Category: books

The Bone Clocks

It occurs to me that I don’t really know how to write about books.  I can give a book a rating out of 5 stars, like I do on Goodreads, but that’s not really much in the way of articulating how I feel.  The 5 stars I give to Infinite Jest and, say, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay are misleading in a way; both books are brilliant, but in different ways, and only one of those books was genuinely life-changing.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I finished reading The Bone Clocks yesterday, and I’m not sure I know how to talk about it.  I mean:  I loved it, I’ve been thinking about it non-stop, I didn’t want it to end and I kinda want to start reading it again immediately, etc.  But that doesn’t actually explain anything to you.  If you want the book’s plot, I’ll cut and paste from the publisher’s own copy, so that you’re only getting what they feel comfortable giving you:

Following a scalding row with her mother, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: a sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as “the radio people,” Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life.

For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics—and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly’s life, affecting all the people Holly loves—even the ones who are not yet born.

A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting from occupied Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list—all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder.

As with David Mitchell’s earlier Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks is a bit of a Russian nesting doll; stories are nestled inside of other stories, characters appear and disappear and are viewed through each other’s eyes; and minute details in the book’s very beginning are finally explained – resulting in literal jaw-dropping – at the book’s very end.

Cloud Atlas is an impressive and thought-provoking work, but it didn’t necessarily move me; I can see how some might be put off by the book’s conceit, or at least find the inter-connected stories a bit of a gimmick (even if it’s a gimmick that is extraordinarily well-crafted and presented with great skill).  Bone Clocks moves in a similar way – if you’re familiar with Cloud Atlas, you can’t not see the relation – but the structure is an integral part of the story he’s telling, and it ends up making each narrative revelation feel, well, revelatory.

And yet, 24 hours after I put the book down, it’s the book’s ending that has me so swept away in emotion.  The blurb above may talk about this age-old war between psychic, mystical beings, but it’s the very human characters that drive the narrative forward.  Each section of the book is narrated in the first person by a different character, and within a few sentences I immediately knew who these people were, and where they were, and how they interacted with the world (not to mention the all-important when).

I can’t talk about the ending except that it moved me in a way that very few books have ever done.  The story might have the trappings of science fiction, but there are very powerful, real emotions at play, and the ending is heartbreaking in all the right ways.

I said before that I’ve been on a remarkably good run regarding the last few books I’ve read – and I’d just finished reading the excellent Wolf in White Van before starting this one – but this is one of the best books I’ve read in quite a long time.  If you’ve read it, I’m happy to discuss it in the comments below; if you haven’t, I heartily recommend that you start immediately.

of Aliens, White Vans and Bone Clocks

Probably not a lot of posting this week, for reasons I can’t quite get into.  I mean, it’s Wednesday already, you’ve probably figured that out.

I’m not quite ready to do a First Few Hours of Alien Isolation, though maybe later this week I’ll have played enough to give a solid impression.  It’s super-creepy, incredibly immersive, and it hits all the right notes for fans of the first Alien movie (of which I am one).  A short, gut impression is that it feels like Dead Space set in the Alien universe, with the best ambient sound design since the first Bioshock.  Headphones (or a good soundsystem) are mandatory.

I finished reading John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van the other night, and it is remarkable; certainly one of the best books I’ve read this year.  I went into it more or less blind; I knew of the author’s reputation as one of the best lyricists of this era (though I must confess I haven’t listened to his band, The Mountain Goats); I have a few friends who think very highly of him.  And as for the book itself, I was dimly aware that the narrator had been in a terrible disfiguring accident in his youth and that he runs an interactive role-playing game through the mail; that’s pretty much it.  To say much more is probably too much.  It’s startlingly well written and uniquely insightful, and that ending.

Currently reading David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, which I had been intimidated by for months but finally started yesterday, and it’s already knocking my socks off.  Man, it’s really nice to be in one of those grooves where every book you read is really enjoyable and satisfying, isn’t it?  I’m looking over my “2014 Books Read” list and of the 13 books I’ve finished, I can’t give anything lower than a B-.  That’s a nice run.

Your mandatory reading for today – if you didn’t read it yesterday – is Kyle Wagner’s piece about Gamergate.

And your hashtag of the day is #StopGamerGate2014.

