Preemptive Retaliation

My reading has been a bit different this year. I spent seven months (a justifiable seven months) reading one book, and then I read two books which are openers for their own epic series which I’m not sure I’ll continue. I suppose whether I pick up their sequels will be the final line of the review. Still, it’s been an interesting year for reading. I feel like I’ve sampled a lot in terms of style and theme. I’ve picked up a few tricks form all of these which I’m looking forward to exploiting in my writing.

 

1. Zen and the Art of Writing – Ray Bradbury. Dec 2015 to 20th Jan

I’ve read a few books on writing in the past, and I always find myself more inspired by the personality of the writer rather than the advice. Ray Bradbury was absolutely charming in this book; not only giving advice about writing but also seeming to push forward general life advice too. Go see a forest! Kiss a girl! Walk barefoot on the grass! There was an excitement and enthusiasm that was contagious and kept me grinning the whole way through.

2. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace. 21st Jan to 29th Aug

I’ve written excessively on this already, so I won’t labour too much on the point. I’ve gotten over my temper tantrum when I finished it, and I again appreciate it for its pointedly pointless rambling prose, its hilarious, true people and ridiculous situations, its unflinching patience with a scene and its love of long, flowing, endless sentences that almost wear out their welcome, but not quite. I’m glad I read it, thought I do regret taking so much time with it since it took up a lot of my reading for the year. Still, all in all, I loved it in my own spiteful way.

3. Delete this at your peril – Neil Forsyth. Unknown beginnings to 4th Sep

This was my palette cleanser when Infinite Jest got a little too much for me. Simple and fun. I found it cringey at times, since I always find this sort of thing embarrassing.

4. Mockingbird – Walter Tevis. 3rd Sep to 7th Sep

I inhaled this book. It was a breath of fresh air compared to Infinite Jest; its concise words getting the point across with perfect brevity. Other than that I was very impressed with it. I love older books speculating what the future would be like, and this had a very interesting bleak future. Moronic humans ruled by vindictive robots, with the act of reading being outlawed. It seems like a simple premise, but the author ran with it in ways that I didn’t expect, and created a whole interesting world out of it. I really enjoyed this book.

5. The Final Empire – Brandon Sanderson. 8th Sep to 6th Oct

I’ve been listening to Writing Excuses for years, and not once have I read anything by the people that run it. I decided to check out this one first since it’s the most famous. I enjoyed it. It was very much a “blockbuster” book, made for sheer entertainment. There were interesting characters and a really interesting magic system. There’s not much else I can say about it. It was a fun romp, and it’s given me a new found confidence in the advice he gives on his podcast. The only thing that annoyed me was the hasty, last minute addition of a bigger bad looking in the background, setting it up for an obvious sequel. Still, I had fun.

6. Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami. 13th Oct to 24th Oct

I haven’t read Murakami since I was in university, and even then it was Kafka on the Shore which was mad and surreal and wonderful. This was something much more grounded though, and I found myself really engrossed by the characters. I was really rooting for the main character, but then as the novel went on I noticed more and more what he was leaving out, and how he was lying to me. It added an extra edge that I didn’t expect from a coming of age novel. The writing was more modern than I expected, and at times really sexy. It was sad and wonderful and wistful.

7. The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett. 25th Oct to 6th Nov

I started reading this in prep for NaNo, to give me flavour and ideas behind my detective novel. I’ve never read a book whose film adaption is so close to the material as this. The film is almost a word for word, shot for shot remake of the book. What I loved most about it was how it got deep under the skin of what a bastard Sam Spade really is. He is a truly manipulative, horrible little man whose only redemption is his single minded duty to what he feels is “right”, even if what’s right is for all the wrong reasons. It made me really appreciate the vague tones of the noir genre, how an anti-hero can be truly crafted.

8. Leviathan Wakes – James S. A. Corey. 7th Nov to 17th Dec

I didn’t get into this one at first – smarmy ass detective and naïve ice hauler who are connected across the expanse of space – but I started to really like the characters and get pretty invested in the world the book built. Sometimes its influences came through strong – a splash of Firefly here, a dollop of Hyperion there – but mostly it stood on its own. I like the clashing difference between the two protagonists, how both of them had a clear moral compass which pointed in different, but not opposite, directions. It had some nice moments, and kept me hooked in until the end.