A Revolutionary "Novel"
920357
It's hard to overemphasize just how important this book is to modern literature.  In one fell swoop, Dashiell Hammett forever upset the world of "nice" genteel adventure and mystery stories, flooding the world in a clipped, tight-lipped, ugly torrent of blood and violence -- and I ain't compaining!  Just about all modern novels and films of savagery and violence can be traced back to this crazy-kilter detective story in the sin-burg of Poisonville.  I give it four stars instead of the full five only because the narrative, composed of linked but separately published units, doesn't cohere in the same astonishing way that Hammett's follow-ups, "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Glass Key" do.  Still a kinetic fix for those interested in the seamier side of classic American literature.  Practically adapted lock stock n' barrell by Akira Kurosawa for his Samurai movie "Yojimbo" (which later became "Fistful of Dollars" and "La! st Man Standing" -- the latter coming the closest to Hammett's original setting, making this sequence a huge circle back to the origin of species).
4337996
This is a very interesting novel and there is no surprise that it is also winner of the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It was a revolutionary book, tackling and creating landscape as it went further into cyberspace and culture, but you may not like it.

The amazing thing about this book is that is can be credited to the origin of many of the things we use today - i.e. cyberspace, but at the same time that means thousands of other people have taken from and expanded to the world and idea's he has created. If you read it now, you may find it unpolished compared to the works of today, such as ghost in the shell and other modern cyberpunk.

The actual book is interestingly a mix of hardcore science fiction and romanticism. The very name of the book being a pun based on neuromancer, necromancer, and romancer. So you'll find very dense and sometimes hard to follow jargon and situations and technology, but those things will be integrated into the story in a realistic way. I mean that the characters will react and use that jargon and technology as if it was every day part of their lives. They don't needlessly explain something between each other, that the characters in that world would logically know. This makes it harder for us to follow, but more engaging to the realistic interaction of the characters.

It is actually that characterization and sub-themed romanticism which are hidden for so much of the book. It isn't until the end you'll realize the story wasn't a hardcore science fiction exploratory journey of a world with that kind of technology, but rather mostly about the characters.

That said, if the book was written and published today, it probably would be considered only okay. It is a decent read, but it isn't polished. It is historically significant, but I feel it doesn't hold up any longer except in nostalgia. So, definitely check it out if you're looking for the source of where so many science fiction authors of today got their inspiration.
4542076
What more can be said about a novel considered the best novel of the 20th C?  I agree it is likely the most innovative novel that ushered in the modern literary age. Its a patient and demanding read (and this is my second go at it  and not quite done).  The scene is thoroughly embedded in the Ireland of its day.  The characters are a rich roster whose fame continues: Leopold Bloom, Stephen Daedalus, the deceased Patty Dignam, et al. Consider reading Portrait of the Artist before Ulysses as a preview to Joyces style.
Yet this version was free on the Kindle e-reader.
1889239
From an outline description, there's a story here - the murder or suicide of a once famous Philippine writer, Crispin Salvador, found dead, floating in the Hudson River, murdered or perhaps a suicide. His final novel, one that he has been working on for twenty years, an expos that is going to blow apart the whole corrupt system in his home country in literary and critical circles as much as political ones, has disappeared. His closest friend, the author Miguel Syjuco, is given access to his notes and documents of this fictional writer, attempts to build up a picture of the brilliant and controversial writer but in the process of interviewing friends and colleagues for a biography of Salvador, Miguel discovers that he never really knew him.

That's the premise in outline anyway. What else there is of this book is somewhat random and smothered in words and irrelevancies. Short biographical incidents are related of the fictional author's life, illustrated but not illuminated, by seemingly random paragraphs from his fictional works, imaginary interviews, stories related to his brilliance, his notoriety and his exile. Between this and the author's singularly uninteresting reminiscences on his own bourgeois US migr background, his journey back to the Philippines, dropping in the odd blog posting and running joke along the way, there is of course an attempt to consider in a very post-modern way modern notions of the role of the author, of fiction, of nationality, one's background and the influences of place of birth and family that make a writer singular and potentially a revolutionary.

All of this is all so very literate and clever, and all of it so much deeply tedious rambling. That's not to say that there aren't moments of brilliance and clever observations on the nature of writing and revolution - albeit from a pampered middle-class migr literary background rather than from a genuine Filipino perspective - but most of them are lost in a morass of references and narrative trickery designed to impress the literati ('Winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize'!). For anyone looking for the next Roberto Bolao, this could be for you. For anyone who thinks one is quite enough then you would do well give Ilustrado a miss.
3488743
Nicholas Bourbaki undertook a formidable "literary" challenge and succeeded.

