Hobbies book6 - suggestions pls

[Surgo]

please recommend the may 2022 novel, which will be significantly easier as i now have a new job which is only part time and i feel like i can breathe again

The Cloud Roads. Not by a white man in the earlier half of the century, but rather a woman in 2011. The first book of a series, but it was never actually intended to be a series so it totally stands alone. Best of all it's wildly original for the SFF genre which by 2011 I thought was super stale.

 

[Myzozoa]

Breakfast of Champions is actually the only Vonnegut book I haven’t read, it sits on my shelf unopened, but seeing somebody mention it as their favorite book in general has me interested. What puts it there?

In BoC Vonnegut breaks the '4th wall' a lot and speaks directly to the reader. The preamble explains how the book is an exercise in 'clearing out' his headspace of "the junk"that had accumulated over the course of 50 or so years of American life. The novel ruminates on how wealth and success can disguise mental illness, and has amazing (IMO) passages on the legacy of slavery in the American mentality/worldview like the following passage:

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A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless education, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well.

But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492.

The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them. Here was another piece of evil nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom to human beings everywhere else. There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of an ice-cream cone on fire. It looked like this:

(drawing of statue of liberty).


Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.

The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black. Color was everything.

Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which was a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched this seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away.

The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.

When Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout met each other, their country was by far the richest and most powerful country on the planet. It had most of the food and minerals and machinery, and it disciplined other countries by threatening to shoot big rockets at them or to drop things on them from airplanes.

A lot of the people on the wrecked planet were Communists. They had a theory that what was left of the planet should be shared more or less equally among all the people, who hadn’t asked to come to a wrecked planet in the first place. Meanwhile, more babies were arriving all the time—kicking and screaming, yelling for milk.

n some places people would actually try to eat mud or such on gravel while babies were being born just a few feet away. And so on.

Dwayne Hoover’s and Kilgore Trout’s country, where there was still plenty of everything, was opposed to Communism. It didn’t think that Earthlings who had a lot should share it with others unless they really wanted to, and most of them didn’t want to.

So they didn’t have to.

Anyway aside from this look into how Vonnegut views the politics and psychology of the moment, the novel also has an epic plot that demonstrates how powerful beliefs/narratives/inherited frameworks can be when a character becomes deluded by a novel into thinking he is the only person that exists with free will/consciousness (i.e all other people are machines) and has a subsequent breakdown and outburst.

I think if you've read every Vonnegut you should read this one right away, as it could likely change how you view his ideas in many of his other works.

 

[boo836]

i'll start by saying that territory of light felt longer than it's page count. perhaps this is due to my state in reading it, perhaps this is due to a bit of padding in the narrative. the novel plays around with its language, which is something that i enjoy a lot and attempt to practice in my own writing - though of course, it's difficult to tell the extent of intentionality, given that i'm reading a translation. still, though, i think the mood of the period is captured very well, and i've literally never engaged with any writing for 1970s japan, so that was neat. this is a feminist novel, and i am a feminist too, though i think it fails to say anything new on the subject (accounting for culture and time, this is maybe more damning than it really needs to be as a piece of criticism). the novel is a little ponderous, but i think that's by design, and is inherent in the structure. i give points for someone trying something even if they don't achieve what they've aimed for. you can pick this novel up and put it down for a while at the end of chapters, that's a positive and a negative of it's narrative. the dialogue was mostly fine, and that's something i struggle with a ton when writing, and i've grown to love a certain type of ultra realistic dialogue which simply isn't present in this novel (though it's largely not present in most novels). the character(s) did not leave a super strong impression on me.

overall, fine, but i do feel this could have been more. i'd be unlikely to reread it, and will score it a 6/10, slightly above average.

please recommend the may 2022 novel, which will be significantly easier as i now have a new job which is only part time and i feel like i can breathe again

Today's theme is: Antifascism!

Alamut by Vladimir Bartol
Men Who Hate Women (aka The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) by Steig Larsson
For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
Parable of the Talents by Octavia E Butler
The Man In the High Castle, by Phillip K Dick

 

[teal6]

Men Who Hate Women (aka The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) by Steig Larsson

i did not have any idea what this was about, so i will do this one for may.

 

[Aqua Jet]

I'm currently reading The Kite Runner in my English class and its pretty good, highly recommend. Trigger warning if you do want to read it though - there is a scene of rape and another scene where a character commits suicide. You can read more about it on the amazon page I linked.