desires and dreams and powers, and everything but sleep
Saturday, 12 February 2011 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtVery tired from the week, but I made my orientation leaders chocolate chip cookies, and they gave me sunflowers, so I think on the whole we probably negotiated the interpersonal relationship aspect of the orientation period fairly successfully. I'm a total zombie, though. Am playing Deus Ex and swearing a lot when I have to sneak around. I hate sneaking.
I have also, in between shouting at the screen during Smallville (predictable villains! I have seen all the "plot" "twists" in the last half dozen episodes coming a mile away), actually done some actual reading in the last week. Book club books, even. To distact me from registration woes. It ended up as an extremely bizarre selection that should probably be giving me mental whiplash, to whit:
1. Robert J. Sawyer, Wake. One of those beautifully elegant confluences of ideas which manages to make the Great Firewall of China, a blind internet geek, and apes communicating via Skype all perfectly logical and inevitable contributing factors to the development of AI. Conceptually I loved it. In terms of actual reading experience it drove me bats - Sawyer is in the "workmanlike" rather than "scintillating" prose category, and I don't think he quite pulled off the teen female voice. Even worse, the AI voice didn't work at all for me. I have no idea what a developing machine intelligence's thoughts would be like, but that wasn't it. Also, I do like some scintillation with my prose.
2. Kathy Reichs, Virals. YA sort-of-werewolf thriller. I ploughed through this like a rubber snowplough through syrup snow; its writing style is in the Dan Brown "incompetent mutated journalese" category, all sentence fragments and synonomous repetitions of ideas put into their own splendid isolation in a paragraph for added punch. The plot moves with glacial slowness and telegraphs its reveals well ahead; while it's an interesting concept and I rather liked the teen protagonists, it also suffers from unlikely villains and a perfectly disconnected and inexplicable teen debutante plot crowbarred into the middle of the thrillery shenanigans. I read it to the end more in stubborn disbelief than anything else. And for the cute wolfdog.
3. Elizabeth von Arnim, One Enchanted April. Possibly the original "life-changing foreign holiday for unhappy women" book. I loved how it was written - both pithy and inconsequential, and the characters extremely well-observed, compelling even when they weren't likeable. The plot does that sort of happy ending that works only because everyone's basically misunderstanding each other, but it's satisfying nonetheless. Recommended for lovers of period drama, awakenings and gardens.
4. Douglas Coupland, Generation A. Douglas Coupland is quite possibly certifiably insane. I honestly wouldn't have believed you could make a coherent narrative out of the death of bee populations, corporate drug plots, post-Freudian narcissistic individualism and cathartic storytelling in the interests of brain chemistry, but by gum he pulled it off. The different voices really worked for me in anchoring the weird conceptual stuff. Also, I think we need to be very worried about the death of bees.
Next up, the first volume of Superman comics, and Zamyatin's We. Now I am going to crash, because gosh wow I'm tired. My voice has dropped about an octave. It's usually a bad sign. 'Night.
I have also, in between shouting at the screen during Smallville (predictable villains! I have seen all the "plot" "twists" in the last half dozen episodes coming a mile away), actually done some actual reading in the last week. Book club books, even. To distact me from registration woes. It ended up as an extremely bizarre selection that should probably be giving me mental whiplash, to whit:
1. Robert J. Sawyer, Wake. One of those beautifully elegant confluences of ideas which manages to make the Great Firewall of China, a blind internet geek, and apes communicating via Skype all perfectly logical and inevitable contributing factors to the development of AI. Conceptually I loved it. In terms of actual reading experience it drove me bats - Sawyer is in the "workmanlike" rather than "scintillating" prose category, and I don't think he quite pulled off the teen female voice. Even worse, the AI voice didn't work at all for me. I have no idea what a developing machine intelligence's thoughts would be like, but that wasn't it. Also, I do like some scintillation with my prose.
2. Kathy Reichs, Virals. YA sort-of-werewolf thriller. I ploughed through this like a rubber snowplough through syrup snow; its writing style is in the Dan Brown "incompetent mutated journalese" category, all sentence fragments and synonomous repetitions of ideas put into their own splendid isolation in a paragraph for added punch. The plot moves with glacial slowness and telegraphs its reveals well ahead; while it's an interesting concept and I rather liked the teen protagonists, it also suffers from unlikely villains and a perfectly disconnected and inexplicable teen debutante plot crowbarred into the middle of the thrillery shenanigans. I read it to the end more in stubborn disbelief than anything else. And for the cute wolfdog.
3. Elizabeth von Arnim, One Enchanted April. Possibly the original "life-changing foreign holiday for unhappy women" book. I loved how it was written - both pithy and inconsequential, and the characters extremely well-observed, compelling even when they weren't likeable. The plot does that sort of happy ending that works only because everyone's basically misunderstanding each other, but it's satisfying nonetheless. Recommended for lovers of period drama, awakenings and gardens.
4. Douglas Coupland, Generation A. Douglas Coupland is quite possibly certifiably insane. I honestly wouldn't have believed you could make a coherent narrative out of the death of bee populations, corporate drug plots, post-Freudian narcissistic individualism and cathartic storytelling in the interests of brain chemistry, but by gum he pulled it off. The different voices really worked for me in anchoring the weird conceptual stuff. Also, I think we need to be very worried about the death of bees.
Next up, the first volume of Superman comics, and Zamyatin's We. Now I am going to crash, because gosh wow I'm tired. My voice has dropped about an octave. It's usually a bad sign. 'Night.
