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[books 2009] miscellaneous again
Jun. 14th, 2009 07:41 pm31. The Brutal Art by Jesse Kellerman
A New York art dealer is given some art found in an abandoned apartment - tens of thousands of sheets of letter-sized paper with pencil sketches going right to the edge that are all numbered and fit together. A retired cop contact the art dealer to let him know that some of the illustrations are of the victims of a serial killer from the 70s.
This starts off really good - a bit like House of Leaves in that you have an enormous, weird piece of art made by a man who doesn't seem to exist, but it goes downhill. The art dealer is the Worst Detective Ever and it fizzles to not a lot. It is nearly redeemed by the twist near the end, but not quite.
Reviews on Amazon either love it or hate it, but I felt it was neither that good nor that bad. It's mostly disappointing in that it doesn't live up to the awesomeness of the first third of the book.
32. The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization by Jonathan Lyons
This was reviewed in New Scientist and I reserved it at the library immediately, and is the story of how learning from the Arab world was brought into Europe from the 10th century on. It's throughouly interesting but harder going than I expected in places because there's a lot of explanations of why both mainstream Muslim and Christian authorities had trouble with the works of Aristotle - philosophy has never been my strong point. Some of Lyons's sources for western European history and the European view of the Crusades are - odd, but that could be me being out of date with the scholarship. Left me with a few bits that I'd like to follow up.
33. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
This month's Bibliogoths selection. I haven't read it in a long time and I can't believe how much of it I forgot, and how much I mis-remember from various film versions, despite the fact that the last time I read it was after the Kenneth Branagh version of the film came out (the only one that gets the ending right).
It generated some interesting discussion at the meeting today and more nerding on the subject of 19th century science, medicine and the Anatomy Act, and being in a group containing more than one scientist, I was not the only person whose thought was "you'd never get that past an ethics committee today".
A New York art dealer is given some art found in an abandoned apartment - tens of thousands of sheets of letter-sized paper with pencil sketches going right to the edge that are all numbered and fit together. A retired cop contact the art dealer to let him know that some of the illustrations are of the victims of a serial killer from the 70s.
This starts off really good - a bit like House of Leaves in that you have an enormous, weird piece of art made by a man who doesn't seem to exist, but it goes downhill. The art dealer is the Worst Detective Ever and it fizzles to not a lot. It is nearly redeemed by the twist near the end, but not quite.
Reviews on Amazon either love it or hate it, but I felt it was neither that good nor that bad. It's mostly disappointing in that it doesn't live up to the awesomeness of the first third of the book.
32. The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization by Jonathan Lyons
This was reviewed in New Scientist and I reserved it at the library immediately, and is the story of how learning from the Arab world was brought into Europe from the 10th century on. It's throughouly interesting but harder going than I expected in places because there's a lot of explanations of why both mainstream Muslim and Christian authorities had trouble with the works of Aristotle - philosophy has never been my strong point. Some of Lyons's sources for western European history and the European view of the Crusades are - odd, but that could be me being out of date with the scholarship. Left me with a few bits that I'd like to follow up.
33. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
This month's Bibliogoths selection. I haven't read it in a long time and I can't believe how much of it I forgot, and how much I mis-remember from various film versions, despite the fact that the last time I read it was after the Kenneth Branagh version of the film came out (the only one that gets the ending right).
It generated some interesting discussion at the meeting today and more nerding on the subject of 19th century science, medicine and the Anatomy Act, and being in a group containing more than one scientist, I was not the only person whose thought was "you'd never get that past an ethics committee today".