SFTC Mach II: Jazz Odyssey

1.  Since I decided to shut up the other day, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.  And one of the things I’ve been considering is to widen the scope of this blog to cover books, films and music.  (Well, film not as much, as I don’t get that much of an opportunity to see new films in theaters, what with the kid and all – but perhaps looking at older movies that have been on my to-do list for some time.)   I’m interesting in doing this if only because sometimes (like right now, actually) I get down on games, and when I’m down I tend not to write, and I’d much rather be writing than not.  Like:  I’d much rather talk about how much I enjoyed reading Whiskey Tango Foxtrot instead of how much I’m not enjoying playing Shadow of Mordor.

I’ll also be posting recommended reading links more often, rather than hoarding them in a GoogleDoc for the end of the year.  I ran across 2 necessary links yesterday, for example, that I highly recommend:

2.  Regarding the aforementioned Whiskey Tango Foxtrot:  I can’t recall how it was recommended to me, but in any event I’m really glad I picked it up.  It’s ostensibly a paranoid sci-fi thriller about espionage, secret knowledge and post-government corporate cabals gathering all of our private data, but it’s also quite charmingly written and features 3 broken protagonists that I related to a lot more strongly than I’d anticipated.  It’s not necessarily poetically written, but I did get a lot of mileage out of my Kindle’s “highlight” feature – there’s a bunch of really wonderful, insightful, deeply resonating passages that struck me deeply.  From descriptions of ceiling fans:

“There was a ceiling fan in her two-room flat; it was on now. But it whorled and kerchonked around at such an unstable and idiotic rate that what it gave in breeze it took back in worry.”

to descriptions of regret:

There is a club for these people, the people who have waited outside the burning houses knowing that they will not go back in and knowing that the not-going-back-in will ruin them.

to achingly heartbreaking professions of love:

How long do you think a weak-minded addict will stay on the shelf? Because that day you walked in? That day I saw you? I swear, my heart slowed and my breath came easier. All that rabbiting I do—it just stopped. Not stopped by like magic, but stopped with reason. You are as strange and amazing as anything my stupid little brain has ever come up with, and you are from outside of it. You have no idea what great news that is. And I’m going to lift some copy here, but there is a time for everything, that day and night here you were the still point of the turning world, and I knew for sure that I had a place in it. That place is next to you…

I really am quite sure that there is something we’re supposed to do together, that there is more that is supposed to go on between us. Aren’t you? Isn’t there a held breath in your life right now? I’ve missed a few boats already, and I really don’t want to miss this one too. I realize that in that metaphor or analogy or whatever, you are a boat. That doesn’t really quite get what I mean, because I am also a boat. We are both boats and we are both passengers. We should not miss each other.

3.  As for music:  I highly, highly recommend the new Flying Lotus album “You’re Dead”.  I don’t yet know how to fully articulate my feelings about it; it has a density and depth that defies my attempts to describe it, which really just means I need another few dozen listens before I can wrap my head around it.  But if you’re already predisposed to what Flying Lotus does, then you’ve probably already picked it up.

4.  As we approach the end of 2014, I’m no longer as intimidated by the game release schedule as I thought I’d be.  By my count, there’s really only 4 AAA must-plays left on my list, a few indie/downloadable things I’m most likely buying close to day one, and a bunch of curiosities that I may or may not get to in an expedient fashion.

The Must-Plays:

  • Civilization: Beyond Earth
  • Assassin’s Creed Unity (heretofore named AssUnit)
  • Far Cry 4
  • Dragon Age Inquisition

The Indies/Downloadables:

  • Geometry Wars 3
  • Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris

The Curiosities:

  • Evil Within
  • Vib Ribbon (almost bought this the other day for the Vita, actually)
  • Costume Quest 2
  • The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (which I’m almost certainly buying if it’s in a Steam Sale)
  • Driveclub (whenever the PS+ version is finally out, at any rate)
  • Little Big Planet 3 (if my kid likes watching it, I might keep it)
  • The Crew

It also should be noted that if Sunset Overdrive reviews well, and if the Halo boxset isn’t terrible, then I’m probably getting an Xbox One.  I’m still kinda tempted to maybe wait a little longer and see if Microsoft comes out with a redesign – considering that they’ve already cut out the Kinect, it’s not totally unreasonable to think that they might come out with a newer box featuring better optimized specs – but I probably won’t be able to wait that long.  I’m still itching to play Forza Horizon 2 and I’d like to be able to try it while there’s still a strong player base.