Shaina Reads

As the title of this post makes painfully clear, it's been a while since I've posted anything about the 2015 TBR Pile Challenge, hosted by Adam over at Roof Beam Reader.

It's not that I haven't been reading; on the contrary, I have been doing a ton of reading but not nearly as much reviewing. And this is how we've come to the start of May, and I'm only just ready to talk about a book I read over a month ago.


On to the books!


In March, I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, probably better known by its movie adaptation, Blade Runner. My boyfriend made me watch Blade Runner with him once, but I fell asleep, so I really can't compare the two stories. I'll get back to you once I watch it again. See: above GIF.

The year is 2021. Earth has been plunged into the radioactive dust of World War Terminus; humans can control their emotions via a "mood organ" and use an "empathy box" to feel connected to each other. (I find that last note is especially interesting in the age of social media.) To own a single animal is to be a success in this world; those who can't succeed go for electric replicas.

Here we have the story of Rick Deckard, an "assassin" whose assignment is to hunt down humanoid androids and "retire" them. Assassin and retire get scare quotes because an ever-present theme of this book is what exactly it means to be human and why we're so desperate to destroy anything that is "other."

Here, Rick speaks with Phil, a fellow bounty hunter to whom he's going to administer his android test:

"'I'll give you my laser tube now. So you won't have to worry about my reaction to the test. In terms of your own personal safety.' He held out the tube and Rick accepted it.

'How'll you kill yourself without it?' Rick asked. "If you fail on the test?"

'I'll hold my breath.'

'Chrissake,' Rick said. 'It can't be done.'

'There's no automatic cut-in of the vague nerve,' Phil Resch said, 'in an android. As there is in a human. Weren't you taught that when they trained you? I got taught that years ago.'

'But to die that way,' Rick protested.

'There's no pain. What's the matter with it?'

'It's—' He gestured. Unable to find the right words." —pg. 121, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

The prose is spare and serious, mirroring the quiet desperation of life in the ruins of San Francisco. Two hundred sixteen pages flesh out this crumbling atmosphere, peppered with futuristic technology, and infuse it with age-old philosophy. What does distinguish a human from other creatures? Is it our DNA, our empathy, or could it be something much more basic? How can any of us really know it about ourselves?

I wasn't initially thrilled by the story, but it's grown more impressive to me over time. Any diehard sci-fi fans and/or armchair philosophers would do well to pick this one up.




Just a couple days ago, I finished Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. I originally intended it to be my February read for the challenge, but it took me much longer than expected to get through. This isn't to knock Bryson—he's a fantastic writer and an even better researcher—but man, this guy can pack a lot of information in a paragraph.

In just under 500 pages, Bryson tackles, well, everything: the tiniest parts of atoms, the forces that cause the earth to quake and spew lava, and all phenomena in between get their own chapters. He even ventures from our atmosphere to discuss supernovae, the shape of space, and the moons of Pluto (still a planet at the time this book was published!).

Bryson treats each of his topics with equal care, and he makes a concerted effort to bring the scientists he cites to life; this includes both those long-dead and those he met while researching his book. Here he describes the famed Isaac Newton:

"Newton was a decidedly odd figure—brilliant beyond measure, but solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the sudden rush of thoughts to his head), and capable of the most riveting strangeness." —pg. 46, A Short History of Nearly Everything

And, here, a population geneticist he interviewed:

"[Rosalind] Harding is a small and chirpy Australian, from Brisbane originally, with the rare knack for being amused and earnest at the same time." —pg. 464, ibid.

I don't know about you, but I can totally imagine both of them.

There were parts that dragged, particularly the sections that discussed the classification of living things (hominids, animals, plants, etc.), but I really think mileage will vary depending on the scientific topics the reader finds most engaging. He also has a tendency toward gloom and doom—most of the sections on natural disasters seemed to edge toward doomsday predictions eventually—but perhaps this is a natural result from learning a hell of a lot about the planet we inhabit.

Overall, I highly recommend this book for anyone looking to learn a little bit about most things and who doesn't mind taking a couple of months to do it.

