Enjoying the Classics, pt. 1

Let's just clear the air of something right off the bat. This might mortify you, and I'm sorry about that. But here it is:

I can't stand the Beatles.

I know, I know. Maybe there's something wrong with me. I've mystified - and even downright offended - some people by saying this. But it's true. Their music just rubs me the wrong way.

That said, I understand why they're important. Their influence is enormous; they paved the way for future generations of pop music; etc. They absolutely deserve to be looked back upon fondly, and to be as seminal as they are. I understand and accept and agree with all of that.

But I don't actually enjoy their music in the least bit.

So then. If I haven't scared you away yet, I'm sure you can already guess where this is going:

What about "classic" books? Do we have to like them just because they're "classic"?

Based on my Beatles analogy, you can no doubt guess my answer to this question:

Of course you don't have to like a book just because it's a classic! Forget what your English teacher and your snooty friends and that strange guy at the bookstore said. It is okay to not like a classic. There have been plenty of classics along the way that I haven't enjoyed. In fact, I'll tell you the reason I'm thinking about this topic now:

I recently started reading 1984 by George Orwell. (...yes, for the first time. ahem...*mumbles incoherently*)

I'm about a quarter of the way in, and...well...it's really not my cup of tea so far. I haven't exiled it to the land of no return (at least not yet), but I'm really not enjoying it at all. Yesterday I told my wife that if this book were written today (instead of being a "classic" from yesteryear), I definitely wouldn't be reading it.

Much like I said about the Beatles: I understand why 1984 is important. I can see why it has been so influential. I recognize that the ideas were simultaneously both a product of their time and ahead of their time. I'm glad it exists. But none of this adds up to me actually liking it.

(Now that it's come this far, I imagine I'm probably stepping on all kinds of toes with this post - haha. Oops.)

Of course there are plenty of classics that I've read and loved along the way, for one reason or another. And there have been a fair share that - much like 1984 - ultimately weren't for me.

And that's okay.


What are some classics that you've read but haven't actually liked, friends? And what are some that you've read and do enjoy?

REVIEW: Child of God - Cormac McCarthy

• Year first released:  1973
• ISBN of the edition I read:  0679728740
• Publisher of the edition I read:  Vintage International
• My rating (out of 5):  4

I'm actually a little hesitant to give Child of God a four-star rating. As to be expected from McCarthy, it's incredibly vivid and highly realistic, with characters that veritably seem to have a life of their own. Never once did I feel like McCarthy was overstepping his bounds as the author, nor stretching the reality of the book's mood or setting. As far as the writing is concerned, Child of God is a solid four at the very least - likely more.

My hesitation over the rating, though, is that Child of God plays right at the edge of the line of being too disturbing (at least for my tastes). The main character, Lester Ballard, is a deeply depraved man, and McCarthy doesn't spare many details of the protagonist's escapades. (Thankfully, he spares a precious few, which is possibly the main reason I was even able to finish the book.)

This is not a quest for redemption. This is not a journey of the protagonist coming to the light, learning from his mistakes, or grappling with his morality. Ballard is vile through and through, and McCarthy never apologizes for this nor tries to get us to believe otherwise.

Sometimes it can be off-putting to have a character that is so intrinsically immoral. Where's the complexity, the ambiguity, the checkered past, the thought process that gets us to actually sort of kind of make us just barely begin to slightly understand at least a little tiny bit why this guy is so evil? Though normally these things make for a fantastic, rich villain, in this rare exception, it is most certainly to McCarthy's credit that he does not try to get us to empathize with Ballard. Understanding Ballard isn't the point; we are only observers. Child of God is a portrait of mankind at its worst. And though we could argue that in reality, there always seems to be a reason for a man to sink so low, this book is simply not about the reasons, the psychology, the saccharine. It is about the depravity.

That said, we come to my main complaint of Child of God. (That is, my main complaint regarding the writing, not just my personal tastes.) Though this picture of depravity is fully realized and highly effective, I was left wondering what, precisely, was the point of the tale. Considering that there is no resolution to speak of, I couldn't help but question what exactly McCarthy was trying to convey. Evil, yes, but why? What inspired McCarthy to commit these particular ideas to the page?

