Turns Out, I Was Too Easy On That Awful Book

Remember the book reviews I used to do? Well, when I fell into the trap of reading that god-awful book Fifty Shades of Grey, I reviewed that too, and it was certainly not a very favorable one.

However, after reading a far more thorough review on The Pervocracy, I realized I was being far, far too nice, mostly in my hesitation of speaking for the BDSM community, of which I am not a part and was fairly ignorant about.

OK gushing time: I looove The Pervocracy. It opened my eyes to a community which I now find incredibly fascinating, although not something that I am personally interested in partaking in. She SLAMMED this book, and reading her chapter-by-chapter evisceration of the novel had me in stitches. She is so much funnier than I could ever be, and I only wish I could have read the book with her commentary in my ear, it would have made the whole experience far more enjoyable. 

If you have some time to kill read through her take on the chapters, it's awesome. 

What Happened to Book Reviews?

Here I used to be reading three books in a weekend given the three hour train ride I have to take whenever I go back to Rome, now it's been twice that I've gone down and I'm still bringing along the same book that I haven't even opened yet. Yeesh, what's going on? Where has the reading bug gone? Well, it's easy, I've gotten hooked on audiobooks. More specifically, I cannot go anywhere without being plugged into the Harry Potter series, read by Stephen Fry.

I adored the books, and I was the perfect age for them to "grow with me" as I was reading them. Now, I have to say, I think I like hearing Stephen Fry reading them to be even better. They keep me company as I walk back and forth to work (since they have now stole my bike for the third time, horray), on the train, as I dissect larvae at the microscope or as I go about my solitary business. They're also so long that by the time I reach the end of the last book, very little time needs to go by before I start on the first again. They're that good. He's that good.

I have found that when it comes to audiobooks, they need to be books you have read and/or books that do not require an enormous amount of attention. If it's your first time reading them, or it is a book that needs careful consideration paid to every word, you need to be able to hold it in your hand and fix it with your eye, or you wont be able to follow it and you certainly wont be able to multitask. To this effect, I have downloaded the following audiobook series that will follow Harry Potter:

Discworld - Terry Pratchet
The Dark Tower - Stephen King
The Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman
Dune - Frank Herbert

I am a little giddy, though I highly doubt that any of them will be as good as the Stephen Fry readings. He's just... so... I suppose you have to listen for yourself to get it. I just hope I wont get too hooked that I wont open up any paperbacks again.

Book Review: Fifty Shades of Grey

This is something that I had heard referenced over and over again on tv and the internet, "this that or the other is like fifty shades of grey", and I actually had to look it up to find out what the Hell it was. Kind of like with Ayn Rand I was the very last to the party, and by the time I had found out what everyone was talking about it had already had a huge success. I see it costs next to nothing on amazon, so I figured why not? Lets tack it onto the list and see what its like. All I can say is.... shmieh.

Here's the thing with sexy novels, you have to actually like the characters. While the female character is alright, albeit extremely judgmental, slut-shame-y and sex-negative (though through my irritation I could forgive it seeing as she's extremely inexperienced), the male character turned me off from the start.

I need to preface this by saying that I have no involvement in the BDSM community and know little about it, it's just really not my scene. Despite this, I still feel like it was really poorly represented in this novel. I feel like for a healthy Dom/Sub relationship, it starts from a place of mutual respect. This guy is a fucking condescending prick. Saying that if one of "his" made the mistake of getting sick on their first time being drunk he'd beat them so badly they couldn't sit for a week? Yea, fuck yourself asshole. 

