I love the movie, and I've always meant to read the book, so grabbed it when I saw it at the library. I enjoyed it quite a bit, though it was nearly impossible to separate from the film, particularly since the physical descriptions of Newton could pretty much be of David Bowie. There's a bit more explanation of what's actually going on - I never entirely realized, watching the film, what exactly Newton is doing on Earth, but I'm not sure I actually care - and there's definitely less of a plunge into hedonism in the book, which I think works better, though I can see how simply having a clinically depressed, drunken alien would make for a less interesting movie.

I read a lot of really dubious "science" books, but this one managed to be even more unconvincing than most. Like Talbot's The Holographic Universe (whose thesis Laszlo rejects early on, but ends up using bits of), he feels that the best way to support his thesis is to present some phenomenon (telepathy, remote viewing, psychic healing, near death experiences, etc.) that isn't really widely accepted and then show how his thesis can explain the phenomenon. That seems like a pretty dubious way to prove one's thesis.

Anyway, Laszlo's theory here is that the quantum vacuum is synonymous with the Akashic field, which (according to Laszlo) explains nonlocality. The same field also guide evolution both on a biological and universe-wide scale. Like I said, I'm not sure I really buy anything he's arguing here, which is a pretty bad sign as I can believe almost any sort of insane scientific theory.

Couple bits of interest, though. Like Wilber's A Theory of Everything, Laszlo tries to make an assumption that the brain's activity is just coincidental with consciousness. I can almost understand the argument they're trying to make, but it's not helped by Laszlo's insistence on falling back on the creationist "the brain is too complex to just evolve accidentally" argument.

The other bit is completely accidental, but, in discussing our universe as a subset of a metaverse, I felt an impressive sense of existentialist vertigo when realizing that any greater reality (either a Judeo-Christian heaven or a higher dimension containing us) doesn't actually get us any closer to "why is there something instead of nothing."

Someone recommended this to me at some point, though I have no idea who or when. Anyway, it was on the shelf at the library and figured it was worth giving it a shot. I'm not sure I entirely got into it - the rotating narrators just made me strongly dislike all the characters (except, I suppose, the two non-American characters) - but it was still fairly well done and effective (particularly since we're talking about making a man-eating plant scary, which is never easy).

Totally entertaining, but, after Cold Skin, I do wonder a fair bit about Pinol's apparent fascination with albino, humanoid beast women. I totally get not wanting to get pigeonholed as a horror writer, so moving away from the simple, but effective, horror writing of Cold Skin and going for the self-reflexive genre commentary/pastiche, but a good chunk of this book is essentially a retelling of Cold Skin, but set in the jungle.

Which would be fine, if it weren't for his apparent desire to sleep with the beast women of his own creation. I suppose he's aware of this, since the protagonist here questions whether he can properly fall in love with one of his own creations, but it still seems a little odd to air out this particular piece of self-analysis in one's fiction.

I feel like I didn't entirely understand the point of this book until the final third, but, once I got what Levenda was going for, it was pretty interesting. The first third of the book is about the Merkavah tradition of Jewish mysticism, about which I knew absolutely nothing (which is somewhat frustrating, since Levenda assumes a fair degree of familiarity with the writings). He then feels a need to go into a length digression in an attempt to assert that the star-based tradition of mystical ascension to heaven is not only not unique to Judaism (as he cites similar traditions in Egypt and Babylon), but can be found in India, China, and Africa as well.

And, while we're talking about Africa, I should point out that buying into Temple's writings on the Dogon without any skepticism makes me fairly likely to question the material I'm writing (however, asserting that the Dogon story is, in fact, deliberately falsified in order to create a general belief in extraterrestrials so that you can lay groundwork for a one world government may not make me question you any less, but I will be much more entertained). Quite a lot of Levenda's writing here seems fairly well-researched, but I'm always a little dubious to entirely buy what Levenda says. If you're not familiar with the guy, this article is fairly fascinating.