Luckily, these questions didn't trouble me until I finished the book. It was not a consuming curiosity that I grappled with throughout each of the 200 pages - more of an idle question once I turned the final page. Considering that the book was so explicit and unsettling, though, it's a fair question to ask: Why did McCarthy spend 200 pages disturbing me, only to end the story without any sort of resolution, redemption, or message?

If this isn't the sort of thing to trouble you, though, friend, then Child of God is one of the better-written books you're going to read. The style, characterizations, and imagery are all first class without a doubt - it is only the disturbing content which gives me pause.

REVIEW: Another Episode S/O - Yukito Ayatsuji

• Year first released:  2016
• ISBN of the edition I read:  9780316312318
• Publisher of the edition I read:  Yen Press
• My rating (out of 5):  3

You might remember from my October review of Another that I was quite smitten with it. (I gave it a 4.5 - pretty dang great, really.) One thing I said about it was, "Every step of the way, the story continually evolves - whether subtly or overtly - and is jam-packed with at least a dozen hefty twists, each of which alters the trajectory of the plot in unpredictable ways."

You can imagine, then, that I had rather high hopes for this side-story novella, Another: Episode S. Ultimately, these might have set me up for a bit of disappointment. 

Episode S wasn't bad. It wasn't anything particularly special, though - at least not compared to its counterpart. Here we have a ghost story about the ghost of a man trying to figure out how he died, why, and where his body is. (He is under the impression that he can't move on from this world until he finds his corpse so that he can get a proper burial.) It's kind of straightforward stuff, really, nothing groundbreaking (up until the end, at least).

I discovered an interesting concept after finishing the book, though:

There were several things about the plot development that bothered me. Frankly, I thought they were rather lazy on Ayatsuji's part, even a bit of a stretch. It felt as though Ayatsuji was taking the easy way out, relying too much on coincidence to move the story along. Curiously, though, once I hit the twist ending - which was quite sizable and highly intriguing, by the way - I realized that many of the things which bothered me along the way were actually intentional, and weren't as lazy or stretchy as I had thought. 

This said, on the one hand, I'd like to say that this revelation washes away the bad taste of that perceived laziness. It was certainly a worthwhile ending which I didn't see coming, and which made sense of the apparent conveniences along the way. Then again, I spent 200 pages with those things. And even though they were justified in the end, so to speak, that's still 200 pages of a bad taste. It's not necessarily so easy to gloss over that, even with a great finale. 

Some people say the end justifies the means. I think Episode S is proof that this isn't always true.

If I look at Episode S as a side story to add a little more weight to the world of Another, it's interesting enough. Considering how much I loved the first novel, I was glad to have the chance to spend more time in the universe. Episode S is absolutely not a starting point for the universe, though, and it won't win over anyone who wasn't impressed with the first book - it's just a nice little filler to flesh out the world a bit more.

(A couple minor, non-review notes, by the way:

One of the reasons Episode S is not a starting point for the world of Another is because it gives away several of the twists from the first book. If you're interested in the world, PLEASE read Another first.

Also, you might have noticed the title of the book also mentions Episode O, which I didn't comment on in this review. Episode O is a very short manga included in the back pages of the book, about which there's not much to say. It doesn't have much of a plot on its own - it's really just meant to highlight a tiny little bit of backstory from the original novel, and would be completely meaningless if you haven't read the original.)

REVIEW: The Halo Grower - Ryushiro Hindemith

• Year first released:  2016
• ISBN of the edition I read:  0989488926 (sorry for the Amazon link this time - this book isn't available via Barnes & Noble)
• Publisher of the edition I read:  Corinthian Editions
• My rating (out of 5):  2.5

As you've noticed, sometimes I have a hard time figuring out exactly what I want to say about a book. Whether it's because I have mixed feelings about the book, or else because I struggle to find the right words/examples to explain how I feel about it (whether good or bad), sometimes it can be difficult to express.

This is not one of those times.

The Halo Grower is not a bad book, per se. There were plenty of elements to it that were generally interesting and worthwhile.

What Hindemith did wrong, though, he did very wrong. And, considering that it's the main conceit of the book, there's really no way around discussing it at length.

