Hello everyone! I hope you're enjoying the nice autumn weather and prepare for Halloween and the darkness that follows by reading great books! Here are some you might like, enjoy!
Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann
We voted to read Daniel Kehlmann's Tyll as a Halloween read at the Shine&Shadow reading group (because of the Jester figure on the cover), and it was a great pick, especially since I personally, despite it being insanely popular here in Germany, probably wouldn't have picked it up by myself.
Through the lens of various historical figures we piece by piece learn about the life of the mythic German figure Till Eulenspiegel who lived in Lower Saxony in the seventeenth century. From his beginnings as the son of an inquisitive-minded miller with a great interest for magic and alchemy, to fleeing his town with the baker's daughter Nele, to joining the travelers and learning the art of being a trickster, to the Thirty Years' War and to meeting various kooky characters like a hangman, a Jesuit who believes in dragons, and the exiled King Frederick and his wife Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, aka Lizzie - a life as fascinating, as ultimately touching.
I'm really not at all for historical stories but I couldn't put Tyll down - the philosophical musings, the terrors of war, the profoundly interesting and unsolvable person that Eulenspiegel was... Amazing, a very enthusiastic thumbs up.
Beautiful Days by Zach Williams
In this collection of ten short stories Zach Williams shows us the insidious side of mundane life, with an underlying sense of disquiet and maybe even of the somehow absurd. His stories, rather than fully accomplished pieces of writing, always stay in the stages of an unripened impetus, of the beginning of an idea - no full story, no plot, no beginning nor end.
There is some merit for someone in these stories; the language is great, and the description that goes "Parents awaken in a home in the woods, again and again, to find themselves aging as their infant remains unchanged. An employee is menaced by a conspiracy-minded security guard and accused of sending a sinister viral email. An aging tour guide leads a troublesome group to the site of a UFO, witnessing the slow social deterioration as the rules of decorum go out the window." sounds awesome, but when you read it, you don't really read that what is described, you read lots of inner monologues and ramblings and unfinished thoughts. There is, as I said above, a story for someone here, but not for me.
The Summer I Died by Ryan C. Thomas
So I guess picking up this splatterpunk classic, the story of two young men being kidnapped and tortured in the cellar of some psychopath wasn't as great an idea as I thought it would be in a time where my news and feed show me non-stop bombed and orphaned children. I feel desensitized from witnessing real life suffering and it feels sort of forced and artificial to read about it in a fictional setting. So, unfortunately this book didn't have as much effect on me as it probably would have had a couple of years ago, but still, to give the devil his due - it is well written, it has good character development and lots of gore, and features a sadistic villain. And it is very quickly readable.
To be fair there aren't many people who gave The Summer I Died a bad rating, so I might be an outlier in this case. I might have liked it more if it had featured some kind of element beyond gory fun, maybe some kind of puzzle or something to involve your head in, but it is, as I said, that one thing only - splatter fun.
Rosemary's Baby#2 - Son of Rosemary by Ira Levin
Writing about Rosemary's Baby's prequel film (Apartment 7A) for my blog post about cults in fiction made me wonder about its actual, legitimate sequel, namely Son of Rosemary, which gets hate on goodreads like no other book does.
Rosemary wakes up from a coma 33 years after the incidents in the first installment. She suspects her falling into a coma has something to do with the Tannis Root Coven, but all of them are already dead. They did, however, raise her son Andy to be the most influential political and religious figure of his time; he unifies a divided America, he is loved and worshiped by old and young alike and he is the one who will take the world into the new millennium. And he is thrilled that his mother is back, he remembers her from his childhood. While mother and son reconnect, sometimes in borderline incestuous ways, Rosemary also starts dating Andy's bodyguard Joe Mafia (🙄). Is everything as rosy, though? Andy is, after all, the son of Satan, and what is his ultimate goal? Can it be good? Can he ever stop lying?
Son of Rosemary is unfortunately as bad as everyone says. There is a killer twist in the end which invalidates, cancels and mocks Rosemary's whole story and its beauty, weight, and importance. I was a fan of Levin but this ending makes me doubt that, I'm not so sure anymore. If you're the kind of person who likes to read bad books from the past for the heck of it, this is definitely yours, I unfortunately can't think of any other scenario in which this book can work.
The Long Walk by Stephen King as Richard Bachmann
I previously said that I don't want to see The Long Walk movie at the theater, but I'm hearing and reading so positive opinions and reviews on it that I changed my mind, and now I do want to see it. But I'm not going to see it without first re-reading the book, which I read during the pandemic the last time.
As I mentioned above, the news and pictures of people suffering is getting to me right now, so I'm trying to read lighter stuff, and because of that The Long Walk was definitely not on my bingo card. It is a story set in a dystopian future in which a yearly "game" has been established during which a group of young men go for the "Long Walk": they start walking and walk at a steady pace of four miles per hour without ever stopping, as long as they can. The last one standing, the one who has the most stamina and is the last one to make it to the end alive, is the winner and wins everything he wants until the end of his days. When one of them can't walk anymore, they get cramps or blisters or bent feet, get sick, get depressed or just can't anymore, they receive a warning of fifteen seconds countdown, and three warnings in total, or else they get shot and killed.
The main character we're following is Ray Garraty and we're focused on his interactions with his co-contestants, his conversations, his dreams, his thoughts and his memories, the friendships he makes and the "losers" he witnesses being killed, the losses he endures...
Beside being arguably one of the most cruel imaginations that came out of Stephen King's mind, The Long Walk is also a very realistic metaphor for war, and each boy, coming from a different financial and social background, represents a different layer of American society. Add to it King's knack of writing characters that are easy to like and care for, who in this case are mere children, and this book is just too good, but also weighs heavy on emotions. I hear they changed the ending for the movie, and that rumor is basically the reason I decided to watch it as I'm curious of what the filmmakers did to the utmost gloomy and heartbreaking ending to make it feel a little more light-hearted.
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