Wed Reading Meme...
Dec. 9th, 2015 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. What you just finished reading?
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell --- it's an interesting book, wherein the narrative structure is key to the story. The writer sets up a series of fragmented narratives, each with their own distinct point of view and narrative style, focused on a central theme, and set up to sort of mirror each other.
The good, the bad, and ugly...so to speak about Cloud Atlas. (We'll see if I say any of this tomorrow night.)
* The Good
The narrative structure is quite brilliant actually, and rather innovative. Each story sort of comments or mirrors the last one in some way, and they appear to be nested inside each other like a series of Chinese dolls.
I found a Paris Review Interview with the author, wherein he explains his intent behind the narrative structure of Cloud Atlas.
And this bit from an interview on Good Reads:
He does pull it off. The story is a series of short novellas that are hyperlinked to one another.
Each bit stops abruptly until we get to the middle novella which sort of pulls them altogether thematically...and on the backend we get the second part of each story that ended abruptly. Also it should be noted that in each novella, except the first one, the protagonist or lead character is determined to find out what happened and wants to get the second half of it.
This structure says something rather fascinating about the art of story-telling and how people perceive stories. In each case, the narrator of the next story - identifies or relates strongly to the narrator in the first story, and in some cases that story affects or inspires them.
Also, in each narrative, the protagonist is a prisoner - either of someone else, of their own design, or of circumstance. It's uplifting in a way because each character does eventually free themselves from their oppression or circumstance and in some cases frees others.
In addition...he does an interesting thing with narrative styles - the first section is a ship's log, reminiscent of Melville, the second is letters by a bi-sexual composer - making one think of Gertrude Stein, back in the 1930s, or Oscar Wilde, then it's a 1970s pulpy corporate thriller/mystery, the sort of thing Foxy Brown may have done as a movie, written with sparse description, reminscent of a John Grisham or one of the 1970s mystery writers, I can't remember the name of, followed by a memoir by a book editor in the 2000 or thereabouts..who writes like popular fiction of that decade - lots of slang, and one word sentences. Then we have an interview that takes place in the distant future in Japan, and finally the dialect-heavy campfire yarn. After the campfire yarn - we get the tail end of each story, in reverse order, until we hit the first one again. So basically the first story is also the last.
* The Bad
This is, unfortunately, for me, a thematic novel not a character driven one. What I mean by that is that theme drives the novel. The writer came up with an idea or theme, based on a specific narrative structure, the characters came later. And you can sort of tell - because only the narrators of each section are fully developed. The villains or antagonists such as they are, are rather one-dimensional and have little depth. It feels rather allegorical as a result. Which is fine if you love that sort of thing and lots of people do. But, as you all must know by now, I'm a character girl. Character first, theme second or possibly third. (It's probably worth noting at this point that I've found philosophical and socio-political texts difficult to get through and there is a reason I was not a philosophy or sociology major.)
I felt the book was a bit on the preachy side. And that the situations were overly simplified. I would have liked a bit more depth to the Adam Ewing Story, as well as Frobisher, Cavendish, Luisa Rey. The Sci-Fi stories which I found difficult to get through, oddly, had a bit more depth to the characters.
While the narrative structure is intriguing, I wish the stories contained within it where more interesting and the characters more compelling. Reader? I didn't care about any of the characters all that much. They were okay, but I found my emotions not highly engaged. This story engages the intellect more than the emotion -- and that may be due to the narrative structure or just personal taste, I don't know.
There were bits that I did find compelling. I did care about Frobischer, although he was admittedly a self-absorbed twit, and Adam Ewing who was well-meaning and at heart a good man, but a tad on the irritating side and a bit of an idiot. Like I said, the narrators are well-developed. Luisa Rey - was hard to get a feel for either way, and Cavendish struck me a sbit whiny. I liked Somni, but she was also hard to get much of a feel for, as were the characters in the final story - who felt more like tropes or archetypes from various dystopian sci-fi stories that I've read.
The ugly
There isn't really one, it just sounds better that way. Tee hee.
Mitchell is an interesting writer, but a tad too thematic centered for my taste. And also focuses more on fragmented stories or novellas - which I'm not a fan of. When I commit to a story - I want the whole story, not fragments or sections. I've never been a short story fan. Read a lot of them. It's rare that I enjoy or like them and can count the ones that I have on one hand.
In some respects his writing style and focus reminds me a bit of Le Quinn and Gaiman, who are also appear to be more thematically centered than character.
At any rate, I recommend, but with mixed feelings. I can't say I loved it like I did James Joyce's Ulysses or for that matter, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Or even Kafka on the Shore or The Ocean at the End of Lane...but I did appreciate and admire what the writer accomplished and I can well understand why it has received so many accolades.
