Book Review - Fictional Worlds

From the Back Cover:

Jax has always succumbed to his boss’ wishes in an effort to please him. When he is asked to journey to the town of Tellare with a volcanic ash cloud standing in his way, Jax realizes the dangers, but he accepts the job anyway. He even brings along his friend Stu as company. However, Jax starts to regret his decision when Stu puts up resistance and conditions continue to worsen. What awaits them inside the ash cloud, and will Stu prove to be a liability when push comes to shove?

As a Reader:http://my.orble.com/co mmunity/blogs/posts/create/36 15/#form

As a reader I quite enjoyed this story. The characters are realistic and indeed I found Jax giving Stu a speech similar to ones I've given some of my friends before. World of Ash has environmental implications and it makes a statement. Most of all, it's got an excellent twist at the end that had me grinning-though bear in mind I'm a little twisted myself.

As a Writer:

I was quite impressed with the writing of this story. It is perhaps not the most perfect tale, nor would I say that Kevin Hopson is the most skilled writer whose work I've been lucky enough to read, but he's definitely a good writer. I found most of the story to be good but not great, but the twist at the end made it great. It was masterfully built up to and masterfully completed. I look forward to seeing more from this up-and-coming writer.

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Posted By: Dianna G - Category: Fiction, Book Review, Reading Related

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Book Review: Education of a Felon

September 17th 2010 12:41

Education of a Felon by Edward Bunker is a book I picked up randomly at the library. I was looking for an autobiography and this one was the first to catch my eye. I started reading it right after I finished Woman on the Edge of Time. You can buy it here.

On to the important part of this post:

The Review

From the Back Cover:

"Edward Bunker's experiences in California's toughest prisons, on the mean streets of Los Angeles, and in Hollywood's seamy underworld have enabled him to write some of the grittiest and affecting prision novels of our time.

Quentin Tarantino called Bunker's Little Boy Blue "the best first person crime novel I've ever read" while The New York Times said of his novel Dog Eat Dog "Mr. Bunker has written a raw, unromantic, naturalistic crime drama more lurid than anything the noiresque Chandlers or Hammetts ever dreamed up."

Now, for the first time, Bunker, who was sent to San Quentin (for the first time) at the age of seventeen, tells the real stories of his life-there's no fiction here. Whether smoking a joint in a gas chamber chair, leaving fingerprints on a knife connected with a serial killer, or swimming in the Neptune Pool at San Simeon, Bunker delivers the goods. He spent half his life living the harsh life, and the other half writing about it. Finally his readers have been let into the raw and unexpurgated world of Edward Bunker. It doesn't get any realer than this."

On to Business: As a Reader

As a reader I greatly enjoyed this book. The idea of a convict becoming a writer fascinated me, and I was not disappointed. Bunker has a very frank style which I quite enjoyed, as well as brutal honesty with himself and his readers.

I was drawn very quickly into his world. I understood most of his actions-running away from military and reform schools at a young age, giving authority lip-and I found a lot of similarities between my personality and his. (Only I'm a fair bit more moderate; I haven't gotten myself in jail.)

Most interesting was his connection to the high life of Hollywood. He is taken in by Louise Wallis, and through her he sees a completely different side of life. He gains dreams he never could have had in his other life. Not only that, but I learned a whole lot about famous people in his day that I'd never know otherwise-both famous criminals and famous actors and actresses.

Watching the transformation of Bunker is fascinating and watching the transformation of the prisons-he is in prison during the first race wars in San Quentin-is even more so.

I feel that I've learned a lot about this book-about prisons, about the underworld in America, about the more dignified underworld of the past, and about many other things. I've learned with Edward Bunker. Most of all I've learned a lot about human psychology. Bunker has a love of the subject and some of what he knows is passed on to his reader.

Excellent book, all in all.