Before explaining, it's worth pointing out: The Halo Grower isn't an especially well-known book. (In fact, I suspect it's self-published, though I haven't verified this yet.) I discovered it in a list on goodreads.com, which listed it as one of the "most difficult" novels in English. Naturally, I was curious. Before picking it up, I didn't know what about the book made it so difficult. After beginning it, the answer came quickly...

Ryushiro Hindemith has a much better vocabulary than you and I do. (That, or he just has a mighty thesaurus, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.)

This fact alone isn't a problem. It's a good thing, in fact. Considering that a person's vocabulary is the number one measure for determining their IQ, Hindemith is clearly in the realm of genius.

Rather, the problem is that Hindemith wants to make sure that we absolutely know he has a better vocabulary than us, to the point where he's clearly just showing off.

Every single page is packed with words you've never seen before. Many of them are, in fact, real words. Others weren't exactly extant before Halo, but still make sense in the way that he used them (adding prefixes or suffixes to change the type of word they are, etc.).

Here, for example, is a very limited list of words from The Halo Grower which I'd wager you haven't come across in your readings:

• blepharospasmic
• Buddhamaniacal
• cathexes
• centuplication
• chirospasmic
• clerestories
• ectomorphic
• eigengrau
• epeirogenic
• etiolated
• Husafellian
• ignivomitus
• karmavention
• lachrymations
• lagophthalmos
• lethologica
• narthex
• neurapraxia
• nevi
• nystagmus
• plantarflexion
• pulchrified
• pyrocumulus
• sanctoliloquy
• sanctomaniacalism
• sanctomegalithic
• shadowgraphical
• stelliferous
• stygiophobia
• synapectomy
• telamonic
• telamons
• triboluminescence
• tritanopia
• vitruvian

Again, this is only a tiny sampling of Hindemith's crazy word choice. In fact, I pulled all of these from just the final 15 pages of the book. (This is merely because I didn't think to start making such a list until I was nearly done reading the book.)

Clearly the vocabulary through Halo is what classifies it as one of the "most difficult" novels in English. Really - how many of these words have you seen before, friends?

That said, I didn't have any trouble following the book. No, I had never seen any of these words before either, but most of them are pretty clearly guessable in context. I only stopped to look up the definitions of one, maybe two words while reading. (Neither of which are actually on this list I shared - they appeared earlier in the book.)

What troubled me more than the use of these rare, complex words, is that Hindemith clearly went out of his way to use them - well out of his way.

If "lachrymations" truly was the best word to use in the context of the sentence, I wouldn't mind in the least.

I'll spare you the trouble of looking it up, though: "lachyrmations" is another word for "tears." Yeah, tears. Like, those drops of water that come out of your eyes when you cry.

Never once in the entire book does Hindemith say that his character "cried" or "shed tears." Nope. The character shed "lachrymations." (He shed them rather often, in fact.)

Oh, come now. This is just plain silly, isn't it?

And it's precisely this silliness that shows us the truth: Hindemith is trying to be difficult. He's purposefully going out of his way to show off his vocabulary.

Yes, I like to learn things as I read. I suspect you do, too. I'm not particularly interested in having an author brag to me about his vocabulary for 250 pages, though. It's a little unbecoming.

Friends, here's a pro tip for you: when you're writing your best seller, let your main character cry. Don't make them lachrymate.

So then. How was the book beyond this asinine word choice, you ask?

Meh. It was fine. The overall setting was quite intriguing. Ironically, though, the plot didn't really go anywhere. (This is ironic because the book is, more or less, a Buddhist cosmological epic about creation and reincarnation - which means that the plot goes everywhere, so to speak - and yet, it doesn't really amount to much. Rem - the main character - basically just comes up against one hurdle or another [actually, mostly one hurdle over and over again] during his creation process, and...well, that's about it.)

I enjoyed picking apart The Halo Grower, accepting the challenge of discovering and understanding this insane vocabulary. It was a fun literary exercise, if nothing else. As well, the setting was vivid and vibrant and of personal interest to me; it's a theme that isn't touched on often, and was worth exploring for that reason.

Aside from these things, though, I really don't know that I can recommend it to anyone. If you want to accept the challenge of Hindemith's word choice - or if you're interested in a peculiar, modern look at Eastern cosmology - then sure, give it a shot, I guess. Otherwise, it's hard to say who else this book might be for.

the Seasonal Cycle of Media

I'm not sure if this is just me - or if everyone is like this - but I've noticed something about myself: my media interests seem to be somewhat cyclical, based on the time of year.

