96 dBKeith Martin's booklog/weblog since 1995791 books logged...and countingBuy at AmazonReamdeby Neal StephensonWilliam Morrow(1056 pages)Keyword(s): Speculative fictionDates read: September 20 - November 01, 2011,Rating:Disappointing. This reads like one of Stephenson's pseudonymous efforts, though it isn't quite as good as "Stephen Bury"'s The Cobweb. I found it a little amusing that Stephenson can spend pages writing about the intricacies of a gun collection, but that he refuses to invest more than a vague paragraph on a plot-relevant sexual encounter between two of the main characters.I think at this point that I have to grudgingly admit that I don't know what I saw in his writing in the first place. It's ambitious, but more and more I think a lot of it is pretty dull.Posted: 2011-11-01 |Modified: 2011-11-10 |PermalinkBuy at AmazonBlack Swan Greenby David MitchellRandom House Trade Paperbacks(304 pages)Keyword(s): Literary fictionDates read: August 28 - September 20, 2011,Rating:Thank you, David Mitchell, for restoring my faith in literary fiction. After a terrible experience with Nicholson Baker's House of Holes and a middling reaction to Richard Powers' Generosity, I was a bit afraid that my tastes had shifted away from beautiful prose and toward plot-driven speculative fiction. Though I do greatly enjoy the latter, thankfully I now know that I still have a taste for the former.Black Swan Green is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel set in England in the early 80s. The narrator, Jason Taylor, is the same age as Mitchell, and about two years older than me, and although I grew up in New England rather than the U.K., I recognized enough of Mitchell's music and pop culture references to see and value how real and appropriate they are. I identified strongly with Jason, especially with the distortions the adolescent mind places on the significance of life's minor but formative events.Mitchell is a versatile writer. You'd have a hard time finding three books in three different genres as uniformly excellent as Mitchell's Black Swan Green (bildungsroman), Cloud Atlas (literary speculative fiction), and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (historical fiction). In all cases, the writing craft is meticulous, but in the case of Black Swan Green there are sentences in each chapter that I wish I had conceived and written, metaphors that jump of the page — to the point of being aphorisms.I'm eager to read Mitchell's earlier novels, though I am tempted to hold off a bit and save them for just the right time and place.Posted: 2011-09-20 |Modified: 2011-09-21 |PermalinkBuy at AmazonHouse of Holes: A Book of Raunchby Nicholson BakerSimon & Schuster(272 pages)Keyword(s): Speculative fictionDates read: August 20-27, 2011,Rating:This is by far my least favorite Nicholson Baker book. It is indeed raunchy, but it has a horrific flavor to it (the first "episode" includes a dismembered forearm feeling up a girl), and if there was anything of valu