While I'm not personally into BDSM, I get the allure of the Dom/Sub relationship in the bedroom. The relinquishing of control can be hot in the right context. However, this book is representing the 24/7 Dom/Sub relationship as if it were the norm for the community, when it is a very small extreme. It's one thing to take control in the bedroom, tie up your partner etc, it's entirely another to say that any straying from this extreme set of rules, like snacking between meals or making a mistake, will result in a beating. Sometimes I can be into the whole game, and other times I feel sick and unsexy and I want to curl up on the couch with a pint of ice cream and watch bad tv, and for that I have to be scared I'm going to get beat up?! It brings what is a normal, healthy aspect of sexuality to something bordering dangerously on the makeup of an abusive relationship. What's worse, the psyche of the male character is set up like he's "like this" because he was abused, and is continuing the cycle of abuse by becoming a Dominant and not being able to change. This isn't to say that you can't have a fucked up character in your novel, but I feel like they're unfairly shitting all over the entire BDSM community with the way they marry his fucked-up-ness with his Dominant sexuality. Please feel free to call me out on my utter naivete if you're in the BDSM community and feel that this criticism is unfair.

I kept reading sex scene after sex scene, realizing that I was getting very close to the end and the story wasn't developing in the slightest. There were plenty of excuses to go back to yet another sex scene, but nothing was actually happening. When I reached the end I saw that somehow they had managed to turn this masturbatory aid into a trilogy, no wonder the story wasn't going anywhere.

Will I read the other two? I really don't know if they're worth my time. The thing is I didn't like the male character for the majority of the book, so the sex scenes really didn't do it for me. Without those, this book is worth nothing. I have no idea if the characters will actually develop in the other two books, but unless someone convinces me that they get better I doubt I'll get around to reading them.

Book Review: The Angel of Grozny

I first discovered Åsne Seierstad's work with The Bookseller of Kabul, a book that I found incredibly powerful, interesting and very informative on a region in the world that I knew very little about. This book, while written in a much more journalistic rather than novelistic style, was even more so.

First of all, it is 100% confirmed that Asne Seierstad has balls of steel. She brazenly enters one of the scariest places in the world, repeatedly, without the permission let alone the support and protection of the Russian government, in order to report first hand what life is really like in Chechnya once you rip off the blinds of propaganda. Believe me, she takes no prisoners with this one, delving into the real, complicated mess that is the Caucasus.

I know that it is easy to laugh at Putin for all of the ridiculous stunts he pulls, trying to portray himself as a badass that no one wants to mess with. Trust me, I wouldn't want to mess with Putin either, but for entirely different reasons. He is far, far more sneaky than he wants to come off, a weasel trying to convince his people he's a bear, and after reading this book it is incredibly hard to just laugh him off as pathetic. You laugh at people that are essentially harmless, and this man is anything but.

There are parts of this book that are very hard to read, and there are things that happened that are fucking inexcusable. It made me angry, sad, guilty that I didn't know or care about this before, and plain depressed that humanity can even go there. 

Iznaur disappeared in 2000 and returned in 2007. He is marked for life.
They pounded a nail into one of his shoulders. All the way in. With a hammer.
They drove a pencil into his chest. The lead is still there.
They pulled flesh from his chest with tongs. Deep hollows remain.
 "The Russians. To get me to talk," says Iznaur. 

In cases like this it is very easy to slip into a narrative that is based around a simple dicotomy. Chechens=martyrs, Russians=evil tyrants. Asne Seierstad is very good at steering clear of this, and no one comes off 100% perfect in this book. Chechnya has become rife with Islamist extremism and honor killings are rampant. Chechens have been pitted against other Chechens and often can be the most sadistic of them all. These are all consequences of ignorance, high mortality and power struggles that one can come to expect after years of oppression (after all, look what happened in Afghanistan), but it goes to show that reality is so much more complicated that good v. evil. It's poor v. poorer, Islam v. Atheism v. Christianity, working class Russian v. Chechen children, Chechen v. Chechen, ignorance v. power, and for what? Hundreds of thousands of lives murdered, maimed and manipulated by the hands of a few sadists and narcissistic sociopaths at the very top.  

Everyone, even the racist bullying Nazi sympatheisers that finally get caught in their hate crimes are difficult to be angry at, or hate. Is it their fault that they were raised in a country rife with ignorance and propaganda against certain people? Do they deserve to be sent to a prison which bleeds their family dry by extorting money from them, a prison with twice as many inmates as beds, where prisoners constantly die of infectious diseases? 

