The Abarat Series by Clive Barker

Clive Barker

“Perhaps a wiser eye than hers would be able to read tomorrow in tonight's stars, but where was the fun in that? It was better not to know. Better to be alive in the Here and the Now--in this bright, laughing moment--and let the Hours to come take care of themselves.” 

“That's not fair!"
"Life's not fair, Kaspar. You know that. You had a slave for — how long?"
"Twelve years.""Did you treat him 'fairly'? No, of course not. You beat him when you were in a bad mood, because it made you feel better, and when you felt better you beat him some more.” 

“Darkness always had its part to play. Without it, how would we know when we walked in the light? It’s only when its ambitions become too grandiose that it must be opposed, disciplined, sometimes—if necessary—brought down for a time. Then it will rise again, as it must.” 


              The Abarat series consists of five books, three of which have already been published.  I started reading these books when I was a Sophomore in High School and I still eagerly wait for the release of the fourth and fifth books. Throughout middle school and my early high school years I usually just read science-fiction or fantasy novels, and this is the one fantasy series that has continued into my college days.   The story follows Candy Quackenbush, who is from Chickentown, Minnesota, USA.   In one of the most captivating scenes I have ever read, the scene that solidified me as an Abarat fan,  Candy's small farm town is suddenly flooded by sea water which eventually takes her to the world of Abarat.  It's a world consisting of an archipelago of 25 islands,  one for every hour of the day and one for non-time, where the beings who look over the Abarat reign. Each one of these islands is a certain hour of the day all the time, making for interesting travel plans. The story is a classic Good vs. Evil tale, with pursuits, battles, confrontations, relationships and death. What makes these books some of my favorites are the illustrations.  Each book is riddled with hundreds of Barker's illustrations, they vary in size but each one magnificent in its own way.  Most authors use words to paint a picture within your mind, Barker skips this step and shows you just how his world is meant to look.  This world is both beautiful and horrifying,  and is very easy to jump into. Imagine if a Van Gough painting came alive, and talked to you?

 

       

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Truman Capote

“I despise people who can't control themselves.” 

“Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.”

“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.” 

        I read this book before my Senior year of high-school, most of the time laying in bed when everyone else in the house was already asleep, a mistake. I found myself having trouble sleeping because every sound coming from various parts of my house were undoubtedly a killer looking for some money and people to shoot, it didn't help that there had recently been a spree of  B&E's in my neighborhood.  For sure, one of the more horrifying novels that I have read because thats just it, it isn't even a novel, its a true story.  Some say that Capote created the genre of a non-fiction novel.  He followed the story for six years taking vigorous notes and conducting in depth interviews with all people involved .  The result was a scary and threatening work in which the reader was allowed into the twisted thoughts of the murderers.  Capote traces the entire story back to the fact that it was complete chance that these killers chose to target this family, and that is the scariest bit, the bit that stopped me from sleeping: it could have been any family. Besides learning the sickening thoughts that lead to the killers entering the family's home, Capote takes you through their actions within the home that are, at points, hard to handle. Getting into the killer's head is what makes this novel incredibly creepy, but also what makes this novel irresistible and captivating.  You learn that there is not good in every human being, some people live their lives with only the worst of intentions.  If every non-fiction piece could be written in such a manner, the book-world would be a better (and more frequently visited) place. 4.5/5  

The Stand (Uncut) by Stephen King

Stephen King 

“The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.” 

“People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.” 

“No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side.  Or you don't.” 

            This is a long and good book. As stated above, the complete and uncut version of The Stand is over 1150 pages.  It took me the last couple weeks of one summer, and then an additional week or so to finish it up because it was too long to finish before school started up again. I have heard and read that the edited and original version of the novel is just as good as the uncut version, if not better.  Having only read the uncut version I am completely satisfied and  amazed with the quality of the novel.  This is the only King book that I have ever read, and I feel guilty because  I know that all of his others are probably just as good as this one.  Character and plot development is the most important and frequent part of this work as King delves deep into the past lives of every main character, until you feel that you know them as well as you do any of your best buds.  He portrays how each of these characters were completely ordinary, but in their own way extraordinary given the dire circumstances. One event leading to another the world as we know it came to an end and people started gathering into two groups: good and bad.  The most intriguing part of this novel was that he made almost everything believable, realistic and easy to conceptualize. However, the leaders of both these groups had super natural powers that created an eerie and out of the ordinary feeling while reading. The antagonist was a satanical creature who had human form but had a deep evil within him that King usually described through his twisted and scheming smile.  One of the few books that I have ever read that has given me goose bumps while reading, from what I have heard King's other novels offer just the same. An epic story in both length and nature, a true page turner. 4.5/5

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

“People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.” 

“Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.”

“There is no God and we are his prophets.”

           This was the first Cormac McCarthy book that I ever read, followed by No Country for Old Men, and currently Blood Meridian.  The diction was the simplest I have yet to encounter, even in comparison to certain Steinbeck and Hemingway books. The book reads with each sentence as its own entity, and dialogue is  seamlessly  incorporated into the novel's events.  The father and son are traveling the United States in a post apocalyptic world.  A layer of ash covers everything, suggesting some type of mass explosion. What is even more interesting than the horrifying image of this post apocalyptic world, is the effects that it has on this father and his son, and the various people that they meet in their travels.  The father and son become completely dependent on each other because its all they have. To give you an idea of the bleakness and utter hopelessness of their story: the happiest point of the entire novel is when they happen to find a can of old peaches, and the father always makes sure to have at least two bullets left so he could kill his son and then himself if they couldn't handle living anymore. The extent to what humans will do in order to survive is a main theme within this read for sure, and the gruesome means of survival are not for the light hearted. Theft, murder, rape and cannibalism enter this story at various points and leave no room for anything resembling happiness or hope. One of the saddest books that I have ever read that still manages to display the love and compassion that people are capable of, even in the worst of times. 4/5

Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac

“Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.” 

“to me a mountain is a buddha. think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin." japhy got out the tea, chinese tea, and sprinkled some in the tin pot, and had the fire going meanwhile...and pretty soon the water was boiling and he poured it out steaming into the tin pot and we had cups of tea with our tin cups..."

     I borrowed this book from my sister to read over Thanksgiving break from college.  She said she thought that I would enjoy it and I was not disappointed, even though it was my first Kerouac novel  I found that I really did appreciate his meandering thoughts and stream of consciousness type writing.  This novel could be split into two different parts, either they were hiking through desolate forests/ climbing challenging mountains  or they were having hippy-dippy drunk poetry orgies at someone or others house.  I enjoyed the first aspect of this novel much more than said orgies, mostly because I felt that the message that I carried away from the novel I gained form these parts.  The protagonist climbed the Matterhorn (the one in California, not the Swiss Alps), trekked through the trails of California with nothing but peanuts and raisons and eventually spent an entire fire season alone at a watch tower in the wilderness.  On each of these ventures meditation and thought was common through the protagonist, as he was slowly working his way towards discovering who he was and the meaning of various aspects of life. Reading this novel made me appreciate this adventurous and slightly carless point of view, and even motivated me to start thinking of such ventures for myself. While I don't think the protagonist has a coming of age experience in the novel, reading it started the rumblings of such an experience within myself.  If you can look past the hippy dippy drunk poetry orgies, this novel is wonderful. 4.5/5

The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski

Jerzy Kosinski

“At times, feeling the wind on my brow, I went numb with horror. In my imagination I saw armies of ants and cockroaches calling to one another and scurrying toward my head, to some place under the top of my skull, where they would build new nests. There they would proliferate and eat out my thoughts, one after another, until I would become as empty as the shell of a pumpkin from which all the fruit has been scraped out.” 

     This is the most disturbing book that I have ever read. I'll repeat this later to emphasize the point. It follows the travels of a likely orphan in WWII Eastern Europe as he tries to survive moving from village to village.  In each new location the local people there find some new means of torturing and brutalizing him.  I enjoy the violence of Tarantino's movies, and can appreciate the thrilling aspect of serial killer shows on TV, I've seen the SAW movies and have studied the atrocities preformed on victims of the holocaust, the images placed into my head from any of these does not compare to the overall feeling of desperateness and hopelessness that Kosinski portrays.  The young boy is heaved into a pit of human feces to drown, buried to his head to be killed by birds, tortured slowly and systematically by his owners, sexually, physically, and emotionally abused at various points. Beastiality even makes an appearance in this novel at one of the more sickening parts. Rape and murder become common place and are described in full detail.  The effects on the young boy are just as alarming in that he turns to a sick and twisted  view of the world and his place within it.  This novel leaves you with no hope or pleasant feeling, and I would consider it as the heaviest of reads. This is the most disturbing book that I have ever read. 4/5

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest By Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey

“He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.”

“If you don't watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite.” 