* Uncanny X-men - Mutant Revolution - Volume 1 - this is the first issue of the Marvel Now series that premiered in 2014 or 2015, I believe. It had about 36 issue and runs out Cyclops arc by Brian Bendeis on the series. Bendeis writes Cyclops as a misunderstood and complex anti-hero, although I'm not sure he's really an anti-hero in the true sense of the word -- his actions, while ruthless at times, seem to be as heroic as any of the Avengers actions appear to be. At any rate in this series - he's a fugitive on the run, along with Emma Frost aka the White Queen, Illyana Rasputin aka Majick, and Eric Lensherr aka Magneto. They are hiding out at the old Weapon X facility that turned Wolverine into a living weapon - mainly because it is literally the last place Wolverine would look for them. Wolverine, who was always a bit of a bad-boy, with his own code, loner, and anti-hero, has morphed into a somewhat self-righteous egotistical boy-scout, which doesn't quite work and feels out of character (my one quibble with the arc -- but he's rarely in it, so it's a minor one -- he's off in his own book -- Wolverine and the X-men (which pretty much says it all) Not sure I can forgive Bendeis and Aaron for screwing with Wolverine but they weren't alone, the damage pre-exists them.) The first volume is rather good. It's by Brian Bendeis and Chris Bacchalau. It's hilarious in places and does a rather good job of underlining various moral ambiguities.
I find it a bit ironic - of the two books I read, Cloud Atlas and Uncanny X-men, Uncanny has the more developed and complex characters and themes. It doesn't preach and it just poses more questions. Say what you will about pulp fiction and genre, it is often far more morally complex and thought provoking than the literary books that claim academic acclaim and awards. Bizarre, ain't it?
At any rate - the complex theme here is -- how should we deal with dangerous people? And is violence really the best approach? Do we save them? Are they redeemable? What is it to be disenfranchised?
What rights, responsibilities, etc - do you have? How do we deal with people who have committed crimes? Particularly if they weren't in their right mind at the time? Etc.
I found that it asked more questions than answered them. At the end of the first issue, I no longer could say who the bad guys or good guys were. In some ways the alleged villains had more honor and nobility than the alleged heroes did. It wasn't clear.
All New X-men Vol 1 - this is also by Brian Bendeis and basically sets up Uncanny. It's best to read them together. And it too is hilarious in places. It comments on our society, what has changed and what hasn't, and how we have failed those who came before us, and how we've exceeded their dreams. It's an interesting what-if tale - what if your teenage self came forward in time to confront you, in your 40s or midlife, and didn't like what you'd become or what choices you'd made?
In this case, the five original X-men journey forward from 1960s to 2015 in the Marvelverse - and discover that they despise their adult selves and the choices the adult versions of themselves made.
In the process, the writers comment on the past work done by previous writers and past thematic arcs.
Did Xaveir teach his students to use their powers or train them to be warriors and what was the cost of that? What is the cost of training people to use violence to resolve their problems? What is the cost on children? And when you discover what you and your friends have become...do you stay friends?
Can you go back to where you came from and just forget?
2.) What I'm reading now?
Sort of plodding through a Madeline Hunter novel that was rec'd by my mother...entitled The Sins of Lord Easterbrook - it's about an empath who has become a recluse and gets involved with a woman who has inherited her father's East India Trade Company, and is hunting down the people who cheated him. I find the writer style stilted. We'll see if I make it through it or jump to something else.
Uncanny X-men Vol 2 and All New X-men Vol 3 - which aren't quite as good as the first volume, but have their moments.
3) What I'm reading next
I'm flirting with Uprooted by the writer whose name I can't spell without looking it up. And a fantasy novel that sophist rec'd that I can't remember the name of and have to hunt down again.
Also the next JA Corey book in the Expanse series, the one after Leviathan Wakes, mainly because I think I'm in the mood for space opera or fantasy.
Also flirting with The Highwayman by Lauren Kerrigen, which is about two kids who fall in love at an orphanage, get broken up, meet years later, he's a crime lord, she's working for Scotland Yard.
I might need to check out Courtny Milan's latest book.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell --- it's an interesting book, wherein the narrative structure is key to the story. The writer sets up a series of fragmented narratives, each with their own distinct point of view and narrative style, focused on a central theme, and set up to sort of mirror each other.
The good, the bad, and ugly...so to speak about Cloud Atlas. (We'll see if I say any of this tomorrow night.)
* The Good
The narrative structure is quite brilliant actually, and rather innovative. Each story sort of comments or mirrors the last one in some way, and they appear to be nested inside each other like a series of Chinese dolls.
