Last Work Of Fiction You Read, The FIRST Amazon Review, YOUR 1-10 Scale

[matcom]

this could be fun. list the title, the FIRST Amazon review (or book description if there is one) listed about it and on a scale of 1-10 (10 being a MUST READ) how you rate it.

mine...

"The Descent" -Jeff Long

In a high Himalayan cave, among the death pits of Bosnia, in a newly excavated Java temple, Long's characters find out to their terror that humanity is not alone--that, as we have always really known, horned and vicious humanoids lurk in vast caverns beneath our feet. This audacious remaking of the old hollow-earth plot takes us, in no short order, to the new world regime that follows the genocidal harrowing of Hell by heavily armed, high-tech American forces. An ambitious tycoon sends an expedition of scientists, including a beautiful nun linguist and a hideously tattooed commando former prisoner of Hell, ever deeper into the unknown, among surviving, savage, horned tribes and the vast citadels of the civilizations that fell beneath the earth before ours arose. A conspiracy of scholars pursues the identity of the being known as Satan, coming up with unpalatable truths about the origins of human culture and the identity of the Turin Shroud, and are picked off one by bloody one. Long rehabilitates, madly, the novel of adventures among lost peoples--occasional clumsiness and promises of paranoid revelations on which he cannot entirely deliver fail to diminish the real achievement here; this feels like a story we have always known and dreaded.

Scale: 8

[underpants]

1. I'm still working on the 9/11 Commission Report

does that count?

I don't read fiction. I can make up better stories myself...and often do.

[matcom]

2. i know

i've read your posts :bounce:

[BlueStateGirl]

3. Mine...

"Mirror, Mirror" By Gregory MacGuire

From Publishers Weekly
Maguire has a lock on clever, elaborate retellings of fairy tales, turning them inside out and couching them in tongue-in-cheek baroque prose. After his revisionist takes on Oz's Wicked Witch of the West (Wicked) and Cinderella's ugly stepsisters (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister), he now tackles Snow White. The notorious Borgia habit of poisoning rivals inspired him to transplant the classic tale to 16th-century Tuscany, where Vicente de Nevada is an expatriate Spanish widower who lives with his daughter, the fair Bianca. Beholden to sinister Cesare Borgia and Cesare's sister (and perhaps lover) Lucrezia, Vicente is sent on what appears to be a fool's errand, to discover and steal from a Middle East monastery a branch of the Tree of Knowledge complete with three apples. When Bianca is 11, Cesare's attraction to her causes the envious Lucrezia to order a young hunter to murder her and deliver her heart in a casket. Bianca, of course, is spared and taken in by seven dwarfs. But this is not Disney; the dwarfs are boulders, stirred to life by Bianca's arrival ("a clothed, bearded obstinacy became slowly apparent"). Several years pass in surreal, dreamlike fashion, with Bianca tending to the dwarfs, who cavort stiffly and philosophize collectively. When Vicente returns successful, Lucrezia poisons an apple for her rival. Innocent Bianca's fate is gentle, but that of the corrupt Lucrezia, in brilliant Venice, is appropriately grotesque. Fairy tales in their original form are often brutal and disturbing; with his rich, idiosyncratic storytelling, Maguire restores the edge to an oft-told tale and imbues it with a strange, unsettling beauty.

My score: 7

[matcom]

4. ooooo a Snow White/Reservoir Dogs type book

cool! :D

[matcom]

5. kick

x( thought i would get some good book recommends outta this :cry:

[ceile]

7. OK-here's one

"Galveston"-Sean Stewart
"Galveston 2004: another hurricane unleashes a spiritual, magical side of the island that no one knew existed. A permanent Mardi Gras inhabits half the island; mythical beasts and Momus an all knowing being. Another hurricane occurs and the two Galvestons become one- Normal island dwellers are forced to converge with the revellers."

Rating 8

Short, I know, but I feel I'll give away too much if I go on.

[ceile]

6. That book gave me nightmares!

It was brilliant!

[matcom]

8. i had a hard time putting it down

really good

[khashka]

9. For Us, The Living

By Bob Heinlein.

