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But in his first-person narrative of a pedophile's obsession with his stepdaughter, Nabokov paints an unflinchingly upsetting and blackly comic view of the depravity of humanity. It's definitely creepy, and it made my stomach churn more than once. (It's also better than the movie, which I liked very much.) Arenas easily convinces you Castro's regime, at least in the 70s, was as oppressive as any of the worst dictatorships during the twentieth century. The autobiography of gay Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas is a heartbreaking, staggering read. Actual book, translated from Spanish by Dolores M. The only reason it doesn't rank higher than the next biography is simply because Isaacson's terse prose (which is sometimes punctuated by unnecessarily flowery adjectives) doesn't quite reach the next book's poetic heights. Whether you love him (like me) or hate him, it's a fascinating read, neither idolizing the man nor defaming him.
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It's really, really good, and I don't see the need to read any other book on the tech god. Isaacson is an expert at condensing exhaustive information into an easy and logical order without ever dumbing down the information. Walter Isaacson's biography on the brains behind Apple Computers is the longest book I read but easily my fastest read. Thus, I found the book very disheartening and depressing at times, which is what West was going for. I've worked on film crews, and little has changed since the era described in the book. The last third drags on more than it should, and it has that weird "Great Gatsby" feel of thinking it's showing you the vicious underbelly of humanity when, in 2015, more disgustingly immoral things occur in the average boardroom meeting.īut what's really interesting about the book is how raw its portrayal of struggling backstage people in Hollywood productions is. "The Day of the Locust" by