pres.umptuo.us

A list of the books I’ve read this year. It looks like I’m slightly behind on my “Two books a month” resolution because of Fortress of Solitude taking me a month to complete, and a false start on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Out of curiosity, I also tried to recall all the movies I watched this year (Only movies I had not seen before).

Books

• Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan
• Being Dead by Jim Crace
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel
• The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
• Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
• Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
• When The Nines Roll Over by David Benioff
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• I am Legend by Richard Matheson

Movies

• A History of Violence
• Shrek the Third
• Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
• TMNT
• Me and You and Everyone We Know
• The Fountain
• Knocked Up
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
• Brick
• The Host
• 28 Weeks Later
• Shooter
• Sky High
• Pan’s Labyrinth
• Spider-Man 3
• 300
• Helvetica
• Wedding Crashers
• Zodiac
• The Illusionist
• Perfume
• Borat

Kurt Vonnegut passes away at 84.

This may be the first time a famous person’s death has made me sad. Reading “Slaughterhouse-Five” in college wasn’t just about “getting” the message of the novel, it also showed me the power of writing and how it can affect an individual. While Vonnegut may not be around anymore, his books will always be read.

• The ‘Marching Morons’ show prescience of science fiction. Not only a good message about the way things are today, but also about most people’s ignorance of science fiction as a legit source of literature.

  Monday March 12, 2007

My views on consumerism and the value of money have changed so much that I didn’t even bother blogging when the Apple iPhone was released. Things like gadgets and cars that I used to drool over no longer matter to me as much as they used to. Granted I’ve still had many discussions with friends about the iPhone and its impact on the cell phone industry, but it’s not a product I’m going to be owning myself for at least a couple of years.

My point is that a lot of my interests are no longer all that blogworthy, and the rising popularity of community link sites such as Digg and Reddit have rendered a lot of my quickies redundant. So let’s see what’s been going on in my interesting life.

My roommate bought a munchkin cat and he’s both cute and annoying at the same time. Annoying cause he loves biting feet and apparently when I fight with the cat it looks like a big kid trying to discipline another kid. It’s not my fault that he likes drinking my herb tea and getting his head stuck in my chair and unrolling the toilet paper.

I’ve been on track with my reading resolution. So far this year I’ve read:

• Gould’s Book of Fish
• Being Dead
• Life of Pi
• The Things They Carried

I’m currently reading “Fortress of Solitude,” although it’s a heftier book, so we’ll see if I can stay on track and still finish two books this month. No one asked for reviews, but I’ll give ‘em anyway. Gould’s Book of Fish: eh. Being Dead: eh. Life of Pi: Alright. The Things They Carried: Highly recommended.

300 comes out in theaters this Friday. It’s the first movie I’ve been really interested in for a long while. I’ve got tickets for the Friday Imax viewing, and it’ll be all the better for the sweet CG renders. I’ll be disappointed if I don’t come out of the theater shouting “SPARTA!”

After sampling Supreme Commander and Command & Conquer 3, neither of them can stack up against Company of Heroes in the RTS realm. Granted I’ve heard multiplayer is a vastly different experience for both games, but from the single-player demos I tried, they didn’t even come close. Both games had essentially the same strategy of building up a giant force and then sending them out to crush the other side. CoH has the constant back-and-forth of holding key territory and choosing the right upgrade at the right time. I’d like to hear what the really good CoH players think of Supreme Commander and C&C3.

My health benefits kicked in as soon as I started my new (old) job, and a regular check-up for me was in order. I can’t say I was too surprised to hear my cholesterol is a little high, although a bit scary for sure. I’ve been on a “lazy” diet ever since, consisting mostly of Subway and Souplantation and lots of fruit every day. I still indulge myself every once in a while, but always in moderation. I go back to the doctor’s in about a week to see how my month-long diet has been helping.

