Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

Long time ago a person I knew told me about Terry Pratchett and his satirical/comical take on the Sword and Sorcery and Epic Fantasy genres. I didn't bite. I was too much into Tolkien and Moorcock (later I discovered Sapkowski and Martin). I couldn't care less about some satirical take on my favorite heroes that I identified with.  Well, I was wrong.

Even though I didn't start with the chronological order with the Rincewind series, neither with the Witches or The Watch, the industrial revolution trilogy is amazing, and Moist Von Lipwig is becoming one my favorite characters in literature. Yes, there is a lot of satire about vampires and trolls and wizards (from the Unseen University and boy do they like to eat!), however the character of Moist and his transformation from a scoundrel to a hero is amazing, and so it the plot development and the resolutions, with Lord Vetinari serving as a Deus Ex Machina of sorts.

After being saved from hanging, Moist von Lipwig is appointed Postmaster General and given the task to make the dilapidated, almost completely destroyed Post Office into a successful institution. Of course, Lipwig's first reflex is to run as fast as possible, but that doesn't pan out thanks to the Golems, which are one of the main characters throughout the Industrial Revolution trilogy.  Here we learn about "The Clacks" - a form of visual telegraph (no electricity yet in Ankh-Morpork) and the corrupt fraudster who stole them from the original inventor.

Eventually Moist invents stamps and restores the Post Office to the old glory and more.  In the meantime he also makes the daughter of the Clacks inventory (who smokes like a chimney non-stop, but apparently is very fit and sexy otherwise) his fiance. Her name is Adora Belle Dearhart and she runs the Golems in the city and fights for their rights.

Excellent book and absolutely great read for the times when you don't want to get too deep into some difficult and deep reading.  I am looking forward to the other two books in the trilogy.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

I re-read this book and I enjoyed the re-reading more than reading a new book.  Maybe I am getting old.  Today I saw the Japanese Ringu movie from 1998, and thought more about how Japanese are different from westerners.  The western "The Ring" movie is scarier than the Japanese original, but only because it uses cheap jumpscare tactics and soundtrack that gets on your nerves.  The Japanese original makes much more sense, the story is consequential and relevant and the sequence of events is logical, unlike the American copy, however it is not as scary.

Mr. Nakata is everyone's grandfather we all wished we had.  Complete goodness and non-nastiness, which is an achievement supreme in today's world of vicious personal interest and disregard for anyone else. The treatment that Mr.Nakata received from his brothers and especially from his first cousin who stole all his life savings after getting in trouble with the Yakuza is the testament to the garbage that modern people have become, refusing to take personal responsibility for their actions and always looking to screw over someone more vulnerable in order to save their own shitty skin. 

We live in a world of garbage humans.  These garbage humans are always on the lookout to swindle and defraud someone naive enough to trust them.  They are like the slimy snake-like monster that comes out of Mr. Nakata's dead mouth, trying to escape.  Mr. Hoshino showed us how to deal with these slimy, disgusting monsters.

There's no one in the entire Japanese history that could bring the Japanese spirit and soul so available and consumable by western readers.  While other Japanese authors pretty much require you to do an extensive study of Japan in order to even start understanding their works - Murakami does western metaphors and connections with the ease of someone who lives in both worlds and understand both intimately. Not only the references to Jazz and other western music, but even books, classical music and other parallels help the well-read and well-rounded western reader understand the Japanese folklore, mythology, demonology and connection with life and death.  Nobody else has ever come even close. 

Love is a Dog from Hell by Charles Bukowski

There was an idiot on the internet (where else?) that claimed Bukowski only knows how to give good titles to his poetry books while the actual poetry sucked.  Well, that idiot should learn that the books are named by editors and publishers, not by the author, and the titles are actually taken from the verses that Bukowski wrote.  So, there you go, internet idiot, you just got schooled. 

The poems in this book are a mixed bag, as usual, because Bukowski lived by his motto (and grave epitaph) - "DO NOT TRY".  Just do. Just let it flow. It doesn't matter if it is garbage, just let it flow. Eventually some diamonds will flow out as well.  Yes, some of the poems here are pure garbage that a fourth grader could write better - so what? There are others that could be rated up there with the best poetry every written by a human being.   

Bukowski does not edit his poetry.  He publishes it all, as it came out from his drunken brain.  It is up to the reader to separate the garbage from the diamonds.  Don't like that approach? Your time is most valuable? Well, be on your merry way, then, nothing for you here! 

