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I wrote for three and a half hours on Friday! It felt awesome. This semester has been kicking my butt, for reasons I can't figure out.
Pat Conroy, South of Broad: The Prince of Tides is one of my favorite books; the dinner party scene gets me at least as turned on as it does Lowenstein. So I hope it’s not incredibly faint praise to say that this book was better when it was The Prince of Tides. Conroy works some variations on his themes—here, the violent father is someone other than the narrator’s, but the brilliantly vicious mother isn’t; the older brother is a suicide before the story begins; and the narrator is positioned in the middle of Charleston society, managing to bring together blacks, poor whites, and the highest caliber of whites according to Charleston’s rigid system. Set in 1989 and in the late 60s/early 70s, it follows a group of friends, lovers, and frenemies who met in their last year of high school—two kids new in town, three orphans, three of the white aristocracy, and the black and white cocaptains of the public high school football team. As usual, the narrator is sympathetic to gays, worships the mysteries of women, and opposes racist acts by others. If I found the lyrical descriptions of the South and the other characters a little overwrought, it’s only because, even with the terrifying Comedian-like father of two of the characters—a Monroe-esque movie star and her AIDS-stricken brother—the story never really approached the Gothic peaks of The Prince of Tides.
William Sleator, Marco’s Millions: Younger-skewing YA about Marco and his younger sister Lily who discover something very strange in the basement: a gateway to another world, where time moves more slowly and the alien inhabitants insist they need Lily to save them, but Marco can’t be sure they’re trustworthy. A distinctive Sleator feature is that the right course of action is generally unclear, even at the end. Sleator ends kind of in the middle of the story; there’s a sequel.
Randall Munroe, xkcd, Vol. 0: A collection of xkcd cartoons, including the mouseover text, with marginalia , some of which form a puzzle I didn’t even bother to try figuring out. Cute and I felt good supporting the site.
Alex Irvine, Supernatural: John Winchester's Journal: Sloppy tie-in--John Winchester's not much of a writer, and there are fragments of mystical texts and lists of supernatural creatures interspersed throughout, along with his yearly ruminations on his anniversary, the boys' birthdays, and the date of Mary's death. Even with all the angst, I got no sense of his character, and I thought some of the information was inconsistent with what we've seen (e.g., John sending Dean on extended solo hunts before Sam left, which seems to contradict the Pilot; information in the journal that one would think Dean and Sam would have read long before they figured stuff out on the show). Oh well.
Harry Turtledove, S.M. Stirling, Mary Gentle, and Walter Jon Williams, Worlds That Weren’t: Four alternate history novellas. The first has Socrates participating in a successful campaign against Sparta. The second posits a near-extinction event in the nineteenth century, leading to a renewed British Empire run out of India and an America returned mostly to wilderness, full of cannibals and Americans who speak in painful dialect. The third features a female mercenary in a fifteenth-century Turkish Empire fighting with/for the followers of the Green Christ and having visions of the future. And the fourth sends Nietzsche to America where he participates in the shootout at the OK Corrall. Frankly, I didn’t see the point, though maybe it was all just residual irritation from the dialect.
Pat Conroy, South of Broad: The Prince of Tides is one of my favorite books; the dinner party scene gets me at least as turned on as it does Lowenstein. So I hope it’s not incredibly faint praise to say that this book was better when it was The Prince of Tides. Conroy works some variations on his themes—here, the violent father is someone other than the narrator’s, but the brilliantly vicious mother isn’t; the older brother is a suicide before the story begins; and the narrator is positioned in the middle of Charleston society, managing to bring together blacks, poor whites, and the highest caliber of whites according to Charleston’s rigid system. Set in 1989 and in the late 60s/early 70s, it follows a group of friends, lovers, and frenemies who met in their last year of high school—two kids new in town, three orphans, three of the white aristocracy, and the black and white cocaptains of the public high school football team. As usual, the narrator is sympathetic to gays, worships the mysteries of women, and opposes racist acts by others. If I found the lyrical descriptions of the South and the other characters a little overwrought, it’s only because, even with the terrifying Comedian-like father of two of the characters—a Monroe-esque movie star and her AIDS-stricken brother—the story never really approached the Gothic peaks of The Prince of Tides.
William Sleator, Marco’s Millions: Younger-skewing YA about Marco and his younger sister Lily who discover something very strange in the basement: a gateway to another world, where time moves more slowly and the alien inhabitants insist they need Lily to save them, but Marco can’t be sure they’re trustworthy. A distinctive Sleator feature is that the right course of action is generally unclear, even at the end. Sleator ends kind of in the middle of the story; there’s a sequel.
Randall Munroe, xkcd, Vol. 0: A collection of xkcd cartoons, including the mouseover text, with marginalia , some of which form a puzzle I didn’t even bother to try figuring out. Cute and I felt good supporting the site.
Alex Irvine, Supernatural: John Winchester's Journal: Sloppy tie-in--John Winchester's not much of a writer, and there are fragments of mystical texts and lists of supernatural creatures interspersed throughout, along with his yearly ruminations on his anniversary, the boys' birthdays, and the date of Mary's death. Even with all the angst, I got no sense of his character, and I thought some of the information was inconsistent with what we've seen (e.g., John sending Dean on extended solo hunts before Sam left, which seems to contradict the Pilot; information in the journal that one would think Dean and Sam would have read long before they figured stuff out on the show). Oh well.
Harry Turtledove, S.M. Stirling, Mary Gentle, and Walter Jon Williams, Worlds That Weren’t: Four alternate history novellas. The first has Socrates participating in a successful campaign against Sparta. The second posits a near-extinction event in the nineteenth century, leading to a renewed British Empire run out of India and an America returned mostly to wilderness, full of cannibals and Americans who speak in painful dialect. The third features a female mercenary in a fifteenth-century Turkish Empire fighting with/for the followers of the Green Christ and having visions of the future. And the fourth sends Nietzsche to America where he participates in the shootout at the OK Corrall. Frankly, I didn’t see the point, though maybe it was all just residual irritation from the dialect.
