The Fifty Year Sword; A Review

The Fifty Year Sword by Mark Z. Danielewski
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I agree with another review of this book, stating that MZD is an experimental storyteller. He wants to test limits and boundaries.

I loved the stitch work art in this piece, and I found the story to be interesting, but nothing that kept me on the edge of my seat. Maybe I'll have to check out a video of the "live performance" to see what I think.

My criticism for this book is it felt like it tried too hard. It wanted to make leaps and bounds and keep you hooked, but I felt like I was going through the motions, reading it. All the characters but one have extremely odd names, and this didn't add to the book, but instead confused me because apparently this book is supposed to take place in Eastern Texas.

Overall I'd say it's an interesting and quick read, but nothing worth critical acclaim.

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The Mapmaker's War; A Review

The Mapmaker's War by Ronlyn Domingue
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

While I found the plot of this book to be mesmerizing, I found it hard to get "in" to the narrative and really submerse myself in the story. The characters felt distant and at times dull to me. I felt as if I never really knew any of them. And perhaps this distance was on purpose, but it made it hard for me to feel the strong emotions and sense of peace and understanding that this book spends so much time describing.

I also found the story to at times feel pointless. I understand it was written as if it were an autobiography, but it also didn't quite feel like that; I got the impression that the story within the life was more important than the life which told the story, but this separation was muddled and confusing at times.

I would like to read the sequel, and see if I still have the same feelings - I suppose we'll find out.

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Divergent by Veronica Roth

Divergent by Veronica Roth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An easy read, this book is quick and hard to put down.

I will admit that the book starts off rather slow, and there's a lot of telling instead of showing, as it were, but there are moments where the author really captures how certain emotions feel (which is hard to do with only words).

I'm eager to read the next book!

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House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Good evening everyone!

Man, I have to say, it's been a long time since I read such a complex work of literature that really got me to think, but also left me feeling like there was so much I didn't understand yet. It's a book I read for pleasure that I plan to do a lot more research on because I think this book is utterly fascinating.

As soon as I finished I began looking online for reviews from other bibliophiles, and I found this wonderful review from I Read Odd Books. I really enjoyed her review and her take on the character Johnny Truant, but honestly for me the most fascinating aspects of the book were A) the layout/the text as a work of art and B) the Navidson Record. I completely understand that the book is really about Johnny more so than it is anything else, and he was a very compelling character and I enjoyed reading about him, but there was something alluring about the house and all its secrets.

Anyway, there are some spoilers below the line, so if you don't want to have details shown to you before reading, here might be a good place to stop. (To make some sort of a page break, here I'll insert some pictures from select pages that show off why I think of this book as a work of art as much as a piece of interesting literature.)

One of my favorite things about this book are little passages with nuggets of thought or clever writing that made me stop and think. One such passage shows up fairly early on in the book, on page 73. There's just been a discussion about echoes and how they work, and it's before there have been any explorations of the hallway. Navy is with his daughter, Daisy.

"Come play with me Daddy."

Navidson lifts his daughter onto his lap.

"Okay. What do you want to play?"

"I don't know," she shrugs. "Always."

"What's always?"

...

Then again, "always" slightly mispronounces "hallways".

It also echoes it.

  I was pretty taken aback when I read this for the first time. It was just a very interesting point to make, and shows the intricacies of the people who live in the house and how they are being affected by it.

Here's another good quotation from the book:

Strangely, then, the best argument for fact is the absolute unaffordability of fiction. Thus it would appear the ghost haunting The Navidson Record, continually bashing against the door, is none other than the recurring threat of its own reality (found on page 149). 

Something I agree with the author of I Read Odd Books is that I marked up my copy with little flags for everything I found interesting and wanted to write about, and found, when I went back, that I couldn't remember why  had marked half the things I did in the first place. I started to take notes in a little notebook of mine, but I still found myself rather lost at the end.

Here are some resources if you too are interested in this book:

• A Guide to the Book
• The Weirdness in House of Leaves, a review
• 21 C Magazine Review of HoL
• An explanation of ergodic literature 
• Another explanation of ergodic literature (from the U of M, my school! :D)

I can't really think of this review as an ending, for me - rather this is just the beginning. I feel there is still so much I have yet to understand and that I need to go over to fully understand this text. Maybe I'll report back once I've done some more digging.

If you want to see what else I've been reading lately, or to see how far I am on the 2014 reading challenge, check out my goodreads here.

A Trip to the Moon

Source

A Trip to the Moon (or Le Voyage dans la Lune) is a strange, but fantastical film by Georges Méliès, and it was first seen by audiences in 1902. So that makes it a pretty damn old film. It was shot in black and white film, and then hand colored in. For a very long time it was thought that there wasn't a surviving, original copy of the film in color, but then one was found (oddly enough, since it is a French movie) in Spain. It was in pretty poor condition, and it was very fragmented, so it sort of sat untouched for a bit (it was found in the 90's and not restored until 2010). Some very ambitious folk decided to try their hand at restoring it, and we now can view this interesting, short little piece of art in color as well as in black and white.

Here is an example of the B&W vs Color:

Black and White

Hand-Colored

And here's another one for good measure (and because it's one of my favorite parts of the film):

Ahhh, my face! My beautiful face!

Ahhh, my face! My beautiful face! (Now in color!)

I took some notes while I watched the movie, and I think what really struck me is how fantastical this story is. It's about a group of old white guys who take a trip to the moon, crash land on the planet, and when one of the native folk pop up he/she/it is promptly whacked on the head by one of the old guys with a stick, and disappears in a POOF of smoke. When the old guys get to what I believe in the palace of the ruler of these folk, they start whacking all sorts of people, get chased back to their rocket-thing, and then fall off a cliff and therefore fall back to earth.

Basically they're huge jerks to the native people of the moon (who are a little strange, I'll admit, but c'mon, they didn't even try to talk to them). And they MURDER THE MOON KING. Rude. Wikipedia fleshes out the story a little more than I have, but that's basically it. I'm somehow reminded of the great conquerors of the Western world and how they weren't always nice to the native population. It's like the opposite of the Enterprise's mission (while it might not explicetly state "and do not explode the native people of foreign planets, I think the idea was discovery, not being a bunch of rude assholes).

I still find it captivating and beautiful, especially when the planets are personified (you'll see if you watch it yourself). If you do want to see it, click here for a link to the movie on youtube.

The image I've shared of the moon is one of the most iconic images in film history, as well as being "punny" (Wikipedia explains it pretty well).

If you want to read someone else's opinion, here's a link to a review/where I got the images from by Gary W. Tooze.