I started watching Battlestar Galactica. The first season was a bit slow but still interesting, but then they ended it on an amazing cliffhanger. The first episodes of season 2 were just amazing with the story development and several main characters in peril, and of course season 2 ended with another great cliffhanger. Now I need to download season 3 and try to catch up with the regular network airings.

Dwight: Do you ever watch Battlestar Galactica?
Guy: No.
Dwight: No? Then you are an idiot.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and welcome to 2007.

The apartment is pretty much done at this point. I feel kinda empty having been occupied with apartment furnishing and decor matters for so long that I don’t really know what to do with all my free time now. I find myself looking for random stuff to buy that I don’t really need to fill that void. I love how I just have that innate consumer behavior.

The biggest hurdle of moving out has been finding cheap food. Fast food’s always an option but it’s so bleh. I’ve been making a map of places to eat in the Irvine area using CommunityWalk based on personal knowledge and a couple of OC foodblogs I frequent (Monster Munching and Chubbypanda). If anyone has any recommendations I’m open to it.

I tried the carne asada fries at Taco Spot in Eagle Rock, located across from Oinkster. They paled in comparison to the ones from Alerto’s. I’ve still yet to find a decent place in LA for carne asada fries.

I made a New Year’s resolution to read at least two books a month. It should probably be more writing related, but I gotta start somewhere.

Somehow I missed reading this one in high school. Several different people commented with variations of, “You’re reading To Kill A Mockingbird? That’s so high school.” Well fie on them. Reading books wasn’t top priority for me in high school. There was procrastination to be done.

Mockingbird is easily one of my favorite books now. There’s something about knowing when something is well-written even if I can’t identify exactly why, and the book carries its themes and morals expertly without coming across too heavy-handed.

I’m gonna aspire to be like Harper Lee. Write one incredible novel, win a Pulitzer, and write no more. That’s called going out on top.

Iowa was awesome this year. I started on my novel, and despite the fact that I’ve only added a paragraph to it since I’ve been back, it’s really gotten the thoughts and ideas flowing. I’m trying hard to sit down for at least an hour a day and write, and if not write then do nothing else but think of the story.

Why don’t we tip flight attendants? We tip people who serve us our food in restaurants and people who park our cars (I could go into a long rant about how lazy we must be to have someone else park our Mercedes for us, but I think that says it all), so why not the flight attendants? I dare say the flight attendant has to do way more work than the average waiter does.

I read through David Sedaris’ “Me Talk Pretty One Day” while in Iowa and waiting at airports. I’ve found myself emulating his style in my writing. He’s so smooth and flowy with his writing. Really funny stuff too. Some of it didn’t do it for me, but most of the time he was on the money.

I’ve been using WriteRoom to write my novel, and highly recommend it for anyone else who has problems concentrating. Plus it looks damn cool to be working on an all black screen with green text on it. Makes me look like some hardcore writer dude.

My desktop machine has died on me for no reason at all. I’m still trying to figure out if it’s the power supply or the motherboard. Either way, I imagine it could be a blessing in surprise disguise since I no longer have access to Warcraft 3 (Damn that footmen frenzy is addicting) or my music. More time to write write write!

I’ve been meaning to write up reviews for The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho and You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon but just never got around to it, and then today I finished reading Crossing California by Adam Langer. I came to the quick realization that I didn’t care much for either of the previous books, but will heartily recommend Crossing California.

I can now categorize books into one of two categories: Books that I recommend to anyone and everyone to read, and books that I tend to forget I had read and won’t say much about unless provoked by someone else. Of course there’s always books that are horrible and I abhor and will probably tell everyone how much I hated it, but that usually has more to do with my own personal taste in novels.

And with that, I will say nothing more about The Alchemist or You Remind Me of Me

I am in Iowa attending the Summer Writing Festival once more, this time taking a workshop on starting the novel. We just had our first meeting and I’m feeling good about our instructor (Leslie Schwartz) and the workshop. She told us not to share our work with anyone else unless they are writers themselves because only then will they understand our plight.