I found a Paris Review Interview with the author, wherein he explains his intent behind the narrative structure of Cloud Atlas.
INTERVIEWER
How did you come up with the idea for the structure of Cloud Atlas?
MITCHELL
The first time I read Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, I didn’t know what I was dealing with. I thought we’d be going back to the interrupted narrative later on in the book, and I very much wanted to. Finishing the novel, I felt a bit cheated that Calvino hadn’t followed through with what he’d begun—which was, of course, the whole point of the book. But a voice said this: What would it actually look like if a mirror were placed at the end of the book, and you continued into a second half that took you back to the beginning? That idea was knocking around in my head since I was eighteen or nineteen years old and, by my third novel, had arrived at the front of the queue.
And this bit from an interview on Good Reads:
GR: Well, many of our members are interested in how you structure your work, "the multiverse"—the interlocking narratives, fragmentation, and jumping from one story to another, often skipping from the past to the future. Goodreads member Simone Mailman compares your work to "a fugue or a symphony." What draws you to that approach?
DM: I think it has something to do with the fact that I basically write novellas, not novels. My optimum parabola is about 80 to 120 pages long, rarely much shorter, rarely much longer. This means to build up novels from these novellas I need to interlock, interconnect, and insert hyperlinks.
He does pull it off. The story is a series of short novellas that are hyperlinked to one another.
Each bit stops abruptly until we get to the middle novella which sort of pulls them altogether thematically...and on the backend we get the second part of each story that ended abruptly. Also it should be noted that in each novella, except the first one, the protagonist or lead character is determined to find out what happened and wants to get the second half of it.
This structure says something rather fascinating about the art of story-telling and how people perceive stories. In each case, the narrator of the next story - identifies or relates strongly to the narrator in the first story, and in some cases that story affects or inspires them.
Also, in each narrative, the protagonist is a prisoner - either of someone else, of their own design, or of circumstance. It's uplifting in a way because each character does eventually free themselves from their oppression or circumstance and in some cases frees others.
In addition...he does an interesting thing with narrative styles - the first section is a ship's log, reminiscent of Melville, the second is letters by a bi-sexual composer - making one think of Gertrude Stein, back in the 1930s, or Oscar Wilde, then it's a 1970s pulpy corporate thriller/mystery, the sort of thing Foxy Brown may have done as a movie, written with sparse description, reminscent of a John Grisham or one of the 1970s mystery writers, I can't remember the name of, followed by a memoir by a book editor in the 2000 or thereabouts..who writes like popular fiction of that decade - lots of slang, and one word sentences. Then we have an interview that takes place in the distant future in Japan, and finally the dialect-heavy campfire yarn. After the campfire yarn - we get the tail end of each story, in reverse order, until we hit the first one again. So basically the first story is also the last.
* The Bad
This is, unfortunately, for me, a thematic novel not a character driven one. What I mean by that is that theme drives the novel. The writer came up with an idea or theme, based on a specific narrative structure, the characters came later. And you can sort of tell - because only the narrators of each section are fully developed. The villains or antagonists such as they are, are rather one-dimensional and have little depth. It feels rather allegorical as a result. Which is fine if you love that sort of thing and lots of people do. But, as you all must know by now, I'm a character girl. Character first, theme second or possibly third. (It's probably worth noting at this point that I've found philosophical and socio-political texts difficult to get through and there is a reason I was not a philosophy or sociology major.)
I felt the book was a bit on the preachy side. And that the situations were overly simplified. I would have liked a bit more depth to the Adam Ewing Story, as well as Frobisher, Cavendish, Luisa Rey. The Sci-Fi stories which I found difficult to get through, oddly, had a bit more depth to the characters.
While the narrative structure is intriguing, I wish the stories contained within it where more interesting and the characters more compelling. Reader? I didn't care about any of the characters all that much. They were okay, but I found my emotions not highly engaged. This story engages the intellect more than the emotion -- and that may be due to the narrative structure or just personal taste, I don't know.
There were bits that I did find compelling. I did care about Frobischer, although he was admittedly a self-absorbed twit, and Adam Ewing who was well-meaning and at heart a good man, but a tad on the irritating side and a bit of an idiot. Like I said, the narrators are well-developed. Luisa Rey - was hard to get a feel for either way, and Cavendish struck me a sbit whiny. I liked Somni, but she was also hard to get much of a feel for, as were the characters in the final story - who felt more like tropes or archetypes from various dystopian sci-fi stories that I've read.
The ugly
There isn't really one, it just sounds better that way. Tee hee.
