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matthewcpeck's reviews
573 reviews
Wool Omnibus by Hugh Howey
3.0
An imaginatively bleak but unevenly written epic about humans living in a vast underground silo beneath a toxic future Earth. Howey is a skillful tale-spinner, and the stratified world of Silo 18 is told at just the right pace, with the twists and cliffhangers arriving at reliable intervals. The prose, though, serves as an argument for editors in the world of self-publishing - clunky sentences and unnecessary explanations are legion in the first 2/3 of the book. Howey seems to have grown significantly as a writer by the fifth, final section of the book, which includes a set-piece in a dark, flooded silo bottom that's heart-stoppingly scary. WOOL is at its best in physical, visceral sections like this, and worst at dialogue and emotional scenes (people are NOT weeping this much in real life, at least not in my experience). It could also spur some philosophical arguments, which is what makes science fiction so important. Is it sometimes better not to know the truth?...
The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
3.0
I went into this novel looking to be challenged. But smothering whole sections of chapters with Japanese characters and multiplication tables is not the tough but rewarding experience I anticipated: it's just raw data, pages for the reader to skip (does make the book go by fast, though). That out of the way, this book is quite funny, and it has a stubborn individualism that makes me understand its cult status among reviewers. There's a wonderfully satirical scene about the school system's limitations in dealing with geniuses, and the final section detailing Ludo's father tryouts has significant insight and range.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
4.0
While it wasn't the sexy crime thriller that its title promised, 'Origin' is a book which, for once, earns the description of "mind-blowing". I've wanted to read Jaynes' hypothesis ever since it I found it mentioned casually in Steven Pinker's 'How The Mind Works': until about 3000 years ago, human beings were virtually unconscious and had no concept of an "I" or self. Conscious-type thoughts and volition traveled from the right hemisphere of the brain to the left as full-blown auditory hallucinations that ordered our ancestors around, hence the gods of the Iliad and the Old Testament and Gilgamesh. When cultures collided around the 2nd millennium BC we 'learned' our way to our present consciousness and we've been haunted by this loss of our god-voices ever since. I think that he was on to something - it's wild but not THAT wild, and Jaynes was no crackpot.
The book is divided into 3 sections - in the first, Jaynes defines what consciousness is and isn't, and introduces his theory of the bicameral mind. In the 2nd, he pores over archaeological and literary evidence. This is the weakest section, because of the inherent dangers of making conclusions based on drawings and on texts that have been translated countless times. There's a lot of sentences like "this CLEARLY is because of the bicameral mind and nothing else", when that's really not the case. Most of the focus is on Mesopotamia with a little of Meso-America (that's where most of the ancient relics have survived), but Asia barely gets a passing glance. In the 3rd section, Jaynes studies contemporary phenomena like hypnosis and schizophrenia, regressions to the bicameral mind.
Jaynes is magnificent writer, with a sense of lyricism that is rare among academics. The final passage is particularly stunning, with its palpable sense of loss. 'Origin' has science, psychology, world history, poetry, spirituality, and philosophy. I'd recommend it if you're interested in even one of these categories - it has the power to change the way you look at world history, even if you don't buy into every suggestion.
The book is divided into 3 sections - in the first, Jaynes defines what consciousness is and isn't, and introduces his theory of the bicameral mind. In the 2nd, he pores over archaeological and literary evidence. This is the weakest section, because of the inherent dangers of making conclusions based on drawings and on texts that have been translated countless times. There's a lot of sentences like "this CLEARLY is because of the bicameral mind and nothing else", when that's really not the case. Most of the focus is on Mesopotamia with a little of Meso-America (that's where most of the ancient relics have survived), but Asia barely gets a passing glance. In the 3rd section, Jaynes studies contemporary phenomena like hypnosis and schizophrenia, regressions to the bicameral mind.
Jaynes is magnificent writer, with a sense of lyricism that is rare among academics. The final passage is particularly stunning, with its palpable sense of loss. 'Origin' has science, psychology, world history, poetry, spirituality, and philosophy. I'd recommend it if you're interested in even one of these categories - it has the power to change the way you look at world history, even if you don't buy into every suggestion.
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
4.0
Rarely have I gone from hating a book so much at the start to adoring it at the finish as I did with Mantel's previous installment in the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, 'Wolf Hall'. I was anticipating the same reaction to its sequel, but I was helplessly obsessed from the first pages.
That being said, I still don't understand why Mantel feels she has to employ a bizarre pronoun gimmick with her main character (always 'he', never Cromwell unless absolutely necessary), though I had a lot less trouble following the dialogue this time around, even with the countless Thomases and Harrys and courtier-gossip. 'Bring Up The Bodies' is sleeker, tighter, and more propulsive than 'Wolf Hall'. The revisionist characterization of Thomas Cromwell grows ever more complex and human - he's a rationalist ahead of his time yet ethically ambiguous in his service to Henry VIII. And we all know what happened, but the climactic pages, with Anne Boleyn's execution, will disturb you for days.
That being said, I still don't understand why Mantel feels she has to employ a bizarre pronoun gimmick with her main character (always 'he', never Cromwell unless absolutely necessary), though I had a lot less trouble following the dialogue this time around, even with the countless Thomases and Harrys and courtier-gossip. 'Bring Up The Bodies' is sleeker, tighter, and more propulsive than 'Wolf Hall'. The revisionist characterization of Thomas Cromwell grows ever more complex and human - he's a rationalist ahead of his time yet ethically ambiguous in his service to Henry VIII. And we all know what happened, but the climactic pages, with Anne Boleyn's execution, will disturb you for days.
Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach
5.0
I never thought I'd bestow a 5-star rating on book that had so many colons. And I DON'T MEAN DOTS.
This might be my favorite Mary Roach work yet, because this time she brings her inimitable style to a subject that applies to everybody (more so than sex). The chapters of the book are neatly structured - starting with taste, smell, saliva and chewing, moving onto digestion, and ending with you-know-what. Those final chapters are unforgettable, and had me squirming all over the surface of my commuter-train seat.
Of course, Roach's writing had me laughing uncontrollably, and she inserts the most wondrous footnotes this side of David Foster Wallace. But she also has a remarkable persuasiveness. Her book 'Stiff' is responsible for my decision to donate my remains to science, and 'Gulp' may just have me (and you) considering fecal implants to be the future of medicine.
The book's flaw is in its being too short. Dear Ms. Roach or Ms. Roach's publisher: please put out a compilation of her magazine pieces, already.
This might be my favorite Mary Roach work yet, because this time she brings her inimitable style to a subject that applies to everybody (more so than sex). The chapters of the book are neatly structured - starting with taste, smell, saliva and chewing, moving onto digestion, and ending with you-know-what. Those final chapters are unforgettable, and had me squirming all over the surface of my commuter-train seat.
Of course, Roach's writing had me laughing uncontrollably, and she inserts the most wondrous footnotes this side of David Foster Wallace. But she also has a remarkable persuasiveness. Her book 'Stiff' is responsible for my decision to donate my remains to science, and 'Gulp' may just have me (and you) considering fecal implants to be the future of medicine.
The book's flaw is in its being too short. Dear Ms. Roach or Ms. Roach's publisher: please put out a compilation of her magazine pieces, already.
NOS4A2 by Joe Hill
4.0
An exceptional piece of New England horror/fantasy, and the fastest 700-page book I've read. Hill has Neil Gaiman's knack for mixing the mundane with the enchanted, and it's refreshing that the characters' psyches tend to be permanently screwed-up from their supernatural encounters, instead of bouncing back like nothing happened. I wasn't as fond of Hill's attempts at crass, grisly, Cryptkeeper-level wisecracks. But these are few and and far between, and the ending is perfect.
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
3.0
Much wackier than expected. I guess PKD was heavy into the themes of illusory reality and mysticism right from the start of his novel-writing career. The first 3/4 of the book are a provocative blend of ideas and exposition, even if it's not terribly exciting. In the last quarter the plot accelerates and things get stranger yet. I admired the novel's opaqueness and resistance to clichéd plot mechanisms, even if the middle section is a little dull.
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell
4.0
The stories in Karen Russell’s debut collection are of a piece. Nearly all of them take place on an unnamed south Florida island, and an ancillary character in one story may be the protagonist in the next. The first four stories alone are all set among adolescent inhabitants of this swampy isle, and always at night.
The typical Russell yarn features an endearingly awkward teen (chubby or hairy or mute, etc.) that’s slipped through the cracks of societal institutions, and a surreal, natural-world adventure – like getting trapped inside of a car-sized conch shell with a janitor during a thunderstorm, or searching for the aquatic ghost of a dead sister in a hidden bay cove festooned with glowworms. These tales are in the tradition stretching from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Haruki Murakami, but above all they have the lingering flavor of Karen Russell’s subconscious. From the descriptions, it sounds like the stories could suffer from forced whimsy and quirk, but no – they work wonderfully because Russell describes the frustrations and euphoria of adolescence with the same matter-of-factness she employs to introduce a dancing albino covered in tin foil or an alpine plane crash. There is one story where this balance doesn’t quite work – the intriguingly titled ‘from Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration’ imagines the legendary Minotaur as the harried patriarch of a family of 19th-century settlers, and it never quite gels. On the high end of the spectrum is the title story, saved for last, narrated by one among a group of werewolves’ daughters being eased into human society. It’s flawless – hilarious, unforgettable, haunting.
*A note for fans of ‘Swamplandia!’: the first story in this collection (‘Ava Wrestles The Alligator’) is the seed that grew into the novel, but it has some significant alterations and is worth reading on its own.
The typical Russell yarn features an endearingly awkward teen (chubby or hairy or mute, etc.) that’s slipped through the cracks of societal institutions, and a surreal, natural-world adventure – like getting trapped inside of a car-sized conch shell with a janitor during a thunderstorm, or searching for the aquatic ghost of a dead sister in a hidden bay cove festooned with glowworms. These tales are in the tradition stretching from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Haruki Murakami, but above all they have the lingering flavor of Karen Russell’s subconscious. From the descriptions, it sounds like the stories could suffer from forced whimsy and quirk, but no – they work wonderfully because Russell describes the frustrations and euphoria of adolescence with the same matter-of-factness she employs to introduce a dancing albino covered in tin foil or an alpine plane crash. There is one story where this balance doesn’t quite work – the intriguingly titled ‘from Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration’ imagines the legendary Minotaur as the harried patriarch of a family of 19th-century settlers, and it never quite gels. On the high end of the spectrum is the title story, saved for last, narrated by one among a group of werewolves’ daughters being eased into human society. It’s flawless – hilarious, unforgettable, haunting.
*A note for fans of ‘Swamplandia!’: the first story in this collection (‘Ava Wrestles The Alligator’) is the seed that grew into the novel, but it has some significant alterations and is worth reading on its own.