My guess for it being at the end is to imply the book is something that you reread after you have additional context from later parts.
It creates this fun cognitive dissonance when you realized your assumptions were totally wrong.
I have no idea what it says about me that I love this structure.
i try to read at least one book a month. the last novel i finished was Blood Meridian which…hoo boy. i really love it, but it’s definitely not like, a “fun” time. beautifully written, though, and the kind of American history that i wish was more widely understood here with regards to its brutality.
while i wait for a book about trauma to arrive, i’m currently and leisurely rereading Upanishads.
other highlights from this past year include Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven, Steinbeck’s East of Eden, PKD’s Ubik, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
edit: OH also Clarke’s Childhood’s End. i read it in an attempt to gain some insight into how Xenogears came about. more specifically, i want to know why there were so many pieces of Japanese media in the mid-to-late 90s that heavily featured Gnostic and Kabbalistic references or allegories. i.e. what is the missing link; how did all these Japanese creators suddenly find out about these semi-obscure mysticisms. anyway, reading Childhood’s End did not shed any light on that, but it turns into a really cool book about midway through and i’m real happy i read it.
a book i bought on multiple recommendations and ended up hating was Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem. mostly i disliked the dialogue. the opening segments about the public call out trials that happened during the revolution were pretty interesting, but around the time that some generic British officer quotes “to be or not to be…” i gave up and threw the book into a corner.
Yeah I think that would have been a big mistake. I am a huge proponent of reading primary sources afresh with no secondary gloss, even a diegetic in-fiction gloss. (I always, always, always skip author’s introductions or forewords of any kind. To assume I need your help before I can read your book; how rude!)
For my part BotNS sucked me right in. I found absolutely nothing pretentious or artificial about it. On the contrary, I kept having this experience reading it where I would stop after a long session, look around and for about four seconds be unable to identify common household objects. It transported me.
It is a book (series, really - the second and third books get even worse about this) about ideas and ideas only. It doesn’t care about characters at all, they are merely pieces to be moved. On the other hand the ideas are really striking and the way Cixin regularly ups the stakes with plot twists is very entertaining. But if what you care about is interiority the books are miserable experiences. Probably you could read the sparknotes and get like two-thirds of the effect.
that’s an interesting way to frame it. i should probably give it another shot, some time, since i own it and all. maybe it’s good for the long plane flights i have coming up this summer.
that said, yeah; what draws me in (with fiction, at least) is how a book is written. i.e. i love Beckett because of how his sentences make my brain feel. i love Steinbeck because his descriptions of visuals and human emotions make my heart weep. etc. etc.
when characters speak in cliches, my immediate reaction is semi-revulsion. this is also why i couldn’t really get into Neuromancer when i finally read it a few years back. it makes me feel like a fraud, considering all the things i love, aesthetically, but i just can’t get down with Gibson’s writing.
Part of the problem in reading Neuromancer now is how much is influenced by Neuromancer, which makes it seem like its own cliche. But Gibson’s writing is also weird as hell sometimes in not good ways. Jesus dude, stop telling us about everyone’s outfits.
yeah, to clarify, i don’t really mean that i thought Neuromancer was full of cliches, per se. it’s just that the whole book reads like someone describing a movie and…that isn’t really what i go for.
Yeah, that is definitely a thing in it. I think part of why that kind of cyberpunk took off like it did is because the movie is just right there. They don’t even need to make an adaptation.
I just reread Neuromancer and Count Zero this past month, and man, Gibson’s quirks are weird and very boomer white dude.
Yeah the problem with reading anything in translation is it’s hard to ever tell who is at fault for stiltedness or lack of poetry; but then again neither of us know Chinese (at least I think you don’t) so we only have what we have, and whose fault it is is basically irrelevant.
I will say that if you’re going to give the book another shot plan to read the whole trilogy. I don’t think you can really fully appreciate the breadth of the ideas he’s exploring unless you can see the whole arc of the story.
Hmmmm…these books are pretty long, so, i should probably not, then.
They’re quick enough that you’d probably make it through all three in a month.
Honestly I was more frustrated by his social science. The book is a chain of action->societal consequence->societal characteristics causing action, but generally he describes all of earth society as reforming radically because of an idea or fear in ways that didn’t account well for variability or political opportunities or cultural responses. It was simplified in order to move quickly towards questions like, Is this type of society ideal for handling this type of situation? And what can it poorly handle? But as well, the answers are facile and reliant on folk personality wisdom applied to cultures.
The stark terror of his natural selection in space idea has stuck in my head ever since, though, and quite a few of the technical conceits are beautiful. The third book may be my favorite; it jumps straight through heat-death-of-the-universe scenarios in ways that make it seem relevant to people and also trivial, which is an interesting effect.
oh god the second book has some reinterpretation of some hoary old wish about an idealized (literally!) woman who exists in a man’s head and is given to him in a Swiss villa as a reward and it’s really not undercut knowingly at all. That was just awful.
I just want him to write about outfits. More stuff about very particular brands of jeans. I’m here for tedious essays about the way a particular method of treating cardboard makes the corners of a box feel in what’s allegedly a thriller. I get to the end and realize half a week has passed in-book and someone thought about how logos make them nauseous for a total of 37 pages and the Big Action Climax was somebody opening a window in BC and shooting a single depleted uranium bullet into a distant shipping container with a false bottom containing a large amount of dirty cash so it shows up on radiation detectors at a vague point in the future when said shipping container is transported over the US/Canadian border so the money will be found and confiscated.
Actual example.
It’s pretty dull.
He’s just reached such a weird mid-point between staid boomer literary dude and thriller writer. Like, he doesn’t have Plots but he only knows Thriller Structure so everything goes through the wine-press of genre anyway and it’s so weird. I’m very into it but would never recommend it to anyone.
It’s great how much that is already a thing in his first books. Like he gives a whole long paragraph describing an exact outfit before remembering at the end to tell you that this person has robot eyes or something. It’s really unintentionally funny.
What do you two mean by ‘boomer traits’ in Gibson’s writing? Is this like, Updike-style suburban ennui and male entitlement?
In general Gibson reads to me as urban, nervous, unspooling; definitely descended from thriller structure but very different with his gift for imagery.
To me, it’s his obsession with fastidious reeling out of All the Deets on the latest hobby in the latest book. My perspective is probably tainted by his twitter feed though.
It might not be fair. He doesn’t describe anyone’s breasts or anyone’s enthusiasm for anyone’s breasts at great length that I can recall.
that seems possible, sure, but i already stopped once because i wasn’t enjoying myself. the idea of spending like, 1800 pages of not enjoying myself doesn’t sound appealing.
however! the stuff you’re mentioning in your post does sound intriguing, for sure. maybe i should just do it as an audiobook.
also, yeah, i don’t know the language at all, and it occurred to me that this might be a translation issue. maybe the character said something else that wouldn’t make sense to a Western/American audience. or, maybe the guy says the same exact thing, but its connotation is different to a Chinese audience and therefore not a cliche, etc. etc.
Unfortunately I think they switch translators and I think the translator for the first book is the best one.
well, i put a hold on the audiobooks on Libby. i will have them in…20 weeks lol.
Oh no, he totally does in Count Zero, where he talks a bit too much about breasts, specifically of the 17 year old girl his grizzled old man protag is escorting around.
There’s a lot of white male boomer-ish neuroses in the first two Sprawl book I just read. It’s fine enough and not as obstructive as something like Updike, but it’s funny how it peeks through.