Month: January 2020

Good Omens Review

This book gets 4 bitching classic cars out of 5. I’d like to think Crowley would gladly drive any of these.
[This gallery is a collection of four images of classic cars: one red convertible, a gold car, a green convertible, and a beautiful dark blue Cadillac.]
  • Why did I pick this book up?

This is yet another book I have wanted to read for a long time. I am a very big fan of Neil Gaiman’s work, from his novels to his graphic novels, and I also love Terry Pratchett (I played Magrat in a community theatre production of his Wyrd Sisters in highschool). After reading some pretty depressing and frankly not great books, I decided that I would give the funny book by two writers who have proven themselves to me a chance.

  • Would I recommend why/why not?

Hell yeah I would recommend this book! If you like funny, irreverent books that will make you laugh on literally every page, this is the book for you! This is not the book for you if you have a genuine fear and belief in the Apocalypse in its Biblical sense, as I guess this could be considered offensive?

I would also recommend it if you want something quasi-fantasy, quasi-sci fi, and completely nutty. If you are a fan of either Gaiman or Pratchett, what are you waiting for?! Read this damn book!

  • Quick Synopsis  **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

Basically, this books takes place in the 90s in England. We meet Aziraphale, an angel, and Crowley, a demon. Although they are literally polar opposites, destined to be eternal enemies, we quickly see that they are totally buddies and secret BFFs.

They are told by their respective bosses (God and Satan) that the Apocalypse is near, and that they must begin their efforts to bring it about, as the Antichrist is about to be born.

Crowley and Aziraphale really like their lives on Earth, and don’t really want this to end. They decide to keep an eye on the Antichrist, baby Warlock, in the hopes that they will be able to sabotage the Apocalypse. However, it turns out that due to a comedy of errors, Warlock is not the Antichrist; there was a switch at the hospital, and the baby named Warlock is just a regular baby, while the Antichrist is ironically named Adam and sent to live with a super boring super normal British family, instead of with the American Ambassador (also funny!).

Eleven years pass, and it is now time for the Apocalypse and for the Four Horsemen to ride. Cue hardcore Queen playing.

Basically there is a bunch of silly stuff that goes on with the attempt to locate the Antichrist by Arizaphale and Crowley, as well as a subplot involving a witch hunter and a psychic granddaughter of the psychic that properly predicted the End of Times, Agnes Nutter.

The world descends into chaos as the Four Horsemen, Death, Famine, War, and Pollution (who, in an interesting commentary, replaces Pestilence) meet up and seek out Adam.

In the meantime, Adam wants to rule the world, as any 11 year old boy would. However, he realizes that if the world ends, if he brings it about by accepting his absolute power, he will not be able to hang out with his friends and live his boy life. So he decides to end the Apocalypse. He gets grounded by his dad, Aziraphale and Crowley are happy the world still exists so they can enjoy food and fancy cars, and the psychic feels liberated by no longer living her life according to a set of wacky and hard to decipher prophecies.

Also maybe there will be a second Apocalypse in the future but who knows.

I didn’t have time to take a picture of my book, but this is the copy that I own and I find the tagline to be perfect: “Heaven to read, and you’ll laugh like hell”.
[This is a picture of a black book with three ‘men’ drawn on the front. One is obviously Crowley, and the other Aziraphale, and maybe the third man is the witch hunter? He seems to old to be Adam. “Good Omens” sprawls across the page, and the letter ‘M’ ends in a devil’s tail.]
  • Overall brain gushings :

This book was so funny. On every page I found something that made me actually LOL. There was a lot of hilarious and snide commentary on human beings and what makes them tick, as well as a lot of poking fun at the contradictions in religion.

I especially liked all the parts that dealt with Famine and the hilarious commentary on people’s obsession with weight and food.

Also I found it really intriguing to consider that this book was written as a collaboration, and found myself wondering who had written what, how the writing process had unfolded, and just exactly how the book all came together. The work was very seamless and I found it incredibly entertaining and impressive to see the product of this partnership.

