December 2013

Factotum – Charles Bukowski

I was assured that Factotum would change my life. Yet I think there are two other books on this list that had a far greater impact on me. I cannot for the life of me say why. Factotum is a bombshell of a book. It follows some part of the life of Henry Chinaski, which consists mostly of a series of jobs, women, and bottles of alcohol, occasionally interrupted by some attempts to write.

I think it is more powerful when I think about it than when I actually read it (though when I read it it was pretty stupendous). Henry keeps finding minor moments of something that is not happiness but might better be described as stability, and then keeps fucking it up. At some point you realise that the point of the book is to make you realise the pointlessness of it all, and when you do it makes the rest of the book even more soulcrushing.

Jesus. Just thinking about it makes me want to hide in a hole. Maybe that’s the point?

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz

This book just hit me like a train. I was in Swaroop’s house, and everyone was sleeping the afternoon away. I wasn’t really looking for something to tread, and had in fact picked up some other crime novel that started badly and only became worse. Then I came across this in his shelf and didn’t put it down until it finished.

What a book.

Diaz writes about Oscar Wao, a second generation immigrant to the United States from the Dominican Republic. But it also tells the story of his mother, his sister, his grandfather. Oscar is overweight and has no friends. He falls in love too easily and is constantly unable to fall out. He’s forever insisting that he is about to beomce the next Tolkien. But it is this pathos that endears you to him. As you read the book you root for Oscar and his every failure only makes you want him to succeed more.

But throughout the book there’re also meditations on the history of the Dominican Republic itself. The narrator, Oscar’s roommate, wonders whether the long shadow of General Trujillo and his fuku, the curse that haunts every family in the Republic, are what have made Oscar into what he is now. And to some extent, it has. Yet there is hope, that a zafa might counter the fuku when it is most needed.

Yet Oscar’s life is, as the cover says, brief and wondrous. Following him through his wondrous life is made all the more heart wrenching for its brevity. When the book ends you’re just left with a sense that Oscar’s life really could have gone nowhere else.

Peppered with references to the Lord of the Rings and the X Men, Oscar Wao’s life is in incredible experience. I loved it from start to finish.

Steelheart – Brandon Sanderson

Sanderson is Sanderson. He writes fun things. In this case he writes about the post apocalyptic world where some people have superpowers and behave like total bastards. They go around killing, maiming, and looting the world and there’s no one to stop them. And Steelheart is the worst of them all.

The book is basically ‘What if Superman was evil?’ Every Epic, as they’re called in the book, has a weakness. But they also have a ton of strengths. Steelheart is superstrong, superfast, can shoot energy beams from his hands, and cannot be hurt. Yet David, the novel’s protagonist, has seen Steelheart bleed. He knows he can be hurt. And if he can be hurt, he can be killed.

It’s pretty good. Standard Sanderson fare.

The Alloy of Law – Brandon Sanderson

Largely, see above. Sanderson does his thing. The fourth in his Mistborn series, it fast forwards a couple hundred years after the end of the last trilogy and sees some increase in technology and society. Basically a cowboy novel set on his world of Scadrial.

Honestly, it was well done and all, but I preferred Red Country.

A Tale for the Time Being – Ruth Ozeki

If Oscar Wao hit me like a train, this was a tsunami. I saw it coming and could not get out of the way. And when I was swept up in it, I wasn’t sure I wanted it to let me go.

A Tale for the Time Being is a double novel, sort of. A novelist called Ruth finds a diary belonging to a girl called Yasutani Nao. I really don’t want to spoil anything, but the book follows both Ruth and Nao as one writes the diary and the other reads it. Though actually you know that the diary has been written long before it ever found its way into Ruth’s hands, while reading the book you fall into thinking that they’re both happening at the same time. And that’s part of the reason the book is so stunning. The way it handles time is superfragilistic. Nao and Ruth are living in the same time, and yet they’re not.

There’s a lot of mind bending stuff in the book. Nao starts the diary trying to write the story of her old Jiko, her great-grandmother, and she’s one of the best characters in the book. She changed my life, a little. There’s a great deal of Buddhist Zen philosophy, a smattering of quantum physics, and a whole lot of tears.


This got shortlisted for the Booker. Guys, it should have won.

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