First Review (read it damn it, you might learn something):

To Heinlein's Children

That's what the book's dedication says, and it's accurate. You won't agree with my five-star rating unless you're in the publisher's target audience, so be warned: my rating is _not_ based on 'literary quality' and your mileage will _definitely_ vary.

Strictly, I have to count myself one of those 'Children'. I was born in 1963, learned to read very young, and cut my literary-intellectual teeth on _Stranger_ and _Mistress_; moreover, this fact is so significant in my personal development that it's something you _must_ know if you want to grok the way my mind works even today, some forty years later. (Spider Robinson remarks somewhere that RAH was the one who took his 'literary virginity'. Same here.)

So whatever issues I may happen to have with the Old Man -- and believe me, I do have some -- I'm most definitely one of the readers at whom this book is aimed. And I highly recommend it to any of Heinlein's _other_ Children out there. To the rest of you, it will be at most of historical interest, so wait for the paperback.

If you're reading this page, you already know what the book is: it's Heinlein's first novel-length writing (though Robinson's introduction suggests that it may not be a 'novel' proper). You've probably already read the comparisons with Edward Bellamy's _Looking Backward_ and H.G. Wells's _When the Sleeper Wakes_.

Here I'll simply confirm that those comparisons are apt; Heinlein's unpublished 1939 work, a look at the 'past' from an imagined future, is essentially a sociopolitical tract wrapped up in a bit of story to make the medicine go down a little more easily. The protagonist, Perry Nelson (whose double-admiral name is presumably a two-gun salute to a couple of Heinlein's naval forebears, though neither the MS nor the commentary explicitly makes this connection), is basically a cardboard figure, and so is his companion-of-the-future Diana.

_As_ a tract, it's pretty interesting. As a story, it's not very, and although there are occasional hints of the writer Heinlein was to become, you wouldn't notice them if you weren't familiar with his later work. What's _really_ interesting is something that will appeal only to those 'Children' of his. I've thought through my entire shelf of Heinlein novels and I can't think of a _single one_ that doesn't have _some_ roots in the ideas set forth in this manuscript. Why, there are a few elements here that don't resurface until _Stranger_.

Most of us have long suspected (hell, known) that the Old Man was deliberately lecturing us in those books of his, no matter how many times he swore up and down that his sole purpose was to entertain. (And no matter how many times his most zealous defenders insisted we couldn't infer anything about Heinlein's own opinions from those of his characters.) But until this MS was published, we didn't have much direct evidence that Heinlein himself accepted and wanted to propagate the ideas set forth by, say, Col. Baslim, Col. DuBois, Jubal Harshaw, Professor de la Paz, and Lazarus Long.

You may not buy all of those ideas yourself; I don't either. But anybody who grew up reading Heinlein's stuff has to credit him for stretching our minds so far out of shape that we will never, as long as we live, lapse into simple-minded moralistic conventionality. About anything.

(The 1960s owe much of their experimentation with convention to a handful of famous and not-so-famous minds from the previous generation or two; Lord Bertrand Russell was one of the famous ones and Paul Blanshard -- twin brother of philosopher Brand Blanshard -- was one of the not-so-famous. Heinlein is on that shortlist; without _Stranger_, much of the ensuing decade wouldn't have unfolded quite as it did.)

I also don't mean to suggest that Heinlein's ideas didn't change _at all_ over the next fifty years. Certainly they did; at the very least, as he himself remarked in the late 1950s (and as Robert James reminds us in his afterword), he turned from a 'soft-headed radical' into a 'hard-headed radical, a pragmatic libertarian'. But those radical (and libertarian) themes had been present in Heinlein's writing from the very beginning; in Spider's apt analogy, this MS contains their DNA. In his life as a fiction writer, Heinlein had to wait another twenty years before his ideas even became publishable -- and even then it was largely because he had personally laid the groundwork for them.

His predictions herein are in some cases uncannily accurate, but he flops in one surprising and deeply ironic respect: as of 2086 there _hasn't yet been a moon landing_. Hee hee. (But in 1939 Heinlein successfully predicted both Hitler's suicide and the development of a united Europe with its own currency. The details are wrong, but still . . .)

Don't skip the 'Social Credit' economic arguments either. If you disagree with them, see if you can spot where they go wrong (if they do).