Anyway, back to this book. After the lengthy and kind of pointless bits on China and India, it becomes fairly clear that the whole book is a refutation of Scholem's assertion that the absorption of the Kabbalah by non-Jewish Western occultists is a perversion with no connection to the actual history of Jewish mysticism. Levenda argues fairly convincingly that the Merkavah tradition showed up in Western occult mysticism well before it was supposed to have become known to non-Jewish sources. He traces a line from German Jewish Freemasonry to the Golden Dawn and, from there, to the various Crowley-inspired groups.

Anyway, fairly interesting, though would have been better without the middle chunk. Some notes:

p. 51. Lots of talk here about the writers of the Qumran documents being Zadokites (or, as they're known to every Sunday School attendee, Sadducees), which is an interesting comparison to the Lash book, which refers to the same group as Zaddikites. I know there's not really a difference in the written name Zadok and the term Tzadik, but it's much less insane to assume that the Zadokites were followers of the high priest (the line of Zadok) than to assume they are attempt to become Tzadikim. Anyway, it's interesting to read two books in relatively short succession with very different biases against the same group of people.

p. 73. It drives me a little nuts that Levenda doesn't ever actually explain much about the merkavah texts, but here, at least, he lets us know the names of the seven heavens. For future reference, they are 'Shamayyim (heaven), Shemei ha-Shamayyim (heaven of heavens), Zevul (meaning undetermined), Araphel (darkness), Shehakim (the skies), and Aravot, with the last heaven named the "Throne of Glory."'

p. 74. Not specific to this page, but sounds like the works of Gershom Scholem are pretty critical for understanding of Kabbalah, merkavah, Frankism, etc.

p. 83. Some talk here about the writings of Abu Yazid al-Bistami, the first Islamic mystic to come up with (or at least document) a celestial ascent method. It's interesting that it features first a descent (which, confusingly, seems to take place from God's point of view? It seems to start with the divine essence, then work through the emanations of God's nature, world beyond form, imagination, spiritual perception, forms, then nature/material world) followed by an ascent to the Divine. The interesting bit is the integration of Jewish and Christian figures into the stages of the ascent. Instead of meeting angels along the way, one meets Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, and, finally, Muhammad. I don't usually think of Islam working quite so hard to justify itself as a successor to or fulfillment of Judaism in the way that Christianity does (particularly in Matthew). Another interesting point here is that the figures met are not external figures but "prophets of one's own being."

p. 169. Totally off-handed mention of Jacob Frank, Sabbateanism, and the Doenmeh, as though we're supposed to know who they are. He will explain this in another chapter, but I kind of get the feeling this book makes more sense if you've already read it.

p. 184. Lots here on the Asiatic Brethren (or, more formally, the Knights of St. John the Evangelist for Asia in Europe), a Jewish Masonic order founded in 1777, that Levenda speculates was founded by Frankist/Sabbatean elements (and would be the means by which merkavah thinking made its way to the Golden Dawn/OTO/A∴A∴)

p. 188. Another Scholem reference, this time to Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, which is apparently written out of hostility to the appropriation of the Kabbalah by non-Jewish mystics like Levi, Crowley, etc.

p. 197. I've never actually read The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, but sounds bizarre and worth actually slogging through at some point.

p. 199. Nicholas Flamel apparently gets name-dropped in Harry Potter, and I'm pretty sure he was mentioned in Foucault's Pendulum. I should probably do more research.

p. 209. Whole chapter here on the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light, which Levenda positions as the secret German lodge of which the Golden Dawn asserted they were a chapter.

This book was recommended to me when I asked for something "mind-altering" to read. I'm not sure this entirely fits the bill, but it was certainly worth reading. I have some issues with the "preppie as other" that is fairly central to the book, mostly due to an upbringing completely surrounded by preps, so it's fairly hard to convince me that they're alluring and foreign. Once I got past that, I enjoyed this one quite a bit and intend to track down Tartt's second book at some point.

