From the TBR Shelf #49: The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands by Stephen King

The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands (1991) by Stephen King


Wow.

As in...wow.

Thanks to Stephen King, I will never be able to look again at lobsters or trains with equanimity. But this Dark Tower series sure is a wild ride, and I plan to see it through to the end.

Books to Look For (October): Biography & Autobiography

     

Review: Rock, Paper, Scissors by Naja Marie Aidt

Rock, Paper, Scissors by Naja Marie Aidt, translated by K. E. Semmel (Open Letter, 341 pages)

This is Danish writer Naja Marie Aidt's first novel, and what a novel it is. At turns emotionally exhausting, heart-stopping, humorous, and depressing, Rock, Paper, Scissors confronts us with some uncomfortable questions about family, jealousy, and greed.

While Thomas O'Malley Lindström, part owner of a stationary store, may seem like the book's main character, it is in fact his dead father around whom all of the action and many of the decisions swirl. After Jacques O'Malley dies suddenly in prison for an unspecified crime, his children, Thomas and Jenny, briefly go through his apartment and then arrange for his cremation and burial. Thing is, the apartment was ransacked before Thomas and Jenny arrived, and it's all downhill from there. After all, Jacques was a hardened criminal and his friends aren't exactly sweet guys - so when Thomas discovers a large wad of cash hidden in Jacques's toaster, the last thing he should do is take it.

Review: Memory by Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría, translated by Lawrence Schimel

 





Review on the Speculative Fiction in Translation site

In Translation: September Fiction and Poetry

Yup, it’s September already- time to binge on school supplies and set some academic goals and look forward to winter break. What better way to start the fall than by reading some great fiction and poetry in translation?! This month brings us some fantastic works by Kuwaiti, French, Israeli, and Spanish writers. Enjoy, and tell us what you’re reading in translation!



The Bamboo Stalk by Saud Alsanousi, translated by Jonathan Wright (Bloomsbury USA, 384 pages, September 22)

Winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, The Bamboo Stalk offers us a glimpse into the lives of foreign workers in Arab countries. Here we have the story of Josephine, a Filipino woman working as a maid in Kuwait, who falls in love and has a child with Rashid. Josephine is ultimately forced by Rashid’s family to return with her son, Jose, to the Philippines. And while Jose hopes to return to Kuwait when he comes of age, his mixed background may work against him.

An Absolutely Serious Analysis of BUT NOT THE HIPPOPOTAMUS

First, let me just clarify for those out there who might not understand that I’m being horribly, horribly facetious in posts like this, that I absolutely love Sandra Boynton because her books calmed my twins when they were crazy almost-toddlers– without fail.

But now, because it’s just so much fun and I really can’t help myself, I shall proceed to critically dissect and analyze Boyton’s classic But Not the Hippopotamus as if I were a stereotypical Dry Old Professor with absolutely no sense of humor. If I were this person, what would I write if someone asked me to produce a close-reading of this text? Well, you’re about to find out.

10 Things That Happen When You Read a “Real” Book

Thank GOODNESS for this article on the benefits of reading actual books! I mean, I was reading the fake stuff (i.e. ebooks), thinking that I was actually consuming the real thing!

According to this ridiculous inane unbelievable informative piece, reading “real” books will make you smarter, help you concentrate better, and even make people think you’re sexy!

But here are even MORE things that reading “real” books will do for you:

Books to Look For (September): History

     

Books to Look For (September): Literary Fiction

     

From the TBR Shelf #48: The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King

The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three (1987) by Stephen King

Ok, everybody's fired for not having made me read the Dark Tower series before now.

Just kidding. I know you guys are just trying to manage your own tottering TBR piles!

So: The Drawing of the Three. King picks up the thread from The Gunslinger and launches us into an entirely different world, one in which Roland can move back and forth between his own and that of our reality. He can even move through time, and that's how he picks up the people who become his companions on the way to the Dark Tower.

Random Recommendation Guest Post: Monograph by Simeon Berry

This recommendation comes from Joseph Spuckler. You can follow him on his Evil Cyclist's Blog, and on twitter @evil_cyclist.


Monograph (2015) by Simeon Berry

"Written in narrow sections that blur the distinction between flash fiction and prose poetry, between memoir and meditation, Monograph veers from the elliptical to the explosive as it dissects the Gordian knot of a marriage’s intellectual, sexual, and domestic lives. Invoking Raymond Chandler, Pythagoras, Joan Didion, and Virginia Woolf as presiding spirits, Simeon Berry curates the negative space of each wry tableau, destabilizing the high seriousness of every lyric aside and slipping quantum uncertainty into the stark lineaments of loss." 