That’s cool cause that makes me feel better than all the non-writers. You hear that? I’m better than you.

I saw fireflies for the first time in my life today.

• What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years? Time to get reading.

  Thursday May 11, 2006

The Five People You Meet in Heaven

The title already lead me to think of some cheesy uplifting story, but I had my hopes that it wouldn’t be all that bad. I was hoping for the wrong thing.

I found this book to be way overrated, and not something I would recommend to anyone. The plot and the way it’s written is well-done though, in that it made me keep reading it, and sure enough I finished it in two days.

But the message, and ultimately the reason for reading any book, just made me say, “Duh.” The book’s title should really be “How to Live Life to its Fullest for Dummies.”

No-No Boy

Victor recommended No-No Boy by John Okada to me after he had read A Wild Sheep Chase on my recommendation. I expected this book to have some aspects of Murakami in it, but it ended up being far from it.

No-No Boy follows the main character Ichiro, who is a Japanese American, or “Nisei,” shortly after he is released from prison for refusing the draft during WWII. Because of this, other Japanese-Americans hate him for not being American enough, but his mother and other Japanese immigrants respect him for being Japanese. Ichiro has to live with the decision he has made, and through the course of the book questions if society can overcome racism and nationalism.

There is some really good stuff in here, and while it moves a bit slow in the beginning and Okada isn’t the greatest of writers, it really pays off. While reading the afterword I realized No-No Boy is a book about Asian-Americans written by an Asian-American. Wow, finally an Asian-American story that isn’t a total copy of Amy Tan or Maxine Hong Kingston’s “My controlling parents are the root of all of my troubles” storyline.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone out there, as its subject matter and message ring very true in today’s world.

• Blurb. What do I need a publisher for?

  Tuesday February 7, 2006

My write-up about these three books is long overdue since I read them months ago, but this post is purely for history so I can remember that I did in fact actually read them. These aren’t even gonna be reviews since I’m too lazy to go into their plots, so you’ll just get a lotta mumbling from me.

About a Boy I read because everyone kept telling me to watch the movie and so I read the book so I could then see the movie (which I haven’t yet). Shopgirl I read because the movie was coming out and it looked good, and also cause I got it on sale for a great price in Iowa. Bluebeard was read on Ken’s recommendation.

Continue reading “About a Boy, Shopgirl, Bluebeard”

A few pages into this novel I already began to regret my purchase. It started out like any typical story about growing up in an English boarding school. Kazuo Ishiguro’s most famous book is Remains of the Day, which was turned into an Anthony Hopkins film. Sounds boring. Yet the critics had been praising Never Let Me Go, and so I read on.

Continue reading “Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro Review”

Because I’m too lazy to think up my own material, here’s a couple of passages from the book I’m reading, Bird by Bird - Some Instructions on Writing and Life:

E.L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t even have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.

This is where the book gets its title:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

On Ken’s recommendation, I picked up A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami. Ken was pushing Murakami more than he was the book, and rightly so. I’ve been drawn in after only reading a few pages.

All of his books are translated from Japanese, so I’m not quite sure how much of it is really him, but it’s awesome. His prose just glides and feels so natural that he can pull anything off and does it well. Some choice quotes:

“What’ve you been up to this past year?” she asked me.
“Different things,” I said.
“Wiser for it?”
“A little.”

So it was that she and her slip vanished forever. Some things are forgotten, some things disappear, some things die. But all in all, this was hardly what you could call a tragedy.

Alright, so I’m bad at making selections considering it fits better within the rest of the work. But you get the idea.

Some authors you admire because of the stories they craft and the creativity they use in their stories. But the ones you idolize and aspire to become are the ones that write in ways that make you smile and shake your head, wondering how they could make words dance the way they do.

Thanks again to Kenneth Pattengale, who’s new album Dust Bowl Dreams is out now.