To give a few examples...

• In May, I'm especially interested in spirituality books (such as Rob Bell's books, and of course the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson), as well as manga, anime, and/or video games that take place in modern day Japan.
• In late July and August, I lean towards American and European media - BBC tv shows, Cormac McCarthy books, etc. Asian media still makes an appearance here and there (such as a large concentration on Psycho-Pass last year) but it's not as predominant in the late summer like this.
• Unsurprisingly (and as I spent the entirety of the month discussing), October features a lot of horror stuff - whether books, movies, or video games. In addition to this, though, October also features a come back to an emphasis on Asian media. 
• November and December are really the only times of year I'll partake of fantasy - again, whether books, movies, or video games. I also enjoy more colorful things around this time - for example, it's the only time I'm likely to play Nintendo games (Mario, Zelda), as opposed to PlayStation games. Correspondingly, it's also the time of year I'm most likely to read children's books.

Anyway. Time to go into a more concrete example.

Recently I’ve been thinking about 47 Ronin. You remember that horrendous 2013 movie starting Keanu Reeves? - yeah, you're right; it was pretty terrible.

One fateful November day two years ago, I happened upon a used copy of the novelization of the movie. I hadn't yet seen the movie - and so didn't know how bad it was - but of course the premise interested me. You'll notice above that October brings me back to Asian media, and November is when my interest in fantasy kicks in. Considering that 47 Ronin is a Japanese fantasy, the timing was perfect.

So then. I decided to give the book a shot. And it was incredible.

Weird, I know. 

Again, this is a novelization - meaning it came after the movie. And the movie was unforgivable. Yet somehow Joan D. Vinge managed to take atrocious source material and turn it into a beautiful epic about honor and the things we cherish. 

This was two years ago I read it. And, like clockwork, last November I started itching to read it again. So I did. 

Sure, this second reading may have been a little too soon - I remembered the story quite well from the year before - but it's still a magical book. 

And here we are, November one year later, and - surprise! - I'm itching to read it yet again. Granted, this time around, I've decided to skip it. I don't want to overdo the magic; I'll wait another year or two until my memories of the book fade a bit more. But let's call it what it is: next time I read it, it will probably be in a November.

Is this just me? Or do you do anything like this, friends? Does your interest in media follow any sort of seasonal cycle like this? 

REVIEW: Turtles All the Way Down - John Green

• Year first released:  2017
• ISBN of the edition I read:  9780525555360
• Publisher of the edition I read:  Penguin Young Readers Group
• My rating (out of 5):  5+

It’s no surprise that I’m a big fan of John Green. That said, I’ll admit up front to perhaps a small bit of bias. If you can forgive me this minor bias, though, and trust me on how incredible Turtles All the Way Down really is - and how you really, really should read it - I hope you'll discover the same sheer magic in it that I did. 

Like all of Green's best books (Looking for Alaska, Paper Towns, and the Fault in Our Stars, in order of their release), it'd be easy enough to categorize Turtles as simply a young adult romance, maybe a coming-of-age story (a label I don't really care for because of its overabundant use and yet lack of any inherent meaning, but there you have it). But, like each of those others, Turtles presents us with so much more than "just" a romance, "just" a drama, "just" a young adult book...in fact, it's far beyond "just" anything. 

Turtles wastes no time in diving into the deep end of human struggle. And though its main character Aza is definitely a teenager with teenage emotions and concerns and struggles, we quickly realize that her story is something that touches just about all of us. Almost nothing about Aza is ordinary, per se, and yet she's completely credible as a character, through and through - I might even say that she is Green's strongest, most believable single character to date. Never have we been so deeply invested inside the in's and out's of one of Green's character's minds - the good, the bad, the quirky, the heartache. 

