RyanG

3 of 3 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 0 stars

“Reading this in 2008 it is almost impossible to not connect the plight of Heller's reluctant WWII bombadier Yossarian, whose superior officers keep raising the number of missions he has to fly to get sent home, with soldiers' tours in Afghanistan and Iraq being extended via stop-lossing. Yossarian is a sane man caught in an insane situation, where each layer peels back only to reveal some new madness that threatens to engulf him. Crazy generals, doctors, chaplains, pilots, prostitutes and their kid sisters inhabit Heller's hilarious and frightening story of the lunacy of war, where only the insane can be sent home - but wanting to go home proves that you're not insane. So says Catch-22.

Heller's novel skewers every piece of the myth that war is at all noble or just; the look at how greed and self-interest and blind unquestioning obedience perpetuate and intensify the damages of war could easily be based on companies like Haliburton and Blackwater -

"When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven, or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and human tragedy"

”

RyanG wrote this review Monday, August 18 2008. ( reply | view 1 replies | permalink )

2 of 2 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 5 stars

“Infundibular means like a funnel; a character in John Crowley's terrific novel Little, Big (that comma is extremely important!) uses the word to define a metaphysical situation of smaller worlds within larger, where, paradoxically, "the further in you go, the bigger it gets." This idea could easily be used to describe this strange and wonderful story, which traces the life of the Drinkwater family through four generations in their odd, many sided house in upstate New York. The story is tricky to summarize without giving away any hint of the surprises within, but this much is safe to say - it involves an extremely unremarkable man from the city marrying into a family whose members may or may not be part of a long and secret tale plotted and directed by fairies. Crowley litters hints and clues about what is actually happening here and there throughout the book, and the wonderfully odd ending, although not quite what the characters and the reader have been led to expect, has been carefully prepared and constructed the whole time. In the cards, as one character would have it. The strength of the book is that it constantly downplays and pushes to the corners the fantastical elements, and focuses on the life of the family it follows, which Crowley captures in clear and moving detail -

"What Smoky liked about his girls' growing up was that, though they moved away from him, they did so (it seemed to him) less from any distaste or boredom than simply to accomodate a growth in their own lives; when they were kids, their lives and concerns could all fit within the compass of his life, which was then replete; and then as they grew up and out, they no longer fit, they needed room, their concerns multiplied, lovers and then children had to be fitted in, he could no longer contain them unless he expanded too, and so he did, and so his own life got larger as theirs did, and he felt them to be no further from him then ever, and he liked that."”

RyanG wrote this review Sunday, July 20 2008. ( reply | permalink )

1 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 5 stars

“The first book in Peake’s series of Gormenghast novels (commonly referred to as a trilogy, but this seems wrong since the term carries with it a sense of intent - Peake envisioned a series of many books; only his death determined three to be the final tally) covers only the first two years or so of it’s eponymous character’s life - the real focus of the book is either on the fascinating antihero Steerpike or the life of the sprawling stone castle itself. Something of a fantasy cult classic, the novel feels more than any other book i’ve read to be architectural in nature - it sprawls and covers ground the way its marvelous castle setting does, and at times the strange odd little characters it follows seem drowned in both the place and the book they inhabit. A favorite of writers such as Anthony Burgess, Peake doesn’t have the wide-ranging fanbase of his contemporaries Tolkien and Lewis but he certainly deserves to be better known.”

RyanG wrote this review Saturday, July 5 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“Hall's luminous and finely detailed portrait of life and tragedy in the english countryside observes a small town facing its approaching end in the construction of the eponymous dam.”

RyanG wrote this review Wednesday, August 1 2007. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“Probably the most affecting piece of fiction aimed at teenagers that I've read. And an unbelievable use of voice (or lack thereof) to establish character. ”

RyanG wrote this review Wednesday, April 18 2007. ( reply | permalink )