Mitchell is an interesting writer, but a tad too thematic centered for my taste. And also focuses more on fragmented stories or novellas - which I'm not a fan of. When I commit to a story - I want the whole story, not fragments or sections. I've never been a short story fan. Read a lot of them. It's rare that I enjoy or like them and can count the ones that I have on one hand.
In some respects his writing style and focus reminds me a bit of Le Quinn and Gaiman, who are also appear to be more thematically centered than character.
At any rate, I recommend, but with mixed feelings. I can't say I loved it like I did James Joyce's Ulysses or for that matter, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Or even Kafka on the Shore or The Ocean at the End of Lane...but I did appreciate and admire what the writer accomplished and I can well understand why it has received so many accolades.
* Uncanny X-men - Mutant Revolution - Volume 1 - this is the first issue of the Marvel Now series that premiered in 2014 or 2015, I believe. It had about 36 issue and runs out Cyclops arc by Brian Bendeis on the series. Bendeis writes Cyclops as a misunderstood and complex anti-hero, although I'm not sure he's really an anti-hero in the true sense of the word -- his actions, while ruthless at times, seem to be as heroic as any of the Avengers actions appear to be. At any rate in this series - he's a fugitive on the run, along with Emma Frost aka the White Queen, Illyana Rasputin aka Majick, and Eric Lensherr aka Magneto. They are hiding out at the old Weapon X facility that turned Wolverine into a living weapon - mainly because it is literally the last place Wolverine would look for them. Wolverine, who was always a bit of a bad-boy, with his own code, loner, and anti-hero, has morphed into a somewhat self-righteous egotistical boy-scout, which doesn't quite work and feels out of character (my one quibble with the arc -- but he's rarely in it, so it's a minor one -- he's off in his own book -- Wolverine and the X-men (which pretty much says it all) Not sure I can forgive Bendeis and Aaron for screwing with Wolverine but they weren't alone, the damage pre-exists them.) The first volume is rather good. It's by Brian Bendeis and Chris Bacchalau. It's hilarious in places and does a rather good job of underlining various moral ambiguities.
I find it a bit ironic - of the two books I read, Cloud Atlas and Uncanny X-men, Uncanny has the more developed and complex characters and themes. It doesn't preach and it just poses more questions. Say what you will about pulp fiction and genre, it is often far more morally complex and thought provoking than the literary books that claim academic acclaim and awards. Bizarre, ain't it?
At any rate - the complex theme here is -- how should we deal with dangerous people? And is violence really the best approach? Do we save them? Are they redeemable? What is it to be disenfranchised?
What rights, responsibilities, etc - do you have? How do we deal with people who have committed crimes? Particularly if they weren't in their right mind at the time? Etc.
I found that it asked more questions than answered them. At the end of the first issue, I no longer could say who the bad guys or good guys were. In some ways the alleged villains had more honor and nobility than the alleged heroes did. It wasn't clear.
All New X-men Vol 1 - this is also by Brian Bendeis and basically sets up Uncanny. It's best to read them together. And it too is hilarious in places. It comments on our society, what has changed and what hasn't, and how we have failed those who came before us, and how we've exceeded their dreams. It's an interesting what-if tale - what if your teenage self came forward in time to confront you, in your 40s or midlife, and didn't like what you'd become or what choices you'd made?
In this case, the five original X-men journey forward from 1960s to 2015 in the Marvelverse - and discover that they despise their adult selves and the choices the adult versions of themselves made.
In the process, the writers comment on the past work done by previous writers and past thematic arcs.
Did Xaveir teach his students to use their powers or train them to be warriors and what was the cost of that? What is the cost of training people to use violence to resolve their problems? What is the cost on children? And when you discover what you and your friends have become...do you stay friends?
Can you go back to where you came from and just forget?
2.) What I'm reading now?
Sort of plodding through a Madeline Hunter novel that was rec'd by my mother...entitled The Sins of Lord Easterbrook - it's about an empath who has become a recluse and gets involved with a woman who has inherited her father's East India Trade Company, and is hunting down the people who cheated him. I find the writer style stilted. We'll see if I make it through it or jump to something else.
Uncanny X-men Vol 2 and All New X-men Vol 3 - which aren't quite as good as the first volume, but have their moments.
3) What I'm reading next
I'm flirting with Uprooted by the writer whose name I can't spell without looking it up. And a fantasy novel that sophist rec'd that I can't remember the name of and have to hunt down again.
Also the next JA Corey book in the Expanse series, the one after Leviathan Wakes, mainly because I think I'm in the mood for space opera or fantasy.
Also flirting with The Highwayman by Lauren Kerrigen, which is about two kids who fall in love at an orphanage, get broken up, meet years later, he's a crime lord, she's working for Scotland Yard.
I might need to check out Courtny Milan's latest book.