I'm generally not a huge fan of Heinlein's nonfiction writings and I'm very, very glad he turned to fiction. (Even on strictly scientific matters, Asimov's reputation as the Great Explainer was never in much danger from RAH.) Nevertheless I think that in its treatiselike aspects, this 'novel' is one of his best _nonfiction_ works. At the least, the underlying theories are better thought out than in any of his later nonfiction.

But overall, what will be of interest to the 'Children' is that in this MS, we can see Heinlein (in the language that Robinson borrows from Zelazny's _Lord of Light_, as he does whenever he wants to talk about something like this) put on his Aspect and raise up his Attribute. This MS dates from the time that Heinlein _became_ the writer of speculative fiction that drove us to the Moon. Reading it is like stepping into a time machine and going back to meet a young John Lennon picking up his first guitar.

If you're one of Heinlein's Children, don't miss this MS. Everybody else can afford to wait a while. But don't wait _too_ long -- or you'll be left behind when the rest of us escape to the stars.

End of review.

1-10 scale? Review 10. That boy got it. But I am one of Heinlein's Children, as well. And I may have a few (serious) issues with Daddy, but I am his Child.
The book rates about a 1.5 as a novel, as a brilliant and offensive political treatise it rates a ten. In 1938/39 he took on racism (the suffering that Blacks and Jews endured truly offended him), he made arguments in favour of women that feminists wouldn't get around to for another 30 years, he championed no-fault divorce, he predicted the rise of the religious right.

I am goddamn fucking proud to be one of Bob's children and a child of Virginia Heinlein too.

(As far as the economics goes, as far as I can tell it works. Maybe someone smarter than me can find the flaws.)

Khash.

[DS1]

10. Snow Crash

4.5/5 stars I came to _Snow Crash_ on the recommendation of a few people who had read it (they called it "great!" and "hilarious!," and knowing that Neal Stephenson is sometimes listed as a "cyberpunk" writer along with William Gibson et al.
I had liked William Gibson's books, so I gave _Snow Crash_ a try.

_Snow Crash_ is primarily about Hiro, a young man who delivers pizzas and collects information for the Central Intelligence Corporation (freelance), for a living. He lives in a storage unit with a cult-hero rockstar named Vitaly Chernobyl. He owns a futon, two awesome Japanese swords, and a laptop computer, where he stays "jacked in" to the "Metaverse" a lot of the time, where he is the world's greatest swordfighter.

Hiro witnesses a crime while interacting with others in the Metaverse. One of his friends is deliberately exposed to a dangerous block of text, which fries his brain (in the real world), and renders him a vegetable. Hiro and his friend Y.T. (15-year old skateboarding female, and knee-slappingly funny smartaleck) set off to find out why, and save the world in the process.

From the getgo this is a funny book. Sure, the vision of the near-future is dark, a little alarming, and at times depressing (there are NO general laws in _Snow Crash_, for example, and private corporations run everything, even the police, just as an example). That's what cyberpunk is like. But the HUMOR is one thing that sets Neal Stephenson aside. Hiro Protagonist? Come on, that's FUNNY, PEOPLE! One reviewer called it an 'odd' name. Yes, it's odd, and it's absurd, and it's funny! Did this author mean it is an unusual choice for a character name? I don't know. I hope not. It would be an odd choice for a character's name in a Jane Austen novel, sure. But this is cyberpunk, or something like it. Among this genre's leading inspirations are the works of Thomas Pynchon, and "Hiro Protagonist," as a character name, would fit in perfectly among his merry bands of misfits, especially in _V._ or _Gravity's Rainbow_.

Repeatedly reviewers are slamming Stephenson for his use of Sumerian myth, exploration of Sumerian culture, etc. in the book... calling it inaccurate, poorly connected to the rest of the story, and, (my personal least favorite), BORING. I tell you, besides the great sense of humor, the Sumerian-myth link is what sets this novel heads above so much other cyberpunk. I don't care if it's inaccurate (this is FICTION, see?). Stephenson "traces" computer/textual viruses and biological viruses quite nicely back to Sumerian times, and he links them to one another, biological virus to digital/informational virus (a debt to another pre-cyberpunk luminary, William Burroughs, who said "Word is Virus?")-- it's all very well connected to the metaverse/here-and-now portion of _Snow Crash_'s plot.