Can you hate the Russian soldier, after you realize that he signed up so that he can finally help his mother financially, but gets his pay stolen by other officers, gte severely wounded and then unceremoniously dumped by his government which doesn't want to pay him his pension or any of the money he is owed for being "voluntarily coerced" into service?

The Chechens are evil on the inside. They are evil in their souls. They're like wolves, and live according to the laws of that beast. [...] "They have hot blood, you see, [...] Red-hot. War seethes in them right from birth".

Oh, how easy life would be if it were really that simple. Reading this part, it made me think about another thing that the major religions really need to answer for. The creation of the Devil, this us vs. them mentality, as if life could be distilled into something as easy as that. "Evil" still exists in this world, but not because the Devil is alive and well. It "exists" because this shit is a vicious cycle, breeding more hate and violence as it goes along, by keeping a people in ignorance and refusing to understand their own history. It makes me scream in frustration because it never ends, and it just gets worse every time it goes around.

It's a tough one to read, but it is so very very worth it. It is another that I would highly recommend, if for no other reason than it is something that has been dismissed for far too long.   
   

Book Review: Against All Odds

Im back in my non-fiction mood, and I started the trend again with this book that got tacked on to my amazon list one day, though I am not quite sure why. It is the story of Paul Connolly, abandoned at two weeks old and growing up in one of the toughest institutions in London. It is an amazing story true to its title, as a man who saw twenty not knowing how to read or write managed to become incredibly successful and even publish a book about his own life.

One of the things that struck me is the similarities that I found in my own personality when reading his thoughts. Largely due to his upbringing he became a very violent person, but that underlying sense of social justice and violence had to be present in his character for him to have taken the path that he did, and it is one that I recognize in myself. As I have alluded to before I was the "bully-beater-upper" when I was in elementary school, I fought viciously to defend my friends in middle school who could not defend themselves, and I was always ready to raise my fists if and whenever I needed to. If I ever saw someone taking advantage of someone else or mericlessly bullying someone weaker than them I wont shed a single tear if that person gets a sound beating, and while objectively I know that the right answer to these situations is "violence is always wrong", I can't bring myself to emotionally agree with that statement. Luckily for me, I grew up in a family that loved me, I went to good schools, I always had enough to eat and any abuse I suffered was minimal, so my inner violence was never required to show itself very often. I still kickbox in my spare time as a form of exercise, but my inner need to feel self confident in my physical ability reside more in the fact that I'm a woman who lives alone and refuses to be afraid of her own shadow when walking home at night, rather than being tied to a sense of self-worth. The seed, however, is there, and if I had grown up under the circumstances that he did? Wow, I can't imagine the demons I would be wrestling with every single day.

I greatly admire the writer for not only achieving all that he did throughout his life, but also the way that he laid bare his deepest fears and the most unflattering parts of his past. I admire his character and his bravery, but most of all I think this book is important to read because it really gives you an understanding of all those boys and girls that society is so ready to give up on and throw away without ever giving them a proper chance in life. I think the author of the book It's Your Time You're Wasting needs to meet this man, they could give each other amazing perspective and be able to offer incredible insight into how to resolve these issues that are becoming ever more pressing in the UK.

If only there were more people that would listen.

Book Review: The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

Here's another one of those books that I had heard so much about but never actually got around to reading. It has been such an integral book to so many people that I know that I instantly recognized many parts of it from previous conversations that I had had. Even more so, reading it was a further insight into some of my closest friends, as I immediately recognized their humor in these pages that I have no doubt in my mind helped shape theirs as they grew up. What if they had never read this book, how different would they be? And if I had read it at the intended age, as a pre-teen or teenager, would I have loved it as much as they had, and would I be more similar to them in my sense of humor? Such big vertiginous questions provoked by such a small book.