Review: Gene Mapper by Taiyo Fujii, translated by Jim Hubbert

 

Review on the Speculative Fiction in Translation site

Books to Look For (September): Biography & Autobiography

     

An Absolutely Serious Analysis of CLICK, CLACK, MOO

I recently took my kids for their yearly check-up and the pediatrician gave them each a new book: Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type and The Ant and the Big Bad Bully Goat. Of course, I was pleased. I mean, FREE BOOKS.

We took them home and I read them aloud to my boys. And wow the disappointment. I mean, Click, Clack, Moo, has so many problems. What a terrible book. I decided to write a critical analysis of it here on Book Riot to explain why I was so irritated by this supposed classic.

Happy “Women in Translation” Month!

August is “Women in Translation Month” (#WITMonth), and we should thank Meytal Radzinski (@Biblibio) for hosting and promoting this awareness effort on her blog.

As Meytal notes (and I myself have tweeted and written), a disproportionately small number of books in English translation are by women (and the numbers for sci-fi in particular? It’s pretty depressing). So in this post, I’m going to do my part to encourage more translations of women writers by listing a cross-section of those books by women that have been translated into English (or newly-released in paperback) this year.

So You Want to “Read Deeply"?

I’ve been on a tear lately against all of those people who claim that the internetz are destroying our ability to read books. Because puhlease.

And I started wondering what these people thought they meant when they bemoaned our supposed inability to engage in “deep reading.” What is “deep reading?” Well, here’s how a recent Time article put it (warning: nonsense up ahead)

"slow, immersive, rich in sensory detail and emotional and moral complexity — [it] is a distinctive experience, different in kind from the mere decoding of words… A book’s lack of hyperlinks, for example, frees the reader from making decisions — Should I click on this link or not? — allowing her to remain fully immersed in the narrative."

Ok, ok, if people are so concerned about our abandonment of “deep reading,” I have a few helpful suggestions for how to keep this practice going:

Random Recommendation Guest Post: He, She and It by Marge Piercy

This recommendation comes from Shaina. Check out her blog and follow her on twitter @shainareads.

He, She and It (1991) by Marge Piercy

"In the middle of the twenty-first century, life as we know it has changed for all time. Shira Shipman's marriage has broken up, and her young son has been taken from her by the corporation that runs her zone, so she has returned to Tikva, the Jewish free town where she grew up. There, she is welcomed by Malkah, the brilliant grandmother who raised her, and meets an extraordinary man who is not a man at all, but a unique cyborg implanted with intelligence, emotions--and the ability to kill....From the imagination of Marge Piercy comes yet another stunning novel of morality and courage, a bold adventure of women, men, and the world of tomorrow. "

Rachel's Random Recommendation #49: Night & Horses & the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature

Night & Horses & the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (1999) ed. Robert Irwin

"Spanning the fifth to sixteenth centuries and societies that range from Afghanistan to Spain, this anthology is a testament to the astonishing grandeur and variety of classical Arabic literature. ...In Night & Horses & the Desert we encounter the dashing Byronic poetry of Imru’ al-Qays and a treatise on bibliomania by Al-Jahiz, possibly the only writer to have been killed by books. There’s a sorcerer’s manual from 11th century Spain and an allegory by the mysterious “Brethren of Purity,” in which animals argue their case against humanity. Encompassing piety and profanity, fables and philosophy, this volume is a thrilling and invaluabe introduction to one of the world’s great bodies of literature."

Book to Look For (August): History

    

From the TBR Shelf #47: The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger by Stephen King

The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger (1982) by Stephen King

I've been a hard-core Stephen King fan for a while now, but somehow never got around to his Dark Tower series. I'm changing that now by listening to the audiobooks each night, and between the often exhilarating prose and the narrator's dynamic reading, I'm thoroughly enjoying the experience.

For those of you who haven't yet read this series, I'll try to summarize the plot, but that might be difficult since I'm still trying to process it. So in the world of the novel, the characters live in a time after "the world moved on," whatever that means, and Roland Deschain of Gilead is chasing "the man in black," whoever he is. I mean, he sounds like Mephistopheles, but who knows. Ultimately, Roland wants to reach "The Tower," where all universes? dimensions? converge.