This is a funny, riproaring tale. I raced through this nearly 500-page paperback in half the time I read most books of this length. I enjoyed it beginning-to-end. My only complaint with the book was that, at times, it too much resembled a Hollywood action movie, what with all sorts of incredible stunts being performed, by boat drivers, skateboarders, swordsmen, etc.

I say, if you like William Gibson or Thomas Pynchon, or if any of this review makes _Snow Crash_ seem a bit appealing to you, give it a chance. I enjoyed it 10 times as much as I thought I would.

ken32

My Scale = 9 or (4.5/5)(2)

:D

[amazona]

11. the arraignment -- steve martini

It's the kind of book you bring on an airplane and when you're finished, you leave it for the next frequent flyer. It keeps you entertained but ten minutes after you finish you don't remember anything about it. I guess airports and airplanes are the last places left where people read pulp fiction like that anymore, but it served its purpose.

The first Amazon.com reviewer said: "For Paul Madriani Fans - Probably A Better Movie Than Book, January 23, 2003" -- which is a good summing up. Don't know if it will actually be a movie but it could be.

[ghostsofgiants]

12. "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski

I'm in the process fo reading it right now.

I first heard of "House of Leaves" about a year ago on the Internet. Somebody said it was the best new horror novel they had read in years. Then when I started working at a bookstore in town, one of my new friends there told me it was the scariest book he had ever read.

All of this quite intrigued me. So I bought the book and read it over a period of about six months. It's not a quick read, or at least it wasn't for me. I had to have other, more normal, sane books going on at the same time. "House of Leaves" is over seven hundred pages long and it's loaded with literary detour signs, unespected landmines (some duds, some live), and good old "holding the book upside down in a mirror so you can read the words printed that way" fun.

"House of Leaves" is a contortionist's daydream, and a conservative reader's nightmare. I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum and found myself admiring the new unhallowed ground Danielewski was breaking, but at other times longing for a more conventional, satisfying structure.

This whole thing is very postmodern. The house is aware of itself as a house, and the book is aware of itself as a book. There is a story of a family moving into a house, trying to sort out its interpersonal demons, and finding that the insides of things (lives, minds, houses) can often be darker, scarier, stranger, and more convoluted than they would appear from the outsides.

That alone would have made a great book, told with inventive language and a compelling psychological subtext.

But that's just the beginning, the backstory really. "House of Leaves" is a story inside a story inside a story, etc. In fact, it puts the dizzying structure of Mary Shelly's "Frankenstein" to shame.

In "House of Leaves," there's a young guy named Johnny Truant who's acting as literary editor, presenting the compelling and disturbing scribblings and ramblings on an old man named Zampano. Zampano's papers, which are presented posthumously, recount, at times blow-for-blow, a documentary film called "The Navidson Record" of a family moving into a house which proves to be larger on the inside than it is on the outside.

There is also another editor above Johnny, who makes comments on top of Johnny's comments. Johnny finds himself wondering if the old man didn't just make up the whole story about the young family moving into the house, because Johnny is unable to find any corroborating scrap of proof that the film exists.

Of course, add into the mix that Johnny is a self-admitted fibber and story teller extroidinaire. He tells us how much fun he has making up completely bogus stories for the benefit of strangers her meets in bars.

Knowing this, the reader has to start to wonder if the old man, Zampano, even exists, or if he's just an invention of Johnny's. And if you follow that line of thinking too far, you might even start to wonder if the heavy black book you're holding exists.

This is the haunted house that's in the film that the old man made up and wrote about as if it were as real as he was, but who was really just a figment of the narrator's fertile imagination, the narrator that doesn't really exist, except on paper and in the reader's mind and imagination...so maybe none of it exists...or all of it does. Maybe the house has turned on its porch lights somewhere deep, deep inside of you, down all those twisting tunnels and swirling, dark echoing caves.

Maybe there's a sign out front. "For Sale By Owner." And under that, in small print, in French, upside down and backwards, "Buyer Beware."

I'll give it probably 8.8/10 thus far.

[amazona]

13. that's a terrific book

...and way more worthy than my idle airplane time-waster.

Another book in the same vein, which I think is even better, is Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, if all concerned are not sick of me repeatedly recommending this book by now. :-)