One of my favorite parts of the book was actually a logical argument about god that someone I had met in a pub was retelling me. As often happens with books you read in your formative years he didn't remember the details very well, and in fact managed to garble the argument immensely to insinuate that it came to precisely the opposite conclusion that it in fact came to. I countered it with an argument made by the great Discern4 over on youtube. So imagine my surprise when I came upon the argument in the book and it turns out that not only the argument was surprisingly similar to the one I had borrowed from Discern4, but it was actually originally an amusingly good argument against Intelligent Design, turning their most common argument of Irreducible Complexity against them:

Now it is such a bizzarely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

So twisty and clever, exactly my cup of tea.

One thing I will say, I will not let my kids (if I ever have any) reach adulthood without reading it, just like they will also read Harry Potter, Roald Dahl and Flatland. It a think-outside-the-box book through and through in the best kind of way, and I think that is a lesson well worth learning as soon as possible.

Book Review: God Is Not Great

My laptop is still on the fritz, but I have a little time at work today to squeeze this one in...

A while ago, when ordering my bulk book package from Amazon, I realized that I have never actually read any of Christopher Hitchens' work. He was certainly not as likeable as other atheist contemporaries of his like Stephen Fry, but nevertheless I recognized in him a monstrous intellect that could only be admired, even if not fully agreed with. Why not then, I thought, get a couple of his most famous books and see for myself? Well the first one I read was God Is Not Great, and holy hell he makes a devastating case.

The first chapters of the book justify one of his most famous positions: "religion poisons everything". He goes over some terrifying things that have been and are still done in the name of religion, and brings up a very good point about how religion facilitates these atrocities. I have explained in a previous post that I am fully aware that bad people in the world will do bad things and that in many cases it is not their religion that "made them" do it, it just gave them a good way to get away with it. What I missed in that post however is this other aspect that Hitchens touches on in this chapter: Religion causes people to accept terrible things, things they would normally cry out against in disgust and horror had they not been done by a religious figure, and this attitude is something that greatly stunts our ability to evolve and move forward as a society.

Case in point: if you found out that Hitchens went about sucking on injured baby penises, spreading herpes as he did so, you would cry out in outrage for his arrest and many for his lynching, and I would be right there alongside you. How disgusting, vile and cruel! Well, it's actually not illegal in New York City to do so thanks to mayor Bloomberg, if you're a rabbi that is. That's right, in a passage of the book that made my skin crawl and I had trouble believing was true, there is a practice amongst a faction of Jews whereby the rabbi, after cutting the foreskin off of a little baby, puts that bleeding injured penis in his mouth and sucks the foreskin off. Babies started getting venereal diseases this way, at least one of them died, but Bloomberg did not make the practice illegal, lest he offend the Jews. Are you fucking kidding me? Does anyone think that this would not be headline, national news with the perpetrator in isolation in prison for his 0wn safety, if he was hacking away and sucking on and infecting baby penises for any reason other than a religious one?

While the God Delusion is more of a philosophical reasoning behind atheism, this book focuses on organized religion, how it was invented by men, how it has done far more harm than good and in the world and how it is silly to believe in such a fabrication. It does not address mysticism or deism, so its a book that many more people are going to agree with. The style he adopts in his writing is so similar to his style of speaking that I could almost hear his voice in my head, a-mile-a-minute touching all the right points though never in profound detail, which means that this one book has added a dozen others to my reading list. The vastness of his knowledge is astounding and his personal experiences remarkable, he truly led a full, if too short a life.

He is obviously not a scientist, so do not expect a book about how evolution and cosmology makes the belief in a creator irrelevant (although I applaud his attempt at understanding the science and alluding to it, albeit superficially). Do also expect that cocky arrogance that Hitchens was so famous for, and you probably wont agree with him on every point. It is not perfect, for one thing he did trip over himself in the brief section he dedicated to abortion, but the best part of this book is that it is an excellent stimulant for debate. It touches on pretty much everything that he could think of, just enough to give you a taste, and almost every sentence can be used as a jump-off point for an hour-long discussion. I would have loved to have the opportunity to sit and chat with him, and be awed at how I could never keep up with his mind.