To say much about the plot would certainly give away the magic of reading the book for yourself - a magic which Green establishes within the first few pages. The most I'd dare say is that, after no small amount of pressure from her best friend, Daisy, Aza begins seeking clues about the disappearance of a fugitive billionaire, hoping to claim her stake in the $100,000 reward. Things very quickly complicate from there, and it's not long before we discover that this really isn't about the money or the manhunt at all - it's about how our stories shape us, how we shape our stories, and about the glorious, painful in between: 

Are we simply on the receiving end of our circumstances? Are our stories really our own? Do they shape us, or do we shape them? Are we more than the sum of our parts? Are we even as much as the sum of our parts?

These are not young adult questions - these are human questions, which Green deftly weaves into page after page of Turtles. I'm convinced that you simply cannot read the book without wrestling with these questions for yourself. That's what it left me with, at least, and I'm 32 - about twice as old as Green's target demographic (haha).

If you've read any of his other works, you've no doubt seen Green's nigh-supernatural ability to take a dozen pieces which feel like they're from a dozen different realities, and yet combine them into the most cohesive, relatable package one can imagine. The same is true here - more so, in fact, than he's accomplished previously. 

I'm still too close to Turtles to definitively say if it's better than Paper Towns (my standing favorite of Green's books), but it is absolutely a worthy successor to it, if nothing else. 

If you're waiting for a punch line from me - a disclaimer, a tiny gripe, a "it's-good-but-not-as-good-as...", etc. - there isn't one. Turtles is absolutely a masterpiece, and absolutely once again proves that John Green sits at the pinnacle of modern authors. 

REVIEW: The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro

• Year first released:   2015
• ISBN of the edition I read:  978-0307271037
• Publisher of the edition I read:  Knopf
• My rating (out of 5):  3.5

Considering that Ishiguro just won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature, it seemed to me that it was high time to read one of his books. And based on the fact that Pico Iyer (another author whom I respect) referred to The Buried Giant as "invincible," this seemed like a grand place to start.

It was and it wasn't, I guess. There was plenty in Buried to like, but "invincible" is certainly too strong of a word. 

Though it's most accurate to call Buried a fantasy, that label would likely give one the wrong impression. Yes, there are knights in it. Yes, there's a dragon that must be slain. There are several references to Merlin (and magic generally), and everything about it feels very medieval. If we can go a bit deeper than these elements, though, Buried is actually more like a drama which happens to include some fantasy tropes. 

The crux of the plot rests on an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, who decide that it's time to visit their son in a faraway village. And so they set out on a journey to find him, only to come across various adventures and misadventures along the way. But their adventure is superficial; the truer themes of the book are about familial bonds, the weight of memory, sacrifice, the things we hold on to. 

These are all important ideas, and they're handled exceedingly well in Buried. Even if some of the events and conversations feel a little more metaphorical than they need to be, there's really no mistaking the larger themes and ideas that Ishiguro wants us to garner from his book. In fact, I will happily claim that Ishiguro handles the use of themes more deftly than most authors today - a major plus, to be sure (and, I suspect, one of the reasons he won the Nobel Prize).

Throughout their adventure, there is a litany of smaller stories which Axl and Beatrice either experience first-hand or else hear of from other characters, which all somehow relate to the overarching narrative. It's in these smaller stories that many of the themes truly shine. It's also in these, though, where a few of the book's largest stumbles reside.

Each of these stories - the story of the mysterious boatman and the woman with the rabbits, the adventure at the abbey, and the confrontation with the dragon Querig, to name a few - are interesting enough, and add a particular weight to Buried. The connections between them, though, is a bit lackadaisical. Each of these subplots holds water on its own, but when thrown into the overall plot, just how separate they really are begins to shine through.

For example, I highly enjoyed the episode in the abbey (which comprised about one-fifth of the book). It was disturbing, well-paced, and full of surprises and concepts that made it a fantastic little story. Its connections to the plot as a whole, though, felt a bit too loose to really justify its inclusion. Yes, the abbey was a day in Axl and Beatrice's adventure, but...why was it in their adventure at all? As a reader, the fact that I wonder why this episode happened doesn't sit right with me. 

This is unfortunate, because, again, the whole episode was great - probably one of my favorite parts of the book. This doesn't necessarily mean it belonged in the book, though.

So it is that the parts of The Buried Giant are each impressive on their own, and certainly carry a strong gravitas to them. Unfortunately, the gravity of everything that isn't such a subplot doesn't quite hold them all together, though.