Surprisingly weak Willeford here. I'm not sure I've ever encountered one of his novels that I just didn't like at all before, but there wasn't anything in here that really worked for me. The whole thing just felt thin (even more thin that Wild Wives, which is short, but brutal), reminding me more of the scraps of stories he worked into some of the Hoke Moseley books as subplots, which probably would have been a better fate for this story.

Thoroughly enjoyable, and I think this serves as a testament to Willeford's skill as a writer. Watching the film version, I felt that the story was a little too close to self-parody, but now that I realize that the film is a nearly scene-for-scene adaptation (aside from the scene in which Richard copes with his ex-lover's announcement of pregnancy by punching her in the gut hard enough to cause a miscarriage) I realize that it's pretty much only Willeford's writing that keeps me from really appreciating how profoundly bizarre his characters are. The sociopathic behavior still comes through of course, but their behavior never seems absurd. Take away Willeford's writing and, even if you change nothing else, the characters seem so far removed from normal human behavior that it's sort of hard to take them seriously.

After watching the movie, I was sort of curious to read the book to see how many of the clunky bits were artifacts from the source material. I was kind of surprised not only by how lousy the book is, but the weirdness of the bits added to the movie. Most of the changes were to give the adult characters more to do, which I guess made it possible for them to bring in some A-list actors, but means that the clunkiness with Doon's father was entirely the fault of the screenwriter. As was that awful setup/payoff with the widget. Though, the flume ride was in the book, so she's off the hook for that one. (Incidentally, the screenwriter is listed on Wikipedia as "a novelist, screenwriter, film director, producer, and French Pop Star," which is quite a list of occupations).

The biggest change is, of course, the addition of giant moles. I would like to have been in the room when the writer found out that they really liked her book, but felt it would be better if they added some giant moles to chase the main characters around. There's not really a whole lot of plot in the book, and the pacing is terrible, so I can understand the desire to add some sort of conflict. Personally, I didn't even question the giant moles (it's post-apocalyptic - of course there are giant moles!), but, judging by the IMDB comments, fans of the book are pretty pissed off.

After The Confusion, I wasn't sure I really had the energy to finish this one. Fortunately, Eliza, the character who nearly killed me when acting as a protagonist in The Confusion, was pretty gone from this one, which helped a lot. Instead, we picked up the present-day storyline from the opening of Quicksilver with Daniel attempting to arrange a reconciliation between Newton and Leibniz. That ends up being a fairly small aspect of the book, as it mostly deals with a mystery that isn't particularly compelling. I kept sort of waiting for DeGex to become a more convincing villain, but he always seemed so incidental to the plot that it was hard to particularly care too much about him. Maybe this was deliberate, as he was pretty explicitly set up to be the voice of the outgoing modes of thought (i.e., monarchy and Catholicism), so maybe he was always supposed to seem kind of small and incidental (though, dramatically, making him a little more prominent might have helped move the books along some).

What I really failed to get was Stephenson's whole point here. I know there was a point, as the book was filled with ominous statements about the eventual failure of the new system being created (that of science, math, finance, etc.). He ties this eventual failure to the failure of Newton and Leibniz to reconcile, but the conversation between the two centers mostly around the nature of free will in the two men's respective philosophies. I'm not sure if Stephenson is really arguing that the Enlightenment-based view of the world is inherently doomed to fail because of an inability to account for free will. Maybe he's saying that both men should have acknowledged the somewhat anachronistically modern viewpoint of Daniel that we're entirely mechanical all the way through, even up to our thought processes. Is Stephenson arguing that the endlessly convoluted twists Enlightenment thinkers went through to incorporate God into their otherwise rational philosophies doomed the whole affair? Does he think they should have gone all out and espoused total atheism? I suppose that's not a bad argument to make (though I suspect it would have led to a lot more authors getting killed instead of widely published), but I'm not really sure that it led to a system that's inherently flawed. Or maybe I'm just reading too much into it.

