Category Archives: Book Reviews

A Just Read Review – Atlas Shrugged – Kill My Mediocre Soul

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Reading Atlas Shrugged is an event. Why? I mean, really, it’s an iffy novel. It’s a thousand pages of iffy story, iffier characters, and come on, the climax reads like b-movie Ian Fleming. And the dry, stupid, unnecessary John Galt speech? Please. It was skim-city and I was the mayor. And yet…

Reading Atlas Shrugged is an event because it’s more than novel, it’s a philosophical treatise, it’s passion, it is an enormous literary masterpiece. It is one of the most important books ever written with some damn fine prose. Damn fine prose. I sound stuffy, like I should be smoking a pipe in front of a fireplace. Damn fine, mate, pip, pip, jolly good.

Reading Atlas Shrugged is like being strapped to chair, drenched in water, and electrocuted and brain-washed, with toothpicks keeping your eyes open for days on end like in the movie The Island from the 1980’s. It is propaganda disguised as a novel. It is probably the most subversive book I’ve ever read. It is a book that begs to be burned. It is a suicidal book. It is anti-Christian, anti-communism, anti-novella. And yet, it is inspiring. This is a book that challenges you to change, and sticks needles in your genitals to make sure that change happens. And if you resist, it fights you, fights you to read it, fights every belief you have, fights you until you are exhausted. It had to be 1000 pages. It uses every word as weapon.

If I wanted to take over a country, I would burn Atlas Shrugged, then kill all the lawyers, and then give people free Taco Bell and free cable T.V. I would rule forever.

I love to read the classic novels because they are classic for a reason. If you haven’t read Goethe’s Faust, you are cheating yourself. Don’t read this insipid blog. Go, now, find a classic book, get some coffee and read until your mind explodes.

Reading Atlas Shrugged exploded my mind. The book is simple. It repeats it’s themes over and over again. We all just have 24 hours in a day. What are you doing with your time? What are you doing to live? And what is stopping you? And if you are letting things stop you, well, I’m not. Get out of my way. I’m going for it. I’ll climb over your corpse to get there. Frak you.

Atlas Shrugged is relentless. Like I said at the beginning, it is an event. And maybe that is what literature is, en event. Not just a nice little story that grabs my little attention for a few little minutes. Man, lots of books are like that. And even writing a little book is hard. But to write something that moves heaven and earth–that takes courage. More and more, though, I’m reading my own writing and I can do better. I’m getting frustrated with the chained writing I’m doing. At some stage, I’m gonna have to throw off the chains, and churn out pages that rage. But it’s hard to write books no one can read. I did that for awhile. But I wonder if I could marry the explosion of my early books with the control and plotting of my later novels. In the end, Ayn Rand wouldn’t care about the art of the book, only about the sales. It’s about money, production, success, celebrating life by creating, innovating, selling, and driving forward. Kill the mediocrity inside you.

So, I am reeling from the event of Atlas Shrugged. You’ll get more. The bomb has gone off. It’s gonna take me any number of blog posts to pick up the pieces.

SHIVER – Just Finished This Minute Reviews

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There’s a lot to like about Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver. I’ve been pushing the book for years, because it came from Andrea Brown’s literary agency, and Laura Rennert is Ms. Stiefvater’s agent, and I love all them people.

So I’m biased. But I’ll tell ya what I think. Just between you and me, world. Other worlds don’t need to know.

A lot of it worked for me. And heck yeah, I’m still gonna recommend it. The idea is intriguing: werewolves don’t change because of the moon, they change because they get cold. So during wintertime, our hero Sam is a wolf. Summertime, he’s a boy who meets our heroine, Grace. There’s love. There’s angst. And the nice hook. Sam is going to change back into a wolf forever once winter hits. It’s his last autumn as a human, and he just found true love? Dammit! I hate when that happens.

Nice thing about Ms. Stiefvater, girlfriend can write. Here’s an example.

My parents didn’t even know. The morning after Sam and I—spent the night together, it seemed like the biggest thing on my mind was that my parents had no idea. I guessed that was normal. I guessed feeling a little guilty was normal. I guessed feeling giddy was normal. It was as if I had thought all along I was a complete picture, and Sam had revealed that I was a puzzle, and had taken me apart into pieces and put me back together again. I was acutely aware of each distinct emotion, all fitting together tightly.
–Shiver, Page 300

And Ms. Stiefvater quotes Rilke:
And leaving you (there aren’t words to untangle it)
Your life, fearful and immense and blossoming,
so that, sometimes frustrated, and sometimes
understanding,
Your life is sometimes a stone in you, and then, a star.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

I loved Sam, Sam’s voice, Sam’s memories of his parents and his becoming. All of it well done. Grace didn’t quite work for me, but it wasn’t bad. I’m not saying it’s bad. Am I saying it’s bad? No, but…

As Pee-Wee Herman once said, “We all have a big but.” Here is mine. I needed more whiz, bang, pow action and tension and conflict and villains and explosions and shining moments of high drama. Not necessarily end of the world type stuff; I didn’t need, in the words of that immortal ghostbuster, Peter Venkman, human sacrifice, cats living with dogs, mass hysteria. Hey, I initially wrote cats living with gods, mass hysteria. Cats Living With Gods. That’s gonna be my next book.

Anyhow, Shiver is a bestselling book, in some ways, the heir to the Twilight empire, and so what do I know? A lot of the book is Sam and Grace, together, loving one another. There are some moments of tension, but they aren’t milked for all their worth in my nothing opinion.

Keep in mind, I like me a good soap opera. And what was the genius\idiocy behind soap operas? Milking conflict for weeks on end. Like on All My Children (God rest your soul), the Erica Kane, Dmitri, Edumud love triangle lasted like six months. Ah, Edmund the stable boy, Dmitri the rich landowner, Erica caught in the middle. Love that Susan Lucci.

So then, of course, I take all of theslowness of Shiver very personal. What if my books don’t sell because I do try to milk my conflict? I do aim for the cats living dogs mass hysteria? What if the audience is looking for nice calm books about sorrowful werewolves holding nice girls with family problems?

Here is the reality, oh world of mine. There is enough room for all books. All will have an audience. Some will have an audience of millions. Some will have an audience of one. I will write my books, Ms. Stiefvater will write hers, and in the end, we’ve both contributed to the libraries of human existence. We’ll both end up in that Alexandrian Library in the sky.

Chasing after someone else’s voice or plot or whatever is a dangerous thing to do. Doppelgangers tend not to live very long. Even though they are a 4d8+4 HD monster.

Dungeon and Dragons, Rilke, Ghostbusters, and All My Children in the same blog post. I frakkin’ love what I write.