"If" could be described as an avant-garde triumph, literary video game, postmodern deconstruction of postmodernism, experimentalist creme de la creme and some surrealism here and there as well.  You, the reader, decide where things are going to go, how your life is going to turn out, and the choices you make are in your hands more than you yourself understand.

As a somewhat avid reader, it is my opinion that people frequently try to accomplish this kind of thing and fall flat or end up seeming mediocre. This hits the summit.  From childhood romance to the streets or to a prominent figure in society, this is a book that reads you reading it.
3978753
It is very difficult to review this novel, because it is not just merely a science fiction novel, but a political commentary. In order to give this novel a proper reply, I might have to do a thorough research (which I might do someday, given the circumstances) and write a full-length thesis.

This novel is a political commentary, comparing two opposing ideology: 'propertarianism' in planet Urras, which is based on ownership, and anarcho-syndicalism in planet Anarres, which is based on no ownership, hence the title "The Dispossessed". The story is told from the point of view of Dr. Shevek, a physics scientist from Anarres, which is invited to witness the life of their counterpart in Urras.

The plot is not the strongest point of this novel, even it is engaging at some points. So if you are a plot junkies, you might get disappointed. This book is about ideas, and you can find ideas are debated, rebutted, crushed, defended along this novel. It is the ideas that make this book alive. And once I read it, it kept ringing in my head and haunt my dream. At some points it answers some of my questions, but most of the time, it gives me new questions to ponder.

But two things especially capture me. It is the question of manual labor and the law of inheritance.

1. Schooling has been a way of avoiding manual labor; so the least fortunate of us, which are not bright enough or wealthy enough to get a degree are doomed to do manual labor, that everybody abhors.
This thought has haunted me very long. In Anarres, manual labor is rotated for EVERYBODY. Everyone needs to do the share. No one has the privilege to avoid manual labor, even the brightest one (the wealthiest one does not count, because there are simply no ownership).

2. Law of inheritance has made an uneven starting point in the beginning or their life, especially if you don't live in a welfare state. In Anarres, even a child is not a property. A child belongs to the society, so the society will take care of it. Sound like Sparta, right? Actually there are primitive societies that practice this. So if you are a child in this primitive society, you can have your lunch in anybody's house, because you are the child of everyone.

I am not going to answer those question. Simply to think about it is hard enough. Those are questions for a life time.

This is the reason why I give this novel a FIVE STAR. It gives you enough material to think for your entire life time. The one that I mention here just some of them, there are plenty of others. Like I said, I might need to write a thesis about it, someday.
3136816
A remarkable novel from a young writer.  A riveting account of the 1959 Cuban Revolution that toppled the corrupt Batista regime and put Fidel Castro in power.  It is told in disparate stories of people involved.  Some of the characters are fictional, some real.  The  historical figures include Batista, Fidel and Raul Castro, and the fatuous American ambassador.  The fictional characters include a former SS officer who supplies arms to the rebels, and an exotic dancer abandoned by her mother in a sordid Havana night club, when she was 13. The setting is Oriente Province, in the huge enclave owned by the United Fruit Company, worked by destitute Haitian sugar cane cutters, and run by Americans living an extremely affluant "company" lifestyle.  The stories all coalesce in an electrifying climax.  The author's mother was one of the American "expats," but the story is extrardinarily realistic, as if Miss Kushner lived through it herself.  I, myself, lived in Cuba briefly, during the Revolution and find her story "rings true."
1532873
The Count of Monte Cristo is a miraculous book. A 1200 page novel from the 1840's that reads as fluidly and as swiftly as something published in the world of 2014. Alexandre Dumas was, clearly, a master. Not just in terms of his prose, (which is shockingly accessible in the Robin Buss translation I read). But also in terms of the novel as a form: he's just a genius at creating a huge cast of distinct characters and moving them forward in what is quite possibly the best plotted, best paced novel I've ever read.

There are more ponderous, "idea" driven mega-novels from this era, books that wrestle with the broad currents of human history (war & peace) with faith and doubt in an age of growing rationalism (the Brothers Karamazov) with the horrors of socio-economic inequality (Les Miserables) and with simple family unhappiness (Anna Karenina) and while each of those is a powerful work in its own right, they often easily get bogged down with eye-rollingly baroque descriptions, tedious philosophizing and more sub-plots than a George R.R. Martin fantasy. In short, with choices that might have a profound aesthetic justification, but which sometimes just don't really work that well in a novel.

