thomaser said:
Yeeeaaah, finally finished Infinite Jest. What a ride. Now, to search the net for analyses so I can hopefully make sense of some of the things that didn't. Make sense.
Congrats on finishing up Infinite Jest! For analysis, I'd recommend
this guy's musing and insights followed by the full on
plot analysis someone worked out.
Here are a few more novels I read recently, but was too lazy to post about in the reading threads at the time:
As part of my weakness for cheesy men's adventure fiction, I picked up the first volume of the
Executioner series, War Against The Mafia. This is the book that introduced Mack Bolan, the Vietnam sniper turned vigilante who takes revenge against the mob for killing his family. That's not a spoiler so much as it's the opening chapter and the lead-off for 376 books and counting. I don't think I'll be reading all of them, mind you, but I certainly enjoyed the first book in the series. Mack Bolan is kinda like a fun loving version of the Punisher, who enjoys shacking up with Mafia women and cracking wise here and there as a change of pace between killing mob members left and right. It was a hoot and an incredibly fast read. I'm hoping to pick up a few more volumes today.
Next up was
Friday by Robert Heinlein, a book I've been meaning to read ever since I first oggled the cover of a friend's copy in middle school. I somehow missed it when I read a lot of dirty-old-man Heinlein in high school so, inspired by someone's avatar around here, I snagged a used copy recently and tore through it in short order. It's about an artifical human named Friday who works as a courier for a mysterious Boss in the not too distant future. When she's cut off from her home base she undergoes a series of adventures in a sort of coming of age story. In true Heinlein fashion, a lot of this involves sex of one sort or another, with Friday's opinions on the subject being, shall we say, extremely relaxed. As far as late period Heinlein goes, this is a pretty great read; the man could make the phone book a page turner, so when he's dealing with a superhuman navigating various emergencies across the planet, it makes for a good time. It's also put me in the mood to read some more later Heinlein novels I've missed, and I'm hoping to score a copy of Job: A Comedy of Justice or The Door Into Summer today as well.
The last book I finished was
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith, a novel about a Ministry for State Security officer in the Stalinist era Soviet Union who tracks down a serial killer. The catch here is that the State officially has no crime and anyone who would suggest such a thing is probably an enemy of the state. Cue paranoia, exile, and all the totalitarian oppression you can stand. I went into this expecting something more along the lines of Martin Cruz Smith's
Arkady Renko novels, but where Renko has a black sense of humor about life in the late Soviet era, things in Child 44 are mostly non-stop grim, grim, grim. Then you throw in serial child murder and, yeah, it's not what you would call a happy read. Also, the way dialogue is written in the book is odd. Here's a sample:
- Why am I talking in italics and with a dash before my dialogue instead of quotations?
- Beats the hell out of me.
You get used to this pretty quickly but, like I said, odd. Overall I enjoyed the book but I didn't completely love it. I might read the follow-up novel
The Secret Speech at some point, but probably not anytime soon.
FnordChan