Whew, all caught up! It's been a science-y couple of months.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess is the basis for my dad's favorite movie. Incidentally, I first watched the movie adaptation with a guy on whom I had a giant crush because I wanted an excuse to sit in the dark with him and awkwardly try to hold his hand. I don't really remember the movie for this reason, but now, having read the book, I'm not sure I could have purposefully picked a less romantic film. Hormones do funny things to ya.

I'm excited to watch the movie again after reading the book. "Excited" might be a funny word, considering how grotesque the subject matter is, but I want to relive how Kubrick brought Burgess's crime-ridden police state to life. The extent of the world-building for a novel just under 180 pages is remarkable and becomes even more so when the protagonist's infamous dialect is taken into account. Despite its brevity, this book took me days to read, mostly because I had to become accustomed to reading sentences filled with completely novel, Russian-derived words. Here's an example, from the book's opening scene in a milk bar:

"They had no licence for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels And Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg." (pg. 1)

Yep, that's page one. There's a handy little glossary in the back of my book, with which I became very intimate in my reading.

Annoying to some, perhaps, but to me this is where the novel's strength shines through most. For most of the story, our fifteen-year-old protagonist (Alex) is doing atrocious things: beating up old men, raping young girls and knocking over small businesses, to name a few. Yet his near-incomprehensible Nadsat works wonders to remove him (and, thus, readers) from his brutality. Even once I became fluent in Nadsat, I couldn't get past Alex's flippant, juvenile speech patterns for long enough to truly be horrified by his actions. I'd compare it to watching a crime happen through frosted glass—uncomfortable, sure, but some of the bite gets smoothed away.

It's this somewhat muted response that ultimately allows us as readers to sympathize with Alex when he first starts being "treated" for his violent tendencies. I don't want to spoil this bit for you, as it's some real horrorshow social commentary, so all I can do is urge you to pick it up, if you haven't already.

I read A Clockwork Orange for both the 2015 TBR Pile Challenge and my Classics Club challenge.

I checked out The Sirens of Titan via Kindle Unlimited and read it as part of the 2015 TBR Pile Challenge and Bout of Books 12.

TSoT follows the story of Malachi Constant, a very lucky, very aimless man who's been told his fate by a time-traveling man and his dog (the dog time-travels, too): he'll marry, have a child, and end up (after a few detours) on the Saturnine moon of Titan. Throw in a mind-controlled, Martian army camp, long reflections on the concepts of free will and destiny, a strange woman, and a Tralfamadorian, and ta-da: you've got the recipe for a Vonnegut novel.

That's not to say it isn't a good book.  I didn't like a single character in it, but, thankfully, likable characters do not a great work make. In typical Vonnegut fashion, the one-liners are clever and biting, and the commentary on human nature is spot-on, as always:

"... the Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree." - pg. 8

"'Just because something feels better than anything else,' he said in his thoughts, 'that don't mean it's good for you.'" - pg. 207

"I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all." - pg. 233  

But, as you can probably tell, I'm having trouble thinking about this book as a standalone work. Did anyone not read Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. in high school English class? I'm talking Slaughterhouse-Five: po-tee-weet, everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, so it goes, etc. (Naturally, this is the quotation that stands out most in my mind, because high school.) I've read a fair number of Vonnegut's novels (SH-5, Breakfast of Champions, Cat's Cradle), but my memories of them are now dim at best, so much that I'm inclined to want to reread his bibliography to get a better overall picture.

But, at the same time, I'm not, because I think I've gleaned what I most need to from this most recent read. To me, his books generally (though not all, see CC) follow the same vein: absurd things happening in space, with a generous dose of sex (and misogyny), war, and fatalism sprinkled on top. This is certainly reductionist of me, but it's mostly that there are so many other books out there, and I'm unmotivated to spend time re-reading these.

I'm not saying that Vonnegut's work is not both masterly and important. Vonnegut was a cornerstone in my literary education and opened the door for me to think more widely about the world at large and what it means to live and die as a human being (yep, don't even care how cliché that sounds). As a believer in determinism and someone who's never read Vonnegut, I think my boyfriend would get a lot out of this book. But, at the same time, maybe he just ought to read SH-5 and leave it at that.

Overall, TSoT is a solid work in Vonnegut's repertoire. My rating reflects more my own feelings about the context of this particular read than on the quality of the work itself. Hell yeah, freedom of speech/opinion.