As a Writer

My calling as a writer is what originally drew me to this book-I wanted to see how somebody else changed their life with writing. I quite enjoyed Bunker's frank writing voice and his many stories. Though every once in a while I bumped into a typo or a sentence I would've changed, overall I loved Bunker's style and agreed with his stylistic choices.

History is important for every writer. Knowing what has really happened in our society allows us to more easily write believable stories. By reading about some of the most insane people on earth, and/or the most cruel, we learn about the extent of human insanity and human cruelty. Reading about conditions in America's underworld and especially its prisons has taught me a few things about human psychology that I think will be very useful to me as a writer. My favourite type of history is the autobiography-it's a story told by the person at its center, what could be better?

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in human psychology, especially the psychology of criminals.

You can buy the book here.

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Posted By: Dianna G - Category: Non-Fiction, Book Review, Reading Related

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Book Review: Woman on the Edge of Time

August 25th 2010 12:39

On my trip out of town I finished the book I've been reading for most of the summer, Woman on the Edge of Time. It's an old book but you can still find it on Amazon if you follow this link.

The back cover reads:

Woman on the Edge of time is the fascinating story of Connie Ramos, a Chicana woman in her mid-thirties, living in New York and labeled insane, committed to a mental institution. But the truth is that Connie is overwhelmingly sane, heroically sane, and tuned into the future.

Connie is able to communicate with the year 2137. Two totally different ways of life are competing. One is beautiful-communal, nonsexist, environmentally pure, open to ritual and magic. The other is a horror-totalitarian, exploitative, rigidly technological.

In Connie's struggle to keep the institution's doctors from forcing her into a brain control operation, we find the timeless struggle between beauty and terror, between good and evil... with an astonishing outcome.

Review

As a Reader:

My history teacher recommended this book during my African History class (which should be called a history of Africans and the Americas or something similar, actually). We were discussing utopia and I said I believed it impossible to please everyone. He showed me this book and told me to take a look at it and the utopian future in it.

I did and all I can say is wow. Connie's honest narration is clear, concise, and simultaneously brutal and loving. The language isn't exactly pretty, and Connie could surely make a sailor blush, but it's real. It's true to her existance-a woman whose grown up all her life in different ghettoes and who lost her only chance to escape them several years before the story. Connie is a good woman who isn't really crazy with anything except love for her family. And she's a woman who's been beaten down by society her entire life, for being poor and being brown and being a woman.

I don't know if I've ever felt so connected to a character, or lived in anyone else's head the way I lived in hers. Though my life has been-and hopefully will be-much easier than hers, I felt her pain with her, and I understood it. I felt how she felt when they called her crazy. When she got angry at her niece's pimp, I was angry with her. When she mourned her lost loves, I mourned with her. When she played the doctors' game to get out of the mental institution, I could have played that game side by side with her.

The future to which she travels is amazing, beautiful, pure. As she was amazed first by the stranger from the future, I was amazed. As she decoded the common language of the future, I decoded it with her. As she stared in awe at everything around her and asked her questions, I asked all the same questions and held all the same amazement. I felt I made the same friends she did. When one of the characters died I almost broke down right along with them.

Long story short-though it's a bit late for that-this book is fantastic. I recommend it to everyone, reader, writer, and most of all to every woman.

As a Writer

As a writer I would like to take my hat off and bow my head to the author of this book, Marge Piercy. As I think about it there's nothing I would have changed.

The voice of the narrative is real, the characters are real, and the story of Connie's present is heartbreakingly true. My favourite line in the entire novel is an intense spoiler, but let's just say there were quite a few times when I had to put the book down and take a few deep breaths.

The ending left something to be desired, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. I closed the book unsure if I was satisfied. Despite that, I do appreciate the ending and I think that it was very classy. As a writer I'm absolutely stunned by what this writer has accomplished. It's been a long time since a book touched my heart like this one has.

I recommend this book absolutely and completely to anyone, especially women of all ages, backgrounds, and colours.

You can buy it on Amazon here.

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Posted By: Dianna G - Category: Writing Exercises, Fiction, Book Review

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