Book Review: Tuesdays With Morrie

How could I have not read this book yet?! It's a classic, it was cheap, it was tacked on to my last bulk shipment of books from Amazon.

It's a tiny little book, just enough to keep to focused for an afternoon. I think the best place to read it is under a tree in a park on a breezy summers day, where you're in a good and tranquil mood and ready to muse on the meaning of life with Morrie Schwartz and his student, Mitch Albom.

You definitely should not read this book if you are in a cranky or cynical mood, it will just annoy you and you wont be able to really get anything of value out of it. That isn't to say that this is prophet-level stuff, but it's inherent simplicity and genuine nature made me feel like there's something in it for everyone, even if you don't agree with all of the chapters or all of Morrie's musings. 

If nothing else, this book makes you stop and think about your life and how you really want to be living it. It makes you review your priorities, lest you wind up twenty years older in a blink of an eye with too many regrets to count. I am the kind of person that tends to get entrenched in the details, furiously focusing on one little thing that I am doing, only to wake up and realize that six months have just passed me by. While there is absolutely nothing wrong in the pursuit of what you love or what you want, it is very important to take a step back once in a while to absorb the simple things in life.

The book has many aphorisms, some of which I may not have agreed with or thought were overly simplistic, but this quote from Morrie is one that resounds perfectly with my personality:

Mitch, if you're trying to show off for people at the top, forget it. They will look down at you anyhow. And if you're trying to show off for people at the bottom, forget it. They will only envy you. Status will get you nowhere.

There are so many people I know that would let go of so much angst and self-loathing if they would only learn this lesson and allow themselves to let go of this burden. 

Any way you slice it, Morrie Schwartz was an inspirational person, and I am very happy that he got the opportunity to share his uniqueness with so many people. He is someone I would have loved to have met.

Book Review: Flesh House

Well it had to happen sooner or later: it is a completely negative review of the latest book I had to force myself to finish: Flesh House by Stuart MacBride. I have no idea how it won the awards that it did, because I found it to be boring, long-winded, predictable and just plain gross.

I am not one of those people that can't handle a little violence or horror in my novels or movies. I have recently blathered on about how much I loved A Nail Through the Heart, which was not lacking in violence. I am a regular fan of Stephen King, and his stuff can get pretty gruesome. It is not the mere presence of gore that thoroughly annoys me when it comes to this book, it is the style and the apparent reason for its presence - and this goes for all of those pathetic Saw, Hostel or otherwise bullshit movies that I despise.

The violence in A Nail Through the Heart was necessary for the telling of a story that was not centered around pure, meaningless gore. Stephen King's (better) novels bristle with tension and suspense, being the only author I have ever come across that made my grown self check under my bed for monsters before I kept reading in my room alone at night. This book on the other hand had none of that. There was no fear, or suspense. There was no literary art to the prose. There wasn't even a good enough murder mystery clue trail to follow. Just like in those stupid movies I hate, all there was was a pointless predictable twist at the end to justify the existence of the book itself, so that all those people that love to read it don't have to admit that they are into torture porn.

I am not interested in the most disgusting thing your mind can come up with thrown in there for mere shock value. I concede that you can come up with grosser things than I can, congratulations.

I am not interested in your detailed descriptions of the torturous murder scence. Dude's getting killed, I get it.

I am not interested in the emotional turmoil that the witness to the gruesome scene must be going through. You only added the witness to tug the heart strings even further and force the reader to imagine what it would be like to have to witness such a thing happening to someone they care about. The torture itself is bad enough for my sensibilities without needing to add that in there too, thanks.

Just... I'm not interested. Now that I know that I have drastically different tastes than the girl that gave me the book in the first place I will make sure I'll remember that.