I really enjoyed Ólafsdóttir's Miss Iceland. This one not so much. I give it 2 out of 5 stars. The protagonist was a little like myself: melancholic and middle-aged. I like to read for either escape or to learn things, not to look into a mirror. Don't think I'll be reading anything else by Ólafsdóttir
"I was unhappy," I say. ... "I didn't know how to fix it," I add. (p. 159)
Yesterday was a funeral for one of my aunts. It was dreary: rainy and around 50 degrees. I thought of the title of Wanda Sykes's recent comedy special, Not Normal. Reykjavik-like weather on a Memorial Day weekend ain't normal, y'all!
Finished this novel last night. I give it three out of five stars. Not as good as The Drowned World, which I loved and will reread one day. I had trouble following a lot of what was going on The Drought, partly because of Ballard's high-brow prose. Thankfully this Brit explained things, particularly that The Drought specialized in surrealism.
I've read several Ballard books:
Soon I'll pick up his autobiography, Miracles of Life, because I would like to read about his two years in a Japanese internment camp, rather than reading the fictionalizing of it in his Empire of the Sun. And I saw Crash years ago; think I'll listen to the audiobook.
Been fooling around with a Circle playlist for the past week or so. Think I finally got the sequencing right:
Been reading J. G. Ballard's The Drought, and this New York Times piece on him from 1990 came to mind, especially this part:
For Ballard, the thing to be feared is the ''suburbanization of the world,'' a totally eventless landscape made up of television and theme parks. He points out that television has created a consciousness in which upheavals, disasters, cataclysmic events of all sorts register only as momentary images that are quickly forgotten. Given this state of affairs, he warns, passive media spectators might well allow a lunatic to come to power, since they would be unable to distinguish between someone posing a real threat and a minor character in the passing show.
I downloaded Green Day's Dookie from Amazon last night. I had a cassette copy from the '90s, however, it was worn out, so last year I picked up the vinyl at Barnes And Noble. I tried converting it to MP3 files, but it didn't sound too good (I've found converting vinyl and cassettes to MP3 sounded better on my desktops than with laptops). It's such a great album — except for "Welcome to Paradise", which is better on Kerplunk — that I just had to buy it again.
Finished rereading Gone South last night. It's held up pretty well since I first read it in the '90s. Surprisingly, I enjoyed it the second time around (not the case with some rereads, like novels by John D. MacDonald). The characters are believable and the pacing is good, however, I still think the ending lacks logic. When the protagonist goes to rescue his bounty hunters, I rolled my eyes at the unbelievably and how they defeat the drug dealers; maybe McCammon was watching too much Miami Vice. And this time around I didn't hate the last couple chapters, where the Bright Girl is revealed, though I still think it should have been supernatural or paranormal instead of a pedestrian explanation.
Anyway, I give it 4.5 stars out of 5. And here's a letter from the author discussing the novel's inspirations and themes.
Some of the things he'd seen, both in Vietnam and afterward, had convinced him that if any supernatural force was the master of this world, it smelled of brimstone and devoured innocent flesh as its sacrament. (p. 43)
Wanted to post about this before I forget. My day job had a virtual awards ceremony last Thursday morning. They shipped out canisters of popcorn to all of us. I saw mine had arrived Thursday night when I was coming in from bike-riding (the box was inside my apartment building — I had missed it earlier because it was on the rear side instead in the front by the mailboxes). I made a mental note to pick it up later. I didn't remember to go back down and pick it up until Friday during lunch. But it was gone. Kinda lame that one of my neighbors or a visitor of theirs stole it. Luckily, there wasn't anything inside the box, like a gift card, except for the popcorn. My lease can't end soon enough.
I read this book in the '90s and loved it. One memory was that aborigines didn't bathe as much as Westerners because they didn't eat meat.