Also there were a lot of hilarious passages that show the fallacies of humans, and also the funny ways that kids think.

  • What does it mean?

Good Omens has a lot of interesting observations on religion and humanity, and one of my favourites is that humans actually create much more pain and suffering for themselves and each other than demons or angels could ever dream up. Crowley is constantly fascinated at the horrors humans manage to invent.

Good Omens is evidently concerned with ideas of free will and predestination, but it can be hard to say exactly what the book is trying to say about it, as it seems mostly concerned with undermining typical attitudes and perceptions of free will and religion, while infusing everything in the text with an amazing aura of total ridiculousness.

Simultaneously, the book deals with how humans are afraid of the unknown, and yet the character of Anathema Device shows that knowing things can be a burden. In fact, the unknown is the beauty of being alive.

You know what else this book means? I think it means that sometimes reading should just be good entertainment! Here is a book that is well-written and funny, pokes fun at an institution and belief system that has a hold over most people, and maybe that is sort of enough! I don’t have to get a deep insight from this book, because if anything this book demonstrates that some of the deep insight we credit certain texts with (cough Bible cough) are unwarranted, and that stories are exactly that; narratives for entertainment and that allow humans to relate to one another.

  • Favourite passages :

Eventually I stopped flagging my favourite passages because I was seriously flagging something on every page. However, I obviously have to include some excerpts, as I think Gaiman and Pratchett’s humour is the most convincing way to get you to read this book!

“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

“Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men.”

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Crowley had always known that he would be around when the world ended, because he was immortal and wouldn’t have any alternative. But he hoped it was a long way off. Because he rather liked people. It was major failing in a demon. Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. There had been times, over the past millennium, when he’d felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there’s nothing we can do to them that they don’t do to themselves and they do things we’ve never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination.

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

“If you sit down and think about it sensibly, you come up with some very funny ideas. Like: why make people inquisitive, and then put some forbidden fruit where they can see it with a big neon finger flashing on and off saying ‘THIS IS IT!’? … I mean, why do that if you really don’t want them to eat it, eh? I mean, maybe you just want to see how it all turns out. Maybe it’s all part of a great big ineffable plan. All of it. You, me, him, everything. Some great big test to see if what you’ve built all works properly, eh? You start thinking: it can’t be a great cosmic game of chess, it has to be just very complicated Solitaire.”

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
  • If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

Read anything by Christopher Moore, especially Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal which, as the title gives away, is the untold story of Jesus’ ‘lost’ years. Irreverent towards the Bible and funny af, it has a lot in common with Good Omens.

If you liked this book or my review, also consider reading anyh of Terry Pratchett’s work, particularly his Discworld series.

Stay tuned for my next review Moving, by Jenny Eclair, a tale about a home and the secrets it can hold. Spoiler, I thought this book was dumb and asinine so that’s a fun review to look forward to!

Bel Canto Review

This book gets 1.5 grand pianos out of 5. I cannot cut the piano in half, so you just get one photo (this novel does not deserve to have its score rounded up for the sake of a pretty diptych).
[There is a black and white photo of a grand piano: it looks sad and comforting at the same time. You can see inside the piano, which could be a metaphor for how this book shows you the inside of the characters, only the piano is more beautiful and meaningful than the characters. #bitter)

Now, I know it has been a long time since I have posted a review. In fact, I finished reading Bel Canto sometime at the end of November, but have got caught up in working full time in a government job that sucks my will to look at a computer more than necessary, and the holidays really destroyed my free-time and my ability to nurture my hobbies. So, I am now again at a point where I have a couple books I have read which can be reviewed, so I am hoping to return to a more regular pace. However, since I am reading a bit more slowly, what with less free time than in the Fall, I am hoping to be able to publish reviews on a biweekly schedule, as opposed to a weekly one. Thank you readers for your patience.

  • Why did I pick this book up?

