I've been reading some really good books lately from very different authors and genres.
I'll admit it I like to read.
Top hits?
Jonathan Carroll's "Land of Laughs" is a tight little novel about a writer who visits a town where his hero (a legendary fantasy writer who has long since passed away) used to live. He meets people in the town including his hero's daughter who seem to be oddly reminiscent of characters in his favorite books. Dogs who talk, people who can predict their own demise and a train that hasn't stopped at the town for decades but suddenly does, make this mystery from a slightly different dimension. I like his writing, I've never read his work before. But I'll just point out that I just bought another one of his books. A really good writer with a little bit of Lewis Carroll in him somewhere.
Chuck Palahniuk's "Rant" is, like all of Chuck's work (I'm a big fan), minimalist, brutal, funny, and twisted, but mostly not what it seems. Touted as an oral biography made up of interviews of friends and associates of Buster Casey, the patient zero of a new epidemic of human to human transmitted rabies, it turns out to be a quite different story by the end. Much like his "Fight Club" which turned 180 degrees by its climax Rant is a page turner with a nice twist. It is not for the squeamish. My favorite character is a car salesman who uses his chance to talk to teach the reader a bit about salesmanship.
Douglas Hofstadter recently came out with a new book (you'll probably remember him from his mind bending debut called "Godel, Escher, Bach" from when you were young.) "I Am a Strange Loop" is a sequel of sorts, though I found it much easier to read (is it him or me?) His book takes on "I-ness" and what it is where it comes from and how much you or I have of it versus a bug or a newborn or a hitler or a schweitzer. He relates Godel's creation of a strange self referential loop built out of mathematical theories, along with is own experiments with video feedback loops, to our own looping feedback belief (or hallucination) of consciousness. Its a stimulating ride though sometimes pedantic and a bit goofy (I only mean that in that he sometimes has paragraphs that take three times to read just to comprehend and other times tells page long stories of absurdity in parallel worlds that you come away thinking that you could have gotten in a sentence or two). Bottom line? Is there some magical force that is a soul or is it just something we get for free as an emergent property of the many many feedback loops swirling around in our head as we react and categorize and look for symbols and abstract out all the sensory perceptions that bubble through out brains? Best parts? he reaches into a box of envelopes only to feel a marble somewhere inside the box, maybe in one of the envelopes, he can feel it, sense its spherical nature, but when he takes out all of the individual envelopes there is no marble. When he has others reach in they all feel it but it isn't there. Its really just an illusion that emerges from all the folded over and glued parts of each envelope. Second best part? He posits a thought experiment in that you and I are both video cameras pointing at our own screen so that we are seeing a deep corridor-like feedback loop to infinity, now your screen is over there in the corner of mine, I can just see your feedback loop in mine (though at a far lower resolution), your loop is fed into mine a bit so that my own changes, and visa versa. This is how the mind works. We are emergent patterns of feedback, but strange in that we shift from level to level of abstraction. So when his wife dies is she really gone? If her "I" was a pattern and he had been partially reflecting it and looping it for lo these many years, isn't she still sometimes alive in him? Read the book if you like to read because its a nice aperitif for the soul.
Others that I've consumed while reading these?
"Grave Peril" and "Summer Knight" more dresden files (book three and four, yes I've read four of them now... yikes) by Jim Butcher. Light fluffy wizard living in Chicago stuff, I think I'll refrain from reviewing any more of his books because they are basically all the same book. I'm not a fan of fantasy but he's a good pulp fiction writer and sometimes I need roughage. If you like this sort of thing (sam spade meets the ghost of Bela Lugosi?) you'll enjoy all of his books. I think you'll like them better than the drivel that is called a series on TV (of the same name and from the same creator).
Other stuff?
Just heard William Gibson has a book coming in a few months called "Spook Country" and I've just started "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by the author of "The Kite Runner" seems good so far.
Reviews to come? Band of Rivals, Second Chance, and Against the Day (yes it will take me a full year to read that one).
Heavy Rotation?
Regina Spektor who I think someday is gonna make it big, she's got a playful virtuosity to her music.
Blonde Redhead's got something going too.
"Come on Feel the Illinoise" by Sufjan Stevens has some instant classics... (They Are Night Zombies is my favorite).
