
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Zenobia, the city on stilts. Vitoriana first told me about this book and sung its praise by describing the mental picture of this city in particular.
Invisible Cities is another of those difficult-to-review books I’ve been going through lately, although perhaps “trudging through” would be a more accurate description. Another one enjoyed in audiobook format, too, and another one I couldn’t concentrate on and retain as well as I would have liked. I have walking, running, wandering through wheat fields, traversing rocky capes and enjoying less-or-more-than-imaginary landscapes in Samothraki to blame. Or it could just be my complete inability to focus on three things at a time—in this case my ears, my visible eyes, and my inner eye. It does sound just a bit too much, now that I mention it.
What I can say is that Invisible Cities turned out to be a very interesting idea of a book—or is it a book of an idea? Marco Polo visits Mongol leader, tells him of his travels to incredible cities far and wide—most of them named curiously similar to ancient-sounding Greek and Latin female names, some rather common in Greece even today—and proceeds to have deep discussion with the Mongol leader (sounds a bit oxymoronic as I’m writing it) on the nature of language, experience, travelling, story-telling… the general business of empire-ruling and noblesse.
Those invisible cities of Marco’s all have some distinctive fantastical characteristic: one’s buildings have no walls, the pipelines defining the cityscape; Zenobia, pictured above, is built on stilts (like Venice, just without the water—Venice, as Marco Polo’s hometown, also plays a rather central role in this book, perhaps as the archetypical invisible city bar none, just as big a mystery to Kublai Khan as the rest of this book architectural and cultural urban menagerie); another still is a meeting place for merchants who trade stories instead of wares. One city is special in that all visitors remember it perfectly just by visiting it once, while another is its visitor’s memories of it. And so it goes.
Invisible Cities is highly structured yet defies usual narrative conventions; it is abstract, exploring imaginary realities through the kind of what-ifs I’ve most often found in science fiction, yet it does so by looking at human history and existence as a whole, rather than at just its future. Calvino’s language is descriptive while being poetic and profound, inviting the reader’s inner eye to see the Invisible. In all honesty, the vibe I got from this book is that of a geometry-twisting, meta philosophical indie video game in the vain of Fez or The Stanley Parable.
Would Italo Calvino have been a genius game developer had he been a millennial?
Invisible Cities is just one of these books that stands out just from how different and unique it is and how ahead of its time I perceive it today to have been. Or maybe it wasn’t ahead of its time at all: we’ve just internalised precious little about the intellectual zeitgeist of the ’60s and ’70s and the early days of radical postmodernism in literature. Could it be that instead of them being ahead of their time, it’s us who are lagging behind and have progressed less than we think we have, perceiving our intellectual maturity as greater than it actually is?
REVIEW: SAMARKAND
Samarkand by Amin Maalouf
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Went into this book completely blind apart from the name of the writer which sounded sort of familiar.
I quite enjoyed the book’s first part, set in medieval Central Asia. I don’t think I would have been able to follow the court intrigue the visionary poet Omar Khayyam found himself in as well as I did if I hadn’t played Crusader Kings II as an emir or sheikh a couple of times. You might take that as a suggestion to play Crusader Kings II before reading Samarkand, if you wish. Actually, no: you should definitely take it as a suggestion to play Crusader Kings II, even if you never ever end up reading Samarkand!
Apart from the plot involving the various characters, I thought the progression within the specific time frame worked really well, and I found the story of the Assassin fort and its spiritual liberation through Khayyam’s ambiguous poetry deeply satisfying. It’s historical fiction done well, with just enough details to help create vivid mental images and just the right amount of vagueness and mystery thrown in to make for a pleasant, flowing read.
That said, I still haven’t checked whether there’s any semblance of truth in Samarkand’s portrayal of the story of the book’s central piece, Khayyam’s magnum opus, the Rubaiyyat, nor have I really checked whether the poet Khayyam actually existed or not, or to what extent the story Samarkand tells is a story purely invented by Maalouf. I suppose there must be some truth in it, as the millennium-old poems themselves, wherever they appear in the book, were quite a pleasure to read, and believe me, you would never catch me saying that I’m big on traditional poetry. In any case, after this experience, I have zero interest in finding out the “true” story of Khayyam and his timeless tome, whatever it might be; some illusions are best left unbroken.
Sadly, the second part of the book which is set in 19th and 20th century Iran and tells the story of how the original manuscript ended up sinking with the most famous shipwreck of all time, the Titanic, I frankly did not care for at all, and that’s the biggest part of the reason why I’m not giving Samarkand at least an extra star.
Close-off trivia: famous musician Isaac Maalouf (whose music reminds me of Thanasis Papakonstantinou’s jazzier pieces) is the writer’s nephew.
EARWORM GARDEN // GOAT — GOATHEAD
Though I’ve left Samothraki a.k.a. goat land, goat remains in head. Goat shall be missed.
SHARY-CARY TAB RELEASE // WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE THEY CAN’T DRAW – AND HOW TO PROVE THEY CAN