I originally bought this book at a yard sale many years ago, and got around to reading it a few weeks ago because it is one of the only books on my shelf that I haven’t read, other than some Dickens. I also ask my Instagram followers to pick between 2 books I suggest, and this is what was picked. So that’s what I chose to read. Also, I thought it would be interesting to read a book that tackles the subject of terrorism, but in a pre-9/11 time (this book came out mere months before 9/11).

  • Would I recommend why/why not?

I personally found this book to be not good. I am trying to be polite, as it is an award-winning book, and I felt that this book was trying to accomplish a lot, but failed. So, I personally would not recommend this book as I found the ending to be so dumb and trite (in fact, I found the ending so bad that it ruined any positive feelings I had had for the book up until that point).

I also would not recommend this book as there was a lot of sort of weird quasi-racist statements peppered throughout the book. It was hard to tell if these statements were merely meant to reflect the imperfect characters, or if these statements reflected the pervasive racism the author feels, (I know, I know, we are supposed to separate the author from the book/protagonist) but there was simply so many weird statements about the ‘savagery’ of Latin Americans and their nations that I couldn’t simply swallow them without questioning what their inclusion meant and reflected.

I suppose I would recommend this book if you really, really like opera, and if you like reading interesting descriptions of music and its effect on people and their mood/memories. That’s about the only positive thing I have to say about the book.

  • Quick Synopsis  **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

The book opens at a fancy opera show in the Vice President of some unnamed Latin American country’s home. The main characters we are introduced to are: a lady opera singer, a middle-aged Japanese man who is her biggest fan, and his translator, who is a younger Japanese man. Terrorists (who we learn are really just trying to fight political and economic injustice in their country) break into the home, intending to hold the President hostage. The president is not there, so they decide to take the whole house and its dozens of guests hostage. Ok. Sounds like a genius plan.

They release all the women except for the opera singer because they decide she must increase their bargaining power (am I a jackass for thinking being an opera singer doesn’t make you a valuable hostage?) so the rest of the text is basically this woman and a bunch of men (and the 2 terrorists who happen to be young girls) living in this fancy house and waiting for negotiations to go through. Apparently this country really doesn’t have its shit together, because hostages and captors live together in relative peace for MONTHS.

Lalala time passes, pretty much every man is in love with the opera singer because of her voice/the fact that she is basically the only woman in sight. The translator falls in love with one of the terrorist women. His employer is super in love with the annoying opera singer (again, her only perceivable quality is her voice) and they all conspire to get them to bone in secret. The translator and the terrorist also bone in secret. It seems like things will continue like this forever.

But no! Right at the end the government busts in, killing literally all the terrorists (including the young sexy lady the translator loves), and they manage to kill the old Japanese guy (who was shielding the sexy terrorist) as well.

If this had been the end I would’ve been somewhat satisfied.

However, the horrifying epilogue shows us that the opera singer has married the younger Japanese guy (what?! why?! creepy!!!) in some weird attempt to bond and preserve their memory of being held hostage and having both their loved ones murdered in front of them? Again, WHAT?!

Anyways, made the book feel like a waste of time imo, and also just talk about a weird and stupid ending that is supposed to wrap things up neatly, but honestly at no point did the book establish that these characters were compatible, so I would’ve been way happier if they had remained sad forever. Ugh. Also, a lot of weird racist and kinda weirdly sexist shit appears in this novel.

It took me so long to get this blog post together that I couldn’t be bothered to take a fancy picture.
[A book sits on a planner. The book has a blueish photo of fancy people at a fancy party. There is a gold music note on the cover as well.]
  • Overall brain gushings :

Ugh. This book. Patchett seems to have really weird preconceptions about men and women based on their gender: the men seem to be really sexist, and the women seem to be very frivolous and superficial. Also, there are only heterosexual people (or so it would seem) and any passages that deal with Carla (a young girl who gets mistaken for a boy) are incredibly creepy/sexist and highlight the weird biases that Patchett and her characters seem to share.

Seriously, the characters are INSANE.

Also, music is amazing, but I felt like Patchett was being snobby about opera throughout the novel, placing it above all art forms.

