rclayton finished reading American Pastoral by Philip Roth
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is …
reading, reading
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As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is …
A novel about mathematically-driven collectivist economic planning vs soviet politics sounds deadly, but people fooling themselves are always entertaining.
Cadfael goes beyond the pale to handle family matters while murderous intrigue unsettles the disposition of sides in the Anarchy.
Investigations into a new understanding of heat and the impact rising temperatures will have on our lives and our planet.
An unhappy Irish family plumbs the depths of their unhappiness, each in their own way.
How bogus sex- and gender-related concepts get propagated along the road from social-science labs to popular perception.
A '90s indie-music star enters the 21st century as a freelance journalist working on a piece about locative art, interviewing a Los Angeles artist who uses augmented reality to restage famous deaths. No one has heard of the magazine she's working for, a Belgian start-up headquartered in London knocking off Wired magazine. Meanwhile, a family of Chinese-Cuban subversives deliver iPods containing data in and around New York City. The family has an occluded past, and is steeped in helpful spiritualism. The family's activities are being tracked by what may be agents of the state, although their provenance is sketchy. Because the subversives text in an obscure Russian-adjacent language, the agents kidnap a drug-addicted translator, and it is from his point of view the agents' part of the story is told. Spook Country tightens these three threads into a knot around the story's almost a McGuffin: one of my favorite minor …
A '90s indie-music star enters the 21st century as a freelance journalist working on a piece about locative art, interviewing a Los Angeles artist who uses augmented reality to restage famous deaths. No one has heard of the magazine she's working for, a Belgian start-up headquartered in London knocking off Wired magazine. Meanwhile, a family of Chinese-Cuban subversives deliver iPods containing data in and around New York City. The family has an occluded past, and is steeped in helpful spiritualism. The family's activities are being tracked by what may be agents of the state, although their provenance is sketchy. Because the subversives text in an obscure Russian-adjacent language, the agents kidnap a drug-addicted translator, and it is from his point of view the agents' part of the story is told. Spook Country tightens these three threads into a knot around the story's almost a McGuffin: one of my favorite minor episodes from the second Gulf War.
Spook Country is the middle of the Blue Ant trilogy, succeeding Pattern Recognition and preceding Zero History. It's got Gibson's disassociative cool, particularly with respect to boutique hotels, and constant forward amble even when people are sitting in a parking lot talking. Because the story is set in 2006, the fun of looking for skies the color of television tuned to a dead channel in Gibson novels has been replaced by nostalgia in recognizing details (“She closed her eyes and clamshelled her phone.”), although it’s fun to note that, given the augmented realities, Spook Country was published the same year Apple released the first iPhone.
Not having to describe future cyberpunk dystopias seems to have loosened Gibson’s writing. He has a Lego joke at the beginning of the story, and another, non-Lego joke preceding a Union Square rumble. He even writes a subtle and surprising sex scene at the end. On the other hand, maybe Gibson's a little too loose. The spiritualism shades close to exoticism (“And the Vietnamese rising like that smoke in the twilight, and as quickly, his limbs not so much moving as insinuating themselves into different and constantly changing relationships with the wall.” There’s a lot of this spiritual parkour — “systema” — in the story, Gibson leans heavily on it.). However, despite the illusory and other-worldly occurrences, Spook Country interrogates some kind of post-9/11 America. The story sweeps along with enough hooks to carry the inconclusive ending, which does little more than bring to mind Guy Grand making it hot for them.
Tales from the intersection of organized crime and jazz from Louis Armstrong to Frank Sinatra.
The Holy Thief is a medieval mystery novel by Ellis Peters set in 1144–1145. It is the 19th and penultimate …
A widowed scientist and her daughters try to bring sense to the recent past by digging into the ancient past.
The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years …
Bradbury's best known novel, The History Man, a campus novel published in 1975, is a satire of academic life in …
A history (mainly political) of Britain (mainly England) in the first 9/10ths of the twentieth century.
An old man tells how he navigated his teens with an over-determined head and an under-determined heart.
Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of its initial publication, this special edition of Jane Jacobs’s masterpiece, The Death …