but not today.

rival  m.c.s and their entourages are the subject of the fictional a hip hop story, more west side story than romeo and juliet, there is an ill-fated romance involved. i really have mixed feeling about this book. i thought the idea was good and the characters are believable. heru ptah has a good message, and i was a bit surprised by the ending. the issues are in the storytelling, the writing isn’t strong enough and the plot development was often too simple or cliched. i wanted it to be a bit edgier, as much as i hate to say it. good book, just flawed.

tiny positioning movements of independent life.

i wish all series could end as well as the xenogenesis trilogy does with imago. octavia butler ended the series with it’s strongest book. the human/oankali symbiotic relationship comes to an apex with the creation of jodah, a perfect ooloi/human hybrid. no one is sure what to think of it, some are happy, most are threatened. the majority wants it to leave earth, so it’s family go into hiding, letting jodah mature and prove it’s no threat. i can’t get over octavia’s imagination and ability to layer complex issues into a story line. i’m enamoured by her style.

parted for the night.

alright, rachelle lent me voices telling me how much she loved it, so i went into with high expectations. that’s always a mistake.

the story is about a society’s struggle to free themselves from invaders that have taken over their land. the group that took over outlawed all books fearing that they are weapons of the devil, and made slaves and whores out of the natives. one household is at the center of the of the resistence, and when some visiting storytellers from the north come they unknowingly help instigate the revolution.

i thought the book was an excellent read, i felt a little let down that i didn’t love it like rachelle did. which probably means i’m not intellectual enough to understand the symbolism and allegories ursula le guin weaved into the story. there are some obvious statements about religion, and a warning of a possible future illiterate society. both of which i appreciated.  le guin is a fantastic writer, i’m only just starting read her.

we care.

interesting week in reading for me, i read the first and latest book by one my favorite authors.  i have now read all of jonathan ames books. they were different yet similar experiences.

the double life is twice as good is his latest book, its a collection of articles, essays and fiction. good book, not his best collection, but that’s what you get from a collection. i would hesitate to recommend it, but i would tell you it’s not his best work.

i pass like night was his first book. it tells the same tale that all his novels tells, a (somewhat) lost adult male has trouble with alcohol and figuring out his sexuality while trying to be a gentleman about town. i’ve criticized him before for recycling the storyline, but he is skilled at skewing it and making seem like different chapters of the same story. this being his first novel, he did a little experimenting with a non-linear story line. for me, that format didn’t work. having read his other books already, it didn’t seem right. he has an unstable style, it just works better in the linear format. i enjoyed this book mainly because it reminded me of his other better books.

i know what i’ve done.

parable of the talents, sequal to parable of the sower, is a mixed bag of a book. over the last two years i’ve become a big fan of octavia butler’s unique style of sci-fi writing. unfortunately parable of the talents reads like it isn’t written by octavia. the wording is often clunky and long winded, and the plot sort of meanders a times. it’s missing octavia’s usual colorful and easy going flair. talents seems like it is two books crammed into; one the story of lauren, the other the story of her daughter. part of me wonders if she submitted two books, and the publisher decided to combine them into one. leaving the job to an editor, not octavia.

i am glad i read the book though, if you’ve ever read any of octavia’s book you know that she has a strong talent for story arcs that span several books. so it was good to see the story of lauren olimina come to a conclusion.

thinking about what’s next.

i got tired of people trying to push middlesex on me, so i gave in. i wish i hadn’t, reading this book was like work. i’ve been avoiding this book, i read most of jeffry eugenides’s virgin suicides, and didn’t really like his voice.  i still find his style annoying. to me it’s unnecessarily wordy and horribly plotted. it should say something that despite not enjoying it, i still finished it. about halfway through the story got slightly better and i wanted to see how it turned out. unfortunately i found the ending to be anti climatic in every way.  file this ony under: i’m glad  other people like it, i just don’t get it.

decided to call this place acorn.

octavia e. butler was a fantastic science fiction writer, and it turns out she could also write a great post-apocalypse adventure and make it seem like fantasy. parable of the sower follows lauren as she treks north after her community was burned and family killed by drug addicts. in a society where trust doesn’t exist, lauren collects a small troop of folks that she aspires to start a new community with. the journey is through a terrible landscape of barren towns, roving gangs of desperate cannibals, wild dogs and countless unexpected dangers. as cheesy as it sounds this book is about finding hope in a hopeless would, it succeeds because of octavia’s brilliant writing.

to tell the truth, not at all.

a good companion piece to persepolis, chicken and plums tells the story marjane satrapi’s great uncle, nasser ali khan, who’s life changes after his tar is broken. satrapi’s writing and graphic style is full of wit and heart. she pulls off a feel good novel about death, and it never gets schmaltzy.

before flying south to get us.

after loving the brief wonderous life of oscar wao i was eager to read more of junot diaz. drown is a collection of short stories that was released before wao. you can see the ground work for wao being laid in drown. junot diaz’s colorful, personal, and mildly experimental prose, that is perfected in wao, takes shape through these stories. although it’s a collection of short stories it reads like a novel, with all of the stories told from the point of view of a dominican-american boy, en masse they cover the boy’s young life into adulthood from the dominican republic to new jersey. like a lot of short story collections, i wish some of them were fleshed out into books of their own, especially the stories about his parents. junot diaz is a writer i’ll be happy to read more of, he just needs to put more out there.

which one is trembling.

clay’s ark is the last book in octavia butler’s patternist series, yet it is the beginning of the story. clay’s ark tells how the mutations in the human race started, leading to the complex race and power struggles that evolve in the series. the book is too short, the plot never takes shape, and you never get a good feel for the characters. character development is usually one of octavia’s strenghts. the ending also seems abrupt, almost like there really wasn’t one, the story basically just stops. clay’s ark is a good compliment to the series, it clears up some of the backstory, but is not essential.