3 thoughts on “LibraryThing Meme”

1. The book-voyeur in me is always interested in the struck-through books – especially when they don’t look like ones read for school, since that milieu has the power to ruin almost anything. Most of those books are classics and we’re supposed to like them, so the dislikes are the more idiosyncratic and telling elements.

   I see two Margaret Atwoods struck through; while I’ve never read her myself (The Blind Assassin is somewhere on my own list) I’ve only heard good things from friends who have. And I liked Never Let Me Go myself (I think it’s second only to The Remains of the Day among Ishiguro’s work, which isn’t always great). May I ask for your thoughts on those?

   Outside of school books, the only things I would strike through in that list are Memoirs of a Geisha, which I knew I wouldn’t like but turned to in a moment of desperation on a boat, far from any other unread books, and Quicksilver, which somehow managed to make my hackles rise with its handling of history, although I enjoyed the relatively similar Cryptonomicon.

2. I agree – the strike-throughs are definitely the most telling aspects of the list.

   With Atwood I really enjoyed The Handmaid’s Tale, but don’t care for her other stuff. Oryx and Crake just struck me as silly. None of the dystopian elements really hit home in an affecting way (I still fail to see what’s so weird and wrong about growing meat as opposed to slaughtering animals on factory farms,) and I never connected with any of the characters. As for The Blind Assassin, I must have been mistakingly thinking of The Robber Bride when I went through the list. I absolutely hated The Robber Bride, finding it essentially Oprah-style chick lit with literary pretensions (and annoying, stereotyped characters.) I was ambivalent about The Blind Assassin, in fact, I barely remember the plot, so I’ve corrected the list to remove that strike.

   I quite like Ishiguro – The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans would have to go on my favorites list. But Never Let Me Go just didn’t capture me, even though I expected to enjoy it. I think it was the plot holes. For instance, they’re allowed to go live on their own for a time as adults, but wouldn’t that cause enormous problems and lead normal people to see them as more than just organ donors? Oh well. Everything else about the novel was fine, I guess it’s just difficult for me to enjoy a book when my brain keeps pointing out things like that.

   I haven’t gotten around to Quicksilver yet, but I hear that Samuel Pepys makes an appearance, which intrigues me. What specifically bothered you about it? I also enjoyed Cryptonomicon, but my favorite is definitely Diamond Age.

   School books, alas. I still haven’t figured out all the logic behind the American reading curriculum.

3. I’ve had problems with suspension of disbelief and Ishiguro’s novels before, but Never Let Me Go didn’t trigger it as intensely as some. I think because everything I had heard mentioned it being his “science fiction” novel, I was able to give it the kind of benefit of the doubt and lack of plot-hole-poking that a lot of soft sci-fi requires. The Time Traveller’s Wife worked similarly – the time travel is given a hand-waving pseudo-science physical explanation that doesn’t really make sense, but that’s my only complaint and was overlookable for the rest of the story. The Unconsoled, on the other hand, I had a hard time getting through because the narrative technique, the way the characters thought, and much of the action felt so strange that I couldn’t reconcile it with the expectation of a realistic novel.

   The almost-instant dislike I took to Quicksilver is something that I haven’t really been able to satisfactorily explain. I feel that Stephenson’s characters are always hypermodern internet-age people, who think like hackers, and this works for cyberpunk like Snow Crash, even retro-cyberpunk like The Diamond Age, both of which I liked. In Cryptonomicon, the historical characters are mostly already hacker prototypes (Turing, et al.) and because the time difference isn’t so great, it’s not as grating when they aren’t.

   But Quicksilver places a group of people who think and act like Stephenson characters (for obvious reasons) into an early modern setting where they feel so out of place on a fundamental level that the little pieces of period information and attitude that Stephenson includes end up only making it worse. It rings every single one of my anachronism alarm bells, more so when he’s using historical people, in a way that nothing else that I’ve read has done.

   From the little I do know of Margaret Atwood, she certainly seems like an interesting character. The LongPen is a crazy idea that I’m amazed actually got built. On the other hand, she has a way with certain types of striking image in her poetry (e.g. “You Fit Into Me”, the last stanza of “Variation on the Word Sleep”). The Handmaid’s Tale is also something I’ve been meaning to read, though right now it and about 500 other books on my to-read list are a few thousand miles away.