(no subject)
Sep. 24th, 2012 03:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cblj_backupBuried in books!
I keep meaning to review Too Big To Know by David Weinberger, because it's like three books in my past by now, but I can't really come up with anything to say about it. It's supposedly about the way we look at "knowing", and how the internet has changed that, but it seems to be a lot of random, sometimes informative statements backed up by anecdote, most of which I already knew. I don't actually blame him for this. It's god-damned hard for anyone to figure out what to do with the internet.
Rather than knowing-by-rducing to what fits in a library or a scientific journal, we are now knowing-by-including every draft of every idea in vast, loosely connected webs. -- p. 5
And I kept just thinking, well, yes, and? So that's pretty much my review. Good start, now what? (It's a very long book for being a "good start". Library yes; purchase, no.)
I also read Blow Up And Other Stories by Julio Cortazar, as part of my continuing education in magical realism. Some of them I liked very much, particularly the shorter ones. That sounds awful, but honestly, I think long form just isn't his forte. I could not care less about the heroin-addicted jazz-playing time-traveler that takes up the more-or-less last quarter of the book.
I saw from very close up the face of an axolotl immobile next to the glass. No transition and no suprrise, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the outside of the tank, I saw it on the other side of the glass. Then my face drew back and I understood. -- Axolotl, p. 8 (an excellent example of how to deal with describing magical stuff that it's hard to describe without sounding, well, silly.)
Most of Cortazar's stories are charming until they turn super dark, like Letter To A Young Lady In Paris, which is the reason I got the book because someone recommended I read it. It's charming and funny -- chaos! bunnies! the mortification of things we do in private! -- and then all of a sudden suicide.
So there's that. I suppose in one sense it's apt and certainly the stories are well-written, but I could have done without quite this level of gloom, perhaps.
Those two, plus the youthful love story End Of The Game (which I expected to end in suicide and didn't, go figure) were really the only ones that stood out, for me. So this is a short review. :D
Cortazar is clearly a talented writer and his prose is well worth reading even in translation, and for me it's educational because, well, magical realism. But this is another "library yes, purchase no" book.
Wouldn't mind owning a copy of Axolotl, though.
I keep meaning to review Too Big To Know by David Weinberger, because it's like three books in my past by now, but I can't really come up with anything to say about it. It's supposedly about the way we look at "knowing", and how the internet has changed that, but it seems to be a lot of random, sometimes informative statements backed up by anecdote, most of which I already knew. I don't actually blame him for this. It's god-damned hard for anyone to figure out what to do with the internet.
Rather than knowing-by-rducing to what fits in a library or a scientific journal, we are now knowing-by-including every draft of every idea in vast, loosely connected webs. -- p. 5
And I kept just thinking, well, yes, and? So that's pretty much my review. Good start, now what? (It's a very long book for being a "good start". Library yes; purchase, no.)
I also read Blow Up And Other Stories by Julio Cortazar, as part of my continuing education in magical realism. Some of them I liked very much, particularly the shorter ones. That sounds awful, but honestly, I think long form just isn't his forte. I could not care less about the heroin-addicted jazz-playing time-traveler that takes up the more-or-less last quarter of the book.
I saw from very close up the face of an axolotl immobile next to the glass. No transition and no suprrise, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the outside of the tank, I saw it on the other side of the glass. Then my face drew back and I understood. -- Axolotl, p. 8 (an excellent example of how to deal with describing magical stuff that it's hard to describe without sounding, well, silly.)
Most of Cortazar's stories are charming until they turn super dark, like Letter To A Young Lady In Paris, which is the reason I got the book because someone recommended I read it. It's charming and funny -- chaos! bunnies! the mortification of things we do in private! -- and then all of a sudden suicide.
So there's that. I suppose in one sense it's apt and certainly the stories are well-written, but I could have done without quite this level of gloom, perhaps.
Those two, plus the youthful love story End Of The Game (which I expected to end in suicide and didn't, go figure) were really the only ones that stood out, for me. So this is a short review. :D
Cortazar is clearly a talented writer and his prose is well worth reading even in translation, and for me it's educational because, well, magical realism. But this is another "library yes, purchase no" book.
Wouldn't mind owning a copy of Axolotl, though.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-09-24 08:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-24 11:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-25 12:24 am (UTC)I agree that Cortazar is much better at short form. I don't, for example, recommend reading his most famous novel, "Hopscotch". (Have you already? I can't remember.) So much obscure jazz and random French. It's ostensibly the first novel of the Boom, but I don't really consider it magical realism. It's also about 500 pages longer than it needed to be.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-25 10:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-10-03 05:29 am (UTC)Sorry, I couldn't resist.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-03 04:01 pm (UTC)