I don’t do too many book reviews. I think cause it’s hard for me to describe and critique them. Nonrequired Reading is just a compilation of works that may or may not be interesting. I would recommend this if only cause it seems to offer something for everyone, and acts in a way as a gateway into other types of literature.

Stand-outs in this collection: Bones by Tom Kealey, The Fifteen-Year Layover by Michael Paterniti (The real-life story that The Terminal was based on), Full House by David Sedaris, and We Have a Pope! by Christopher Buckley. Coincidentally enough, I read that last one just before all this stuff with the Pope happened. The story itself is quite humorous by playing the whole Papal election off as some big PR stunt.

Grab the nearest book.
Open the book to page 23.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal…
…along with these instructions.

As the original “point” (so called by Chaucer), it appears to occupy a place in our grammar that is unassailable.
-Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

Wish I had a cooler book nearby.

Embroiled in a murder incident is Albert Camus’ existentialist classic, and I must applaud it for pulling it off without being overbearing on the philosophical side. The Stranger is split into two parts, the first part being what could be called the expository section and where all the action occurs, while the second part is the analysis of the events that transpired in part one and the ultimate conclusion.

Part One of the story felt a bit slow because of its lack of any visible direction or climax, but the end comes abruptly and the reader is thrown into Part Two where finally things pull together.

Wow, that was a horrible explanation. To put it very simply, the story made me think at the end and consider certain things in life, and it’s a very short read that can be done in about two days.

I was really hyped up about this book. Pulitzer Prize winner, UCI alumni, doing screenplays for Spider-man 2. How could this book not be good? How could it possibly not live up to the hype? Well, somehow, it didn’t. Not for reasons you’d expect though.

Kavalier & Clay follows two cousins who break into the comic book industry in the era of World War II by creating their character “The Escapist” and become rich almost overnight. I won’t go too in-depth with the plot since a summary can easily be found on Amazon or anywhere else, but the book is rife with escapist themes - Josef Kavalier escaping from religious persecution in Poland, Samuel Clay escaping from a world that won’t accept him.

Chabon’s writing style is intent on filling his world with as many adjectives as possible. He gets descriptive with his…um, descriptions? I often got lost in all the commas he threw into his massive sentences, and the style wasn’t something I was used to. I can’t exactly say it’s a bad style, but just not something to my taste, especially with my admiration of Vonnegut and his simplistic no-frills writing style.

My ultimate disappointment though came in the story and plot itself. It didn’t really show me anything; I didn’t leave the world of Kavalier & Clay (One notable thing about the book is how Chabon mixes in real-world characters such as Orson Welles and Stan Lee with his fictional characters) with any added knowledge to my head, nothing to really contemplate or make me ponder. I ask myself if I gained anything from reading this book?

It sounds like I expect a fictional novel to preach to me, but I just never found myself enthralled with the storyline. Not a lot of suspense, not a lot of “I wonder what’s going to happen next” sort of thing happening. In short, it got tedious at times. Nothing memorable to come away with.

I really hate to issue this novel a rating of “Not Recommended”, but I just wouldn’t know how to sell the book to get other people to read it, yet at the same time it’s not like it’s some godawful book.

The next book on my reading list is William Boyd’s Any Human Heart. It would’ve been Ken’s (Bastard didn’t like my now infamous ketchup post. Infamous because I say so.) recommendation of Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish by Richard Flanagan, but my second time checking it out of a library and again I didn’t get to it before it was due. Next time.

Thanks to Jennie for our little outing to Old Town Pasadena on our lonely Thursday night. All of our friends (and even our relatives!) abandoned us for their own evenings of fun. Nevertheless, we saw the saleless clothes at Urban Outfitters, shopped for new books at Barnes & Noble and enjoyed frozen yogurt at 21 Choices. Their Reese’s Peanut Butter mix was awesome.

I picked up Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves since I needed something new to read after having finished Fight Club. The whole book is a rally against bad punctuation. I was laughing in the store after having read this from the back cover:

A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

“I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”