The one element that I really enjoyed of this series, I must say, is the explanation of how England basically ended up taking over the planet. I had never really thought of British concepts of finance as being the means by which they pulled it off, so I have to thank Stephenson for that, but I'm pretty sure it could have been done a lot faster. All in all, I'd have to say The Baroque Cycle is my least favorite thing he's written. Though, I still haven't read The Big U. Or his faux-Tom Clancy novels.

What I ended up finding most disturbing about the book was how dated it feels. I mean, I am consciously aware that the Obama administration isn't really doing that much to undo some of the terrifying civil liberties violations the Bush administration made (or, for that matter, anything to undo the centralization of power in the executive branch, the ongoing looting of our treasury by the wealthy, or unending buildup of military spending), but it's hard to read this book and not say "oh, that was a different time." I mean, I am fully aware that FISA is still gutted, the TSA is a rogue agency whose job is mostly to get Americans used to completely arbitrary "security" procedures, etc., but even I have a hard time feeling like the sorts of things depicted here are still likely to go down, even though I know our current administration is not really that different on a lot of policy issues.

Though, I must say, I have an even harder time believing that any expose of any kind of violations into American civil liberties would ever lead to any sort of improvement. The number of terrifying revelations over the last decade have, if nothing else, proved that it's basically impossible to get Americans angry enough to actually do something.

Also I would be remiss (and at risk at injuring my reputation as a curmudgeon) if I didn't point out that the editing in this book is kind of awful. There are at least a couple spots where the incorrect character names are used (I guess the protagonist's mom used to be Latina instead of English? And the two teenage female characters were conflated?), and a whole mess of grammatical errors. Everything seems to have been fixed on the version Doctorow is giving away, so perhaps future editions will be better.

I was up until 2 in the morning finishing this one. I am pretty sure that, if I don't restrain myself, I would pretty much read everything this guy's written by the end of the month. I wouldn't have thought he could make a more stressful, palm-sweat inducing book than the previous two, but giving Hank a crippling pill problem certainly manages to help. There's a significant degree of sadness here, which is only fair given the territory covered in these books. There's a line toward the beginning of the book, summarizing the events of the previous two, in which he mentions that he finds he's better at violence as a human being has any right to be (in much the same way he was good at baseball) that just killed me.

First off, this book made me really want some huevos rancheros. I've never even had real chorizo, but, man, the descriptions here made my mouth water. Anyway, this picks up a little bit after Caught Stealing and is, I think, a more solid book. The cartoonishness of the DuRante brothers is gone, and replaced with a variety of totally believable speed freaks and reprobates. It's arguably even more stressful to read than Caught Stealing was. Once again, I'm supposed to be finishing The Baroque Cycle, but I'm pretty sure I'm never going to get to that as long as there are Hank Thompson books to read. On the other hand, these are quick enough (and engaging enough) that I nearly read them in one sitting.

I am so torn on Walton's books. On one hand, I really like her ability to show the ease with which British society could function in a fascist society. On the other hand, she can't really write. Her characters are thin and annoying. Her plots are thing. Her pacing is non-existent. About ten pages before the book was over, I became acutely aware that there were numerous plots that were nowhere near a reasonable resolution. She resolved it, of course, by having the Queen step in and declare everything solved. I don't think I'll be reading another one of her books.

As I mentioned when I was reading Queen and Country, this story takes place between two story arcs in the comic. While it's fairly jarring to read the comic if you didn't know this story didn't exist, I'm not sure you'd really lose much if you read the novel without having read any of the comics. It's a pretty flimsy novel, though it was nice to give Chace a bit more of an inner life than she usually gets. I'm not sure I buy her as a believable protagonist yet, but Rucka does a better job here.