     This is a novel that many students read while in high school, but I was never assigned it and never got a chance to read it on my own.  I read it over my winter break after my first semester of college.  I had already seen the film adaptation of the novel several times, so I knew the story and characters very well.  However, like most stories the written version was richer and full of more content. (Not that the movie wasn't great.)  Note: I don't find it necessary to summarize the novel in any of these posts because an explanation better than I could ever write is a couple of clicks away, I focus more on my own thoughts concerning the novel. The protagonist is a fascinating figure that I found easy to admire and enjoy. He carries himself in an honorable manner with a certain code of twisted and humorous reason/logic.  Thrown into this atmosphere of a nurse dominated life, he has immediate problems with authority being forced upon him and acts out in satisfying and funny ways. The author makes obvious remarks on the human mind and what insanity actually is, and figuring that out was one of the more satisfying parts of this novel.  To me, what makes this novel great is the love and compassion that the protagonist shows for his fellow "insane" patients, whether he is helping them for his own amusement or his own affections is unknown and to me,  irrelevant.   It did bother me that I read this entire novel with Jack Nicholson's face planted firmly in the middle of every page, so I do recommend reading before watching if you get the chance. 4/5

Why Own Books?

 

    When I walk into a library I have the intention to buy, not rent. The concept of a public library is great, almost anyone can take out any book or media that they want, use it for a certain amount of time and then return it. This is a great way to get started on reading no matter what age you are, but I believe the appropriate way to read a book is to take it off your own shelf, read it, and once finished place it back in its respective spot to be looked upon, and remembered regularly and if its good enough loaned to friends. This habit of buying and owning books does not have to be an expensive hobby either, I rarely spend over two dollars for any given book, and more often than not the price is closer to fifty cents. Most libraries have a used/donated book sale open all of the time, some are larger/better than others but most have some sort of selection to browse. Any Goodwill or Savers will also have a great selection, even though they are a little more expensive than libraries.
      My room is lined with book shelves (more being added now), and I am immensely proud of my 300+ book collection. I have books dating before the civil war, books worth hundreds of dollars, leather bounds, hardcovers and paperbacks spanning a large number of topics and authors. I have not read all of these books, but I have the capability to whenever I want, they are at my fingertips to browse and read.  Since I have started buying my own books and keeping them in my room I have found that when I have free time from school there is never a point when I am not reading one of these books, an obvious benefit.  The concept of ownership is important to everyone in someway or another. Whether it be through a house, car, thoughts, rights, whatever.  I believe the ownership of knowledge is one of the most important things you can own.  Yes, you can go to your library and rent the same version of that book and knowledge and not have to pay the money for it, but I have seen repeatedly that it is always better to depend on yourself rather than on someone else.

More to come.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe

“The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”

“There is no story that is not true.” 

        I was looking through /r/books one night and I came upon a list of 'Books that will change your life' or something silly like that, and this was one of them.  After reading the summary online I figured that I would enjoy reading it.  My parents were nice enough to get me this book for christmas as well. During a winter break from school where time is limited it's nice to read a couple books that aren't too long or difficult to read, and this novel fits that description. It follows the story of a man in an African tribe, his rise and fall within their community.  It was relatively interesting to learn the customs of this tribe through the author's narrative and how they eventually dealt with the interruption of white missionaries in their life. It wasn't a great novel in the sense that I had trouble putting it down, but the author did have a knack for story telling and the entire novel was fluid and enjoyable to read. Reddit, this book did not change my life. 3/5

Trout Fishing in America By Richard Brautigan

Cartoon of Richard Brautigan

“I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise.” (and he did just that)

“The bookstore was a parking lot for used graveyards. Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars. Most of the books were out of print, and no one wanted to read them any more and the people who had read the books had died or forgotten about them, but through the organic process of music the books had become virgins again.”

           My parents gave me this book for Christmas this past year, and I read it soon after during my winter break from school.  I have previously read A Confederate General from Big Sur and The Revenge of the Lawn, and Trout Fishing in America is by far the most outlandish and strange of the three, and thats saying something with Brautigan.  Throughout the entire novel, a little over 100 pages, he refers to people, places, events and emotions as 'Trout Fishing in America'.  It may have been his way of critiquing and describing his America in all of its various forms, but with Brautigan I've found it more enjoyable to just enjoy the ride rather than trying to understand every bit and piece. Like his other works the chapters are never more than a few pages, and they often traverse between several locations and people.  I feel that he had as much fun writing this novel as I did reading it because each chapter seemed to be an individual experiment in literature. I can't say that I claimed any obvious message or over-arching meaning from this novel, but  perhaps to recognize the little happenings in life and appreciate all they have to offer. 4/5