Poetry books are difficult to review, since you have to do it poem by poem.  This collection is similar to others by Bukowski, which I reviewed previously, dealing with love in the gutter and life in the gutter, describing, in very strong words (dick, shit, cunt, ass, fucking etc. being regularly used), the lowest social classes in the US, their morals (or lack thereof), their values, life priorities and views of the world at large.

Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

This is the second book in the Culture series, if you go chronologically by published date.  It is also the most boring one of the 4 I've read so far in the Culture series.  I see people online gushing over how interesting the story telling is when one thread starts from the beginning and the other from the end, but this seems to me to be just a silly gimmick, that does not help to lift off the average and boring story off the ground.  Here is the ending: Zakalwe is actually his brother who killed the original Zakalwe and his sister Darkscense (a stupid name as stupid names come, though Banks is a champion in making up the most dumb names for aliens - I can feel Heinlein raging against moronic names in SciFi).

Yes, he is the Chair Maker because he made a chair from the bones of his sister, including her broken pelvis!  We had to wade through 400 pages of shitty prose to get to that "exciting twist"!  The twists in this book are definitely sub par. 

Other than that, Sma is again here - she seems to be the most reccuring character.  This time she also organizaes her habitual group sex orgies and other fun stuff that Banks seems to think people living in space would enjoy en masse (why? people are not enjoying group sex en masse on this planet - why would that change in space?).

I keep saying that I will stop reading the Culture novels, but I still reach out for them because all of us humans want something familiar.  Maybe after this disappointment I will truly stop.

Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaimann

 It is a short book and without the complicated mythology of other Gaimann books, but it is very flowing and nostalgic and even a tearjerker at times. It starts when the protagonist returns to the lane where the house he grew up in used to be (torn down now to make space for a set of townhouses).  At the end of the lane there is a mystrerious, all-female, three-generational family, The  Hempstocks, living, on a farm with a large pond that the youngest Hempstock, Lettie, calls an Ocean. The middle-aged Hempstock is Ginnie and the eldest is called just The Old Mrs. Hempstock.

The narrator spends time with Lettie, who shows him another place, where other things live, after the tenant, an Opal Miner, kills himself in the family Mini Morris. One of the things from the other place comes to this world in the foot of the narrator when he is 7 years old and starts giving people money, while taking a human form, a pretty young woman called Ursula Monkton, who starts working for the narrator's family as a nanny and also has an affair with the father of the family. 

The narrator fights the monster, and Lettie helps by letting 'varmints' from another world in, who eat things like what Ursula Monkton is.  The varmints devour her, but they also want to eat the narrator who was a vessel/house for the thing to come from the other place.  Lettie and Ginnie try to protect the 7 year old, but the varmints are stronger.  Lettie throws herself on the top of his body while the varmints attack her and nearly kill her until the Old Mrs. Hempstock wakes from her sleep in her silvery form (she has seen the Big Bang, and will also see the next one) and orders the varmints to get out of this world, which they obey.

Lettie is interred in the pond on the Hempstock's farm, which turns into a veritable ocean, and Ginnie says that when her healing is finished, she will come back.  The narrator leaves the home town and has a full life far away in London, but still comes back every 10 years to check if Lettie has come back from the Ocean at the End of the Lane. 

Look to Winward by Iain M. Banks

I read this book from The Culture series second (after Consider Phlebas) since it deals with the aftermath of the Idiran War (700 years later) and I wanted to see what happened, since I like Hamza in the first book and it was written as an adventure novel.  Well, this volume is definitely not an adventure novel.  It is very slow and much happens inside the heads of characters, with extensive thinkings, flashbacks and memories. At it's core it could be called a spy novel in the future as it is about a saboteur from the planet Chel, who wants to destroy an Orbital (Halo Ring) and kill 5 billion Culture citizens to get a revenge because of the deaths in the Chelgrian Civil War, which was (somewhat) initiated by The Culture meddling. 

Chelgrians are three-legged feline predators who have a very conservative, caste-based and religion-based society, which is not yet at the level of The Culture technologically.  Quil is a former soldier who lost his wife in the Civil War and doesn't want to live anymore, so he is recruited by a faction of Chegrians who want to kill Culture citizens as a revenge.  Quil is supposed to create wormhole in the hub of the Orbital Massaq and kill the Mind (very advanced, sentient AI with full citizenship rights) which will cause a part of the Orbital to desintegrate and kill billions.  Quil will also die, but that's what he wants, anyway.