This book's been pushed pretty hard on Salon and sounded pretty interesting. I sort of considered going back and re-reading the Narnia books first (since I haven't read one since I was, at latest, 12), but figured it was all right to just have fuzzy sorts of memories of them, which worked out fine. The book's divided into three pretty distinct chapters. The first is the most personal, dealing with the author's feelings of discovery (when reading the books as a kid) and betrayal (once she found out they were Christian propaganda). The second chunk is largely devoted to Lewis biography, which is all right, but I'm not sure that knowing that Lewis was into caning is really something I needed to know. The third bit is interesting, as it gets into the relationship between Lewis and Tolkien, as well at their relationship to the English literary scene at the time.

Some notes:

p. 123. Some talk about Lewis and Tolkien as embodying a kind of anti-development, "the old ways are best" conservatism. I wonder a bit how much of my own anti-development, semi-Luddite worldview is shaped by having read books by a certain generation of British conservatives as a child.

p. 143. The Natural History of Make-Believe by John Goldthwaite sounds pretty interesting. I will have to track it down.

p. 231. Miller claims William Morris was the first to create a new world for his stories instead of using "Faerie Land" or someplace based on reality in his works The Well at the World's End and The Wood Beyond the World. I had no idea.

p. 233. I've never read any pre-structuralist literary theory, so perhaps I should read Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism.

p. 245. Charles Williams' The Place of the Lion sounds completely insane, described as an "unfolding of a sort of Platonic apocalypse in modern-day Britain." Will have to try to find it.

Stunningly, I discovered this book via online advertising. Whoever is publishing his new book bought some ad space on Daily Kos that included some sort of intriguing blurb. I'm not sure if it was the "...like Maltese Falcon on crack..." blurb that's on the back of this one, but it was enough to convince me to check out his first book from the library. I was totally pulled in by the first page, and finished the whole book the next day. On occasion, it veers into the over-the-top ludicrousness that mars a lot of post-Tarantino crime film (I'm looking at you, Smokin' Aces) and a lot of crime fiction (most particularly the later works of Carl Hiaasen), but the main character (and the overall brutality of the storyline) pulls things back into line pretty well. It's not a book I will recommend without reservations, but it was exactly the sort of quick, absorbing read I needed between Stephenson novels, as well as being good enough to get me to read another of his books. Plus, I like any author who insists on referring to himself as a pulp novelist.

It took a few tries, but I did finally make it through Quicksilver and was able to use that momentum to get through this one as well. It was kind of a chore, since a far greater proportion of this book was devoted to Eliza, whom I find to be a profoundly uninteresting protagonist. It doesn't help that her storyline is deeply tied with French politics, in which I have a hard time staying interested. Given that I found the obligatory action bits with Jack in Quicksilver pointless and superfluous, it's a bad sign that I desperately looked forward to his sections in this book. About two-thirds of the way through the book, though, Eliza pretty much disappeared, and we got back to Daniel and English politics. Much more enjoyable.

Anyway, it does do a nice job capturing the insanity of European global trade in the late 17th century. I think I'll take a little break before I dive into System of the World, but I am going to finish this series. It's probably too much to expect that Eliza stays gone, but I'll remain optimistic.

I initially read this book sometime in high school, but at one point I was discussing the downgrading of fictional Saints in the Catholic Church with my wife, which reminded me of the short story contained here about his meeting with the newly demoted Saints. I re-read that one, enjoyed it, and re-read the rest of them. Very enjoyable, humorous ghost stories, almost in a Wodehouse-y vein, with a sense of humor I wouldn't have really guessed at from his more serious books. Makes me think I should re-read some of his other works. I suspect I'll get more out of them now than I did when I was sixteen.

I wish the book was a little more clear about when these stories were written. The first ones felt a little rough. I found them a little cloying, until I tried reading them in Miranda July's voice in my head. That helped a lot, but it wasn't until "Making Love in 2003" that one of the stories really stood on its own for me. The insertion of Madeleine L'Engle into the story is a little odd, but that story was probably the one that worked the best for me.