Again, the ending is actually terrible: I was ready to give the novel a pass, was even thinking the ending was sort of poignant, and then she had to ruin it with a super bizarre epilogue that undercut all the emotion and work the novel had put into making me care about or even slightly like the characters.

  • What does it mean?

I think that there are a few things the novel is trying to say: that music connects people in ways nothing else can, that it crosses all boundaries of culture, gender, and language. That’s pretty nice. However, I think it also means that in the end, while music can connect people on a personal level (and change them in a similar manner) it cannot affect geopolitical and large-scale change. It cannot end a revolution; it cannot address the root causes of unhappiness and marginalization, and this is the failure of art.

I do tend to disagree with this, as I can think of a lot of examples of really influential art that affected large scale change (though I suppose nothing in the vein of stopping a revolution/freeing hostages) and moved beyond the realm of the personal, and into the public. Books like The Well of Loneliness or Lady Chatterley’s Lover are a few examples of books that helped spur on sexual revolutions and change mainstream attitudes about sexuality and LGBT awareness. Other books like Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (confession: I have only ever read this book’s Wikipedia page, so take my analysis with a large grain of salt) have managed to influence a bunch of douchey dude-bro libertarians so that’s another example.

Also, it weirded me out that she chose to constantly emphasize the non-specificity of which country this was. Like it could be any Latin American country, because Patchett views them as all the same. Ugh. To pile on my “alsos”, this book is loosely based on something that happened in Peru in 1996 and to quote a Goodreads review “It upset me to realize that Patchett was using a piece of Peruvian history with no intention of telling a story of Peru or its political unrest or even including a proper description of the country”. She could have had a lot to say about the shady way in which the militants were killed, or what caused this situation in the first place, but instead Patchett seems more concerned with what opera can do, and telling a romantic story full of purple prose.

Patchett seems to view opera as a panacea for all the worlds tension and fear, and yet her ending (again, something that is based in history and could therefore be rendered extremely poignant) shows that this is deluded, and the chance to make a commentary on real-world situations and contexts is lost.

  • Favourite passages :

Honestly, I didn’t really have that many favourite passages… There were a few sentences here and there that were poignant (usually about music and memory) but nothing too notable/quotable. I am going to cite some of the batshit things too because that amused me to no end.

A French ambassador muses on how he has fallen in love with his wife anew upon his arrival to “this godforsaken country” (that is also a direct quote!) :

In this country with its dirt roads and yellow rice he discovered he loved her, he was her. Perhaps this would not have been true if he had been the ambassador to Spain. Without these particular circumstances, this specific and horrible place, he might never have realized that the only true love of his life was his wife.

Ann Patchett, pg 36

Again, WHAT IS THIS PASSAGE? Prejudice on prejudice! And to those who think that maybe it is just the ambassador’s point of view, and not Patchett’s, literally every character is super prejudiced, so if the point that she is making is that everyone is prejudice, then it makes perfect that sense that she is prejudiced AF.

There are a few moments where Patchett actually has some semi-insightful things to say about the “terrorists” but these moments are not mined to their full potential:

‘We all should have gone home a week ago,’ General Benjamin sighed. ‘But we have to see our brothers released.’ For General Benjamin, of course, this meant both his philosophical comrades and his literal brother, Luis. Luis, who had committed the crime of distributing flyers for a political protest and was now buried alive in a high-altitude prison. Before his brother’s arrest, Benjamin had not been a general at all. He had taught grade school. He had lived in the south of the country near the ocean.

pg 136

  • If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

Although I did not like this book, it made me think about interesting texts that discuss the importance of art and creativity in the face of crisis. The texts I would recommend that deal with this theme would be Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (pretty sure I have recommended that book before, but since it is my favourite, can’t hurt to recommend it often).

I’ve also realized that writing reviews on books I didn’t enjoy is more fun than writing about books I liked. Clearly, I like to bitch about books I didn’t have the talent or dedication to write. Ha!

Stay tuned for my next review of the oh-so-fun read that is Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Seriously, this book was such a silly and enjoyable romp through the Apocalypse.