Dumas... doesn't really fall into those kind of traps. Of the books 117 chapters, I think there were, at most, 2 in which the narrative action didn't really seem to move forward, a feat which few authors of any genre/style seem able to manage with a novel of 200-300 pages, much less one with 1200.

Maybe I'm overselling it but I think any large, modern novel with a sprawling cast of characters, regardless of its level of realism or artistry, owes a huge and profound debt to The Count of Monte Cristo; this is the giant novel which all the other giant novels (and novelists) come out of. From Stephen King and Neal Stephenson, to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, to Infinite Jest, to A Song of Ice and Fire, the sorts of smart decisions that Dumas made here serve as a powerful example of how to orchestrate and interlock lots of actions across lots of interacting characters over a huge space. This book is as instructive as it is edifying.

I recommend the Count of Monte Cristo unconditionally, simply because I can't imagine anyone reading it and not being blown away by Dumas's generosity and skill with telling a story.
955438
Marx, bless his heart, believed that the Future was communism, an idea whose time would inevitably follow and replace--in some trans-historical Hegelian fashion--capitalism. Of course, when the revolution came a century and a half later it was televised, but not by state-run media; it was Marx's own great idea we watched being smashed to rubble in Berlin, accompanied by the warbling of (alas, poor Karl! the final insult) David Hasselhoff.

Beemer Minutia, the hero of this perfect-in-every-way debut novel, saw this revolution live on TV too, and at a very impressionable age. With History officially over, the Future belonged no longer to nations, but to individuals. In a dramatic come-from-behind, the Future turns out to be capitalism after all, and Beemer Minutia wants his share: Beemer, the archetypal Brand Me, with a media empire of books and movies and maybe a talk show and, in case you get thirsty from it all, Beemer soda, which we are led to believe will taste a lot like Mountain Dew , only better. So start like'n it.

The business plan for Beemer includes an equally driven girlfriend (the impetus for a lot of car-top sex), a black-ops advertising agency, an appallingly well-organized group of pre-teen domestic terrorists, a boy-band of questionable masculinity, and lots and lots of ice-cold super-sized fountain soda. Unfortunately for Beemer, the funding never comes through. But like all business visionaries failure is just a stumbling block, propelling him to greater, more profound endeavors.

From identical metropolises of 1.1 million people to a desert periphery where some still search for an `authentic' America, author Glenn Gaslin hints at an alternate or future U.S. of A. now increasingly familiar. His cynical view of suburban sprawl is fresh, but not new. The world of Beemer Minutia is a prelude to well-known literary futures: a child born in Beemer's bulging Orange County might find herself coming of age in the militarized burbclaves of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and having mid-life cosmetic surgery in the Shinjuku imagined by William Gibson. Gaslin is not simply imitating, however. His America, Beemer's America, feels like it is almost here. And the writing is original, too; each page brings precious, collectible sentences (like the combination of the US highway system and Mountain Dew bringing about a state of "transcontinental meditation").

Equal parts commentary, irony, and perhaps even auto-biography, Gaslin's novel goes down like all 44 sweet ounces of a Super Big Gulp--leaving you sucking, slurping, then finally chewing on the ice.
2779024
How can a single volume of "docufictions" be graphically violent,
elegantly stylized, philosophically revolutionary and irrepressibly
funny all at once? Jaffe somehow brings it off.
Given the subject matter, the graphic violence goes without speaking;
the stylization is in how the individual narratives (each "story"
belongs to a different serial killer) are modeled. Jaffe presents us
with monologues, "unsituated dialogues," letters, playlets,  mock TV
talk shows, and various combinations of these modalities. The result
is not chaos but its opposite, a kind of fluidly elegant architecture
of form. Revolution is, it seems, the intent; a revolution of
consciousness which has aligned the serial murderer with the powerful
politician or media capitalist and demonstrated conclusively the
greater virtue of the serial murderer. As in False Positive, Straight
Razor, Sex for the Millennium and his other books, Jaffe is comical
in ways that can't easily be described--a combination of the
language, the uncannily accented rhythm and the wildly incongruous
details and images.
The upshot is a virtuosic performance which is at the same time an
extraordinarily trenchant commentary on our post-Millennial culture.
--
382827
Player Piano was the late Kurt Vonnegut's first novel.  Published in 1952, the novel is set in an industrial dystopia where the engineers are the top rung of the ladder.  In the name of progress, the engineers create machines that can do the work of men.  Only the best and brightest are allowed to attend the colleges necessary to secure doctorates.  The rest of the population is consigned either to the Army or the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps (Reeks and Wrecks).  The main character is Dr. Paul Proteus, the head of the Ilium Works in Ilium, New York.  Proteus is the son of one of the men who led the mechanization of America, thus he is well-respected and expected to rise to the top.  But Proteus is decidedly unhappy with the system, particularly the way the common working man has been disenfranchised.  The main thread of the novel follows Paul as he attempts to sort out his loyalties, while a side story follows the Shah of Bratpuhr, who's being given a tour of America.

While the technology in the book is quite dated, the story itself still resonates strongly, especially in this age of computers and outsourcing jobs to foreign countries.  The people in the story have become enslaved by technology.  The people at the top need to be able to create and control the machines in order to maintain their elite status and the people of the bottom have been excluded from making a meaningful contribution to society by being replaced by machines.  The people at the bottom are either in the Army, the Reeks and Wrecks, who do very menial tasks, or they just do nothing.  They are segregated from the elite managers and engineers.  The elite don't seem to have it much better as they spend the majority of the book spouting useless propaganda and jockeying for position.  This is the America that causes Proteus to question every value he once held dear.

Despite the somewhat bleak circumstances of the story, Vonnegut tells it with a wry humor and a sharp sense of satire.  Player Piano is perhaps the most conventional of his novels and written linearly as opposed to the nonlinear jumping around he would use in later books.  This was the first of his novels I ever read, given as a high school assignment back in 1994.  I enjoyed it then and I still love it today.  I've read some reviews that have said that Player Piano doesn't hold up when compared with his later work.  I couldn't disagree more.  The story is still relevant to modern times and it's told beautifully.
3190634
This short collection presents one of the central questions facing working people the world over-- what does it take to defend the conquests of a workers revolution in the living complexity of a real revolutionary struggle?
 Kronstadt was the scene of an uprising against the Russian Revolution several years after the Bolsheviks led workers and peasants to overthrow capitalism. "Kronstadt" details the pressures of war and economic blockade imposed by the United States, France, Britain and other capitalist powers, which made the early years of the revolution enormously difficult. This left some among workers and peasants as well as middle-class layers open to counter-revolutionary propaganda and actions. More recently, similar challenges arose in the Cuban revolution and the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, both of which faced years of murderous attacks by U.S.-organized counter-revolutionaries.
 "Kronstadt" reprints excerpts from contemporary speeches and reports by two central leaders of the Russian Revolution, V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, as well as later articles by Trotsky drawing lessons of the experience. They explain the roots of the crisis and the measures taken by the revolutionary government to suppress the uprising. They answer arguments of anarchists and others who turned their backs on the revolution and acted in behalf of the capitalist-inspired counterrevolution.
 An extensive glossary, introduction and a 1938 article "The Truth About Kronstadt" from the socialist journal "New International" round out the collection and will help you make sense of these important events.
3845041
Aldous Huxley's 1928 novel opens with a grand London party given by Lady Edward Tantamount. Music plays. Dozens of characters cross the stage, meet briefly, argue, and part. Some go on to a restaurant that stays open past midnight; there, they meet still more characters and argue some more; several of them continue to yet another party in the early hours of the morning. We are now 100 pages into the book, a quarter of the way through. The numerous characters will continue to bump into each other over the next days and months, but the essential texture of the opening will not change.

If you Google the title, the question comes back "Did you mean Point Counterpoint?" Well, no. Counterpoint is a musical term implying line and movement: two or more voices, intertwining with one another, echoing, developing, but never standing still. Huxley certainly understands that music implies movement -- his descriptions of actual music are superb -- but his method as a novelist is essentially static: to set characters off against one another, each of whom represents a different point of view. The book is thus a series of debates, some funny, some serious, all clever. But the characters ricochet off one another like balls on a pool table; this is truly a matter of point clashing with point; there is no line, little movement, and almost no plot.

Oddly enough, Huxley has one of his characters, a writer, criticize his own method: "Novel of ideas. The character of each personage must be implied, as far as possible, in the ideas of which he is the mouthpiece. In so far as theories are rationalizations of sentiments, instincts, dispositions of soul, this is feasible. The chief defect of the novel of ideas is that you must write about people who have ideas to express -- which excludes all but about .01 per cent of the human race." And again: "The great defect of the novel of ideas is that it's a made-up affair. Necessarily; for people who can reel off neatly formulated notions aren't quite real; they're slightly monstrous. Living with monsters becomes rather tiresome in the long run." He has it right; this book IS a made-up affair, it IS tiresome, and its .01 percent of the human race consists of a handful of English aristocrats and intellectuals -- Huxley as a kind of egghead Evelyn Waugh.

Several times, I almost tossed the book away, yet kept on reading -- why? The first time was when Huxley introduces Mark Rampion, a painter and would-be novelist closely based on his friend D. H. Lawrence. Here is a character who does not come from the upper classes, whose thoughts are three-dimensional and fully worked out, and whose unconventional yet bracing morality serves as a touchstone for the other characters in the book. The chapter describing his courtship is one of the few passages where the novel of ideas becomes one of feeling, and it was riveting. Although nothing quite like that chapter comes again, I kept on because I was often amused, sometimes challenged (Huxley is an erudite author who almost demands footnotes), and increasingly aware that I was reading something that was as close to source material on the period as I was likely to find. For Huxley does not confine himself to the social and amorous goings-on typical of an early Waugh book such as&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/A-HANDFUL-OF-DUST/dp/0375414207/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">A HANDFUL OF DUST</a>. He also addresses politics (both fascism and communism are represented), religion and its substitutes, philosophy, the arts, and science. Even sex gets analyzed with an almost scientific detachment: there is a long disquisition by one of the more despicable characters on the techniques of seduction, perversion, and spiritual degradation; another embarks on what must be the first examination in literature of the phrase "sleeping around". As a reference work, this is fascinating; I just wish it were a better novel. Interesting though the numerous points are, I could have done with some genuine counterpoint.
2939105
A vivid tale of revolution. Spartacus, but with a happy ending.
652657
Truly one of my favorite novels.  Sembene Ousmane vigorously engages the complex politics of post-colonial revolutionary struggle, while maintaining a humanistic artistic base of pure poetry.  Also, Sembene Ousmane is one of a precious few male authors who creates dynamic, thinking, feeling female characters.  Read this book--it's a gem.
762077
The Giver presents the reader to a dystopian  society that has forayed the people's right to CHOICE in an odious fashion; but nonetheless, it can at times be furtively appealing in an hypnotic way. To analyze this society initially it is quite inscrutable to identify how a people could so ardently support such an articulated "guidance." While this book is merely fiction, it indeed sheds light on an ideology that either is intrinsically intelligent, or it is quite eloquently repugnant to the nebulous of human desire, freedom to endeavor.  Being a Constitutionalist I prefer the latter rather than the former. To have one's perspective sculpted and wrought by a fashion of governmental control by means of familial degradation and division from a biological existence, sexual drive altered by compulsory pharmaceuticals, intricate scheduling of one's day, standards and virtues that are ubiquitous, one all encompassing day of "birth", population control, genetic manipulation, and procuring children and spouses by application and approval only, is quite destitute of any CHOICE. Is this inane? Is this madness? Or, if freedom was not known in the context that of which is lain before us in the U.S. Constitution-which both Republicrats and Demopublicans are obscuring-would this dystopia be so divisive? The society in this book is something one could indeed marvel by pretext to the actual context due to the lack of tyrannical behavior. We must not be disillusioned. We must not allow the propagators' evidence and statistical datum to dissuade us from having the penchant to pursue freedom as a virtue over security. For such a society in essence, no matter success, does indeed revoke the core and foundations of an inalienable right that our predecessors have fought eons for-FREEDOM! Articulating political structure  is arduous and elicits much dissension along the way; however, do not let that make one despondent or draw forth consternation or political apathy. For if political structure, by and for the people, becomes a derelict, then for our children FREEDOM will be merely a vestige. Or, perhaps a more formidable coin, an antiquated myth.

 Lowry has definitely deserved to be upon the list of writer's that has hit a symphonic political note. While not as fecundated as George Orwell's (Eric Blair) writing, she has a latent exhortation for us, or at least for me. The book also has a rendition upon perspective of reality and that will certainly shift the tides of what constitutes this book's yield. I would suggest everyone to read this book, along with other dystopian and utopian classics. Each of those titles have their own way of exorcising the demons from both forms of society.

 The end did irritate me slightly, I wanted a more pronounced and clarified ending. Nonetheless, following with the book's thesis, THE MATTER OF CHOICE, Lowry leaves it to the reader to bestow your interpretation; which is elating for some and exacerbating for others. My ending was grim which was evoked by random forethought rather than by intention.
2806652
This is a well written and very provocative novel, the title captures it all too simply. As you read this book, you can't help think that the concept is not so farfetched. The class distinction issue in the political theater and Occupy Wall Street movements, combined with the news this week about the disgruntled Goldman Sachs employee and the US Army sniper gone off the deep end, make Bogin's story all too possible. Highly recommended!