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Book Report
Jan. 8th, 2003 02:14 amI just finished reading The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd. Its back cover is facing up on the kitchen table. I feel traumatized because the book... just...
Ends.
I'd been reading at quite a clip. I'm a slow reader, so it felt good to complete a book in 24 hours (with sleep and work included). Sometimes I feel guilty about being a slow reader. I've been able to read since age two and a half, so it's not that the words are foreign. I have this need to chew each word, to come as close to memorization as possible. Since this book was fiction and it was printed for easy reading (the author wants you to conclude he became a graphic designer, from the look of the book and from its content).
The last time I felt this ripped off by the end of a book was a decade ago, when I bought Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams. It went along great until the last ten pages, when it slammed into a wall and took all of its enjoyment away. Poof! All the characters are dead because their reality has been excised.
This is a new form of deus ex machina that only the Twentieth Century could have given us: create an alternate reality and send everyone to it. Typical Western thinking -- take a great idea from the Nineteenth Century, one that needed a fuckload of brewing and spare time; toss the idea at some experiments and prove the faint theory is very real; then blow it so far out of proportion that you wish you'd never heard of the theory; then mass-produce it and abolish any contradictory thought. Hegel gave us Synthesis; we gave him cholera.
The book uses modern print technique and liberal concept of time (it's 1957, but Winter Break in a university happens at the same as Christmas; these events would have been separate before the 1979 oil embargo when it became too expensive to heat entire universities during January) to tell a great story. I felt for the protagonist because I had fucking BEEN him. Many of us have.
The book doesn't have any denouement -- just an assignment. The final page is blank, but it's also numbered.
Playing with the moment of ending is what brought people back to the cinema. Think Memento or The Sixth Sense -- the end happens first, or it happens before you can understand it.
I stared at the back cover for a moment. I twitched a little. My mind wants the characters to be folded nicely into an ending. I bet I'll have to read the book again just to construct a proper timeline.
Good book if you need a mental heavy petting session.
-"This is where we shake hands." Dante
Ends.
I'd been reading at quite a clip. I'm a slow reader, so it felt good to complete a book in 24 hours (with sleep and work included). Sometimes I feel guilty about being a slow reader. I've been able to read since age two and a half, so it's not that the words are foreign. I have this need to chew each word, to come as close to memorization as possible. Since this book was fiction and it was printed for easy reading (the author wants you to conclude he became a graphic designer, from the look of the book and from its content).
The last time I felt this ripped off by the end of a book was a decade ago, when I bought Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams. It went along great until the last ten pages, when it slammed into a wall and took all of its enjoyment away. Poof! All the characters are dead because their reality has been excised.
This is a new form of deus ex machina that only the Twentieth Century could have given us: create an alternate reality and send everyone to it. Typical Western thinking -- take a great idea from the Nineteenth Century, one that needed a fuckload of brewing and spare time; toss the idea at some experiments and prove the faint theory is very real; then blow it so far out of proportion that you wish you'd never heard of the theory; then mass-produce it and abolish any contradictory thought. Hegel gave us Synthesis; we gave him cholera.
The book uses modern print technique and liberal concept of time (it's 1957, but Winter Break in a university happens at the same as Christmas; these events would have been separate before the 1979 oil embargo when it became too expensive to heat entire universities during January) to tell a great story. I felt for the protagonist because I had fucking BEEN him. Many of us have.
The book doesn't have any denouement -- just an assignment. The final page is blank, but it's also numbered.
Playing with the moment of ending is what brought people back to the cinema. Think Memento or The Sixth Sense -- the end happens first, or it happens before you can understand it.
I stared at the back cover for a moment. I twitched a little. My mind wants the characters to be folded nicely into an ending. I bet I'll have to read the book again just to construct a proper timeline.
Good book if you need a mental heavy petting session.
-"This is where we shake hands." Dante