Halfway through listening to the audiobook, I succumbed to bad habit of mine: Googling the author and book. Turns out the book isn't true in the slightest bit. It's all fake! The author didn't go on a walkabout with a dying aboriginal tribe. Learning that then made it a tough listen. I went days without listening to it. Eventually finished it, sped up at 1.5. Fortunately, it's only six hours. I give it 2 stars out of 5.
Oh well, upward and onward. I'm going to stay in Australia with my audiobook-listening and start Peter Garrett's (of Midnight Oil fame) memoir.
Started rereading this horror novel today (originally read it in the '90s). First sentence is awesome!
It was hell's season, and the air smelled of burning children.
The Washington Post let me down again. I read Marie Benedict's The Mystery of Mrs. Christie based on a review of theirs. Pretty disappointing. I give it two out of four stars. The concept gives a writer so much to work with: Agatha Christie's 11-day disappearance in 1926. Benedict doesn't really have down how the Brits spoke back then, the novel could have lost at least 50 pages, and the ending was weaker than a Tana French denouement. On the plus side, now I want to rewatch the great Dr. Who episode about it, "The Unicorn and the Wasp".
I usually just blog about books, movies, and TV shows I read and watch, but I did want to write about the past few days.
Haven't been sleeping too well the past few, with Wednesday night being the worse, though I did sleep well last night. Been worried about my living situation. The lease for my apartment is up at the end of June. I hadn't received a new offer, so I had to bug the property manager for one. I'm currently paying $1,145 per month. His original offer was $1,445 ($300 more). I pushed back and his new offer is $1,350 ($205 more), so I'm moving out.
The new owners are way worse than the original management company when I moved in 2017. Since taking over around Oct. '20, they've listed someone else name on my account online, took about six months to hire a handyman (I had a dead bird in the balcony closet, and handles on interior closets were loose — I had to fix them on my own), and took over a month to replace the light bulb in the hallway outside of my door.
I'm going to crash at my mom's house for a little while. There's an apartment complex I would like to move into, but they don't have anything open at the moment. Plus, my day job hasn't announced if they're reopening the office in the fall, since this pandemic is winding down. And I may save up enough money to buy a house; rent is so high now (my second apartment was $500 around the year 2000) that it may be worth it to get my own place, even though I'll have to do one major project a year and I'll probably never own it, but at least I wouldn't be paying greedy landlords anymore.
Anyway, sing it Yaz!:
Finished reading Dmitri Volkogonov's Lenin. I give it four out of five stars. It's the second biography I've read by him. With Lenin, Volkogonov does a good job of chipping away at communism, much better than The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 by Martin Malia, whose subtext oozed with the anti-Slavic condescension of an American imperialist.
Here are passages that caught my eye:
Lenin was the inspirer, Trotsky the agitator, and Stalin the executor.
p. 261
bureaucratic totalitarianism
p. 312
the path of dogmatism is the shortest way to dictatorship
p. 317
Everything connected with Lenin was anti-capitalist, anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-reformist, anti-human and anti-Christian. There can scarcely have been another man in history who managed so profoundly to change so large a society on such a scale.
p.326
[[Next to last chapter, starting with "The demise of the Union", and the last chapter]]
Last weekend I was listening to The World/Inferno Friendship Society's "Heartattack '64". I haven't bought anything by them since 2006's Red-Eyed Soul, so I thought I would pick up their latest, All Borders Are Porous to Cats. While listening to it, I glanced at a review on Punk News. Apparently it's a concept album mashing up immigration and Dr. Seuss' Cat in the Hat. The only song I'm keeping on my iPod is "The Cat in the Hat Has a Right to Sing the Blues". I was debating whether to keep "I'll Be Your Alibi" and the 57-second "In the Briar Patch Born and Raised", but I couldn't see enjoying them with repeated listens. I think part of the reason I'm not keeping more songs from this album is because it's very jazzy, and I don't dig that music genre.
I was gonna create a Spotify playlist of all the songs I have on my iTunes from them, but "The Expatraite Act" from the Rock Against Bush comp isn't on there, so what's the point. Damn you streaming services!