Chelgrians have devices called "Soulkeepers" which save the full contents of their minds at any given point, so they can be reconstructed in an artificial environment, and thus can live forever, in a way. However, Quil's wife's Soulkeeper was damaged so she suffered a permadeath, and that's what Quil wants as well. The Chelgrian extreme faction meet with 'allies' who are actually renegade Minds of the culture, at an "Airsphere" - ancient worlds created by a long gone civilization and populated by titanic fauna like the behemethosaurs, which are hundreds of kilometers long and live for tens of millions of years.  Chelgrians receive the wormhole weapon from the 'allies' and go to the Massaq Orbital under a guise of wanting to persuade a fugitive Chelgrian composer to return to Chel. 

Everything seems to go undiscovered until the last 10 pages, happening during the long-awaited concert of the first brand new symphony by the Chelgrian composer since he left Chel.  The Mind of the Orbital tells Quil that he knew since the very beginning that he was there to kill him and destroy the orbital, but he didn't do anything to stop Quil because the Mind wanted to die permanently.  The Mind says that he cannot live with the memories of the massacres and mass-murders that he committed during the Idiran war and everything he tried to forget didn't work, so permanent death is the only solution.  He and Quil die together a no-backup death, while the rest of the Orbital lives, and the Chelgrian faction that planned the massacre is murdered violently. 

The book is a meditation on permanent death and the meaning of a finite life, as opposed to infinite oblivion. 

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk

This is probably the most disturbing book by Palahniuk. It consists of a series of short stories connected by a common thread, and there is a range of quality. Some stories are pretty mediocre while others are very powerful and deeply disturbing.  Some stories could be called "horror" or "science fiction" but it is mostly about commentary on society and the psychopaths among us, which is a common theme in Palahniuk's writing. 

The most artfully disturbing story for me was the one about the Nightmare Box, which has enough hints to make it deeply creepy while never revealing what actually happens so each reader can imagine their worst possible nightmare.  Cassandra in this story takes part in a few others, less good ones, and eventually we learn that she was a previous partner of Mr. Whittier, the guy who organizes the 3 month writers retreat, which is the thread that connects all the stories, i.e. each story is told by one of the retreat participants, something like Decameron or Chaucer, or the Mary Shelly retreat where she wrote Frankenstein. 

The participants are addressed by nicknames in the connecting story which is very distracting, though in the actual stories they tell their real names are used.  The 3 month retreat is a total isolation without an opportunity to leave early, which results in multiple murders, mutiliations, psychotic breaks and cannibalism. In a previous retreat, also organized by the psychopath Mr. Whittier, the participants played tic tac toe on the chest of Cassandra by carving the board and pieces with knives into her skin and flesh. The X player won. 

Mr. Whittier is a special type of psychopath, 13 years old with an aging disease that makes him look 80 and death soon approaching he uses his condition to elicit sex from attractive female volunteers in the care home where he is institutionalized.  After having rowdy sex with them, he then blackmails them with constitutional rape to extort money under threat of telling the police and their families. He organizes the retreat to prove to God that all humans are psychopaths deep inside and because of his obsessive fear of dying alone. 

The story of the murder of the aging child actor and framing him with child porn of prepubescent Czech girls being anal-raped by grown monkeys and prepubescent Russian boys performing oral sex on old men is also especially disturbing because of the deeply sick themes, which also could be completely based on reality. Also the story of the post-op trans woman being stripped naked, held down and hand raped by a group of women attending a women's support group is deeply disturbing, especially in today's context, 20 years after it was written.

The most famous story in the collection is "Guts" which is very disturbing when read on its own (as Palahniuk has done in many public readings while asking the audience to hold its breath) but when put in the context of the other, more disturbing stories in the book - it doesn't even break in the Top 3.  It is about a boy who masturbates naked at bottom of a pool while sitting on the pool exit valve. His anus gets sucked into the exit valve and while swimming up as not to drown, the boy's entire rectum is pulled out of his body, his anus still attached to the exit valve. This necessitates a surgery to remove most of his rectum and he cannot digest heavy food like meat for the rest of his life.  His nickname is Mr. Gut-Free. 

Overall, though the quality varies, this book contains some of the most powerfully disturbing scenes in modern mainstream literature.  Not for the faint of heart.