Sunday, March 26, 2006

 

Podcast: Queer as Folk Music

The Ballad of Sean McCollough
You're Gonna Miss Me
There is Nothing
All Alone Blues

All songs written and performed by Enoch and copyright of Bassless Accusations Music 2006.

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

 

Book Review: The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima

Writing Style-6.1
Originality-5.6
Plot-4.9
Merit(whatever that means)-5.9
Overall-5.5

Yet another extremely mediocre book. I picked this one up when I noticed it on Time magazines Top 100 and that we had a copy of it at the house.

This author is pretty interesting because after he completed what he considered his masterpiece (not The Sound of Waves) he commited seppuku (ritual suicide). I really hope that that book (actually a trilogy I think) is better than this one, though The Sound of Waves seems to be the most widely read in the US at least.

The feel of the novel is nice. Since it is in Japan and reveals somethings about Japanese culture. But the story is not very interesting. It's a pretty straight forward love story. Poor boy falls in love with rich girl. She loves him back but they have to overcome society's forces that are trying to keep them apart. It's one of those deals. Though I didn't really feel the struggle, you know? I just didn't feel the pain. I felt the love, but when it came to the main struggle of the novel, it just never seemed to get bad enough for the main characters to really care.

 

Book Review: The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

Writing Style-5.9
Originality-6.3
Plot-5.8
Merit(whatever that means)-4.9
Overall-5.7

I know it's been a long time since my last review. Sorry, I've been pretty busy. Plus, I just haven't felt very bloggy lately. Sooner or later you're bound to ask yourself, 'Who gives a shit?' The answer is inevitably, no effin' body. But what the hell, I kinda like having this record of what I've read. Plus I usually forget what the hell a book was about a few months after having read it, so now I can go back and jog my memory. In fact, the other day I picked up my copy of 1876 by Gore Vidal and tried to remember if I've read it yet or not. I'm pretty sure I have, but I can't remember one damn thing about it.

Anyhoo, on to The Lathe of Heaven. Another book that I probably won't remember a year from now if not for this blog entry. It's pretty standard sci-fi fare. Trying to be smarter than most, but not really having anything substantial to say.

The plot sounds so cliche that it feels weird even talking about it seriously. There's a dude who dreams stuff and the dreams come true. Problem is, it's not that easy to dream good stuff and keep bad stuff from happening. And even when he does dream what he wants to happen there are horrible unforeseen circumstances. Imagine!

Now, I'm a Le Guin fan. See my Dispossessed review. That book was thought-provoking. This isn't, at all. It's like a bad episode of Amazing Stories. Wait every episode was bad. You get my point.

The books is short though. Almost novella sized. So at least Le Guin recognized that there really wasn't enough there to work with to warrant more pages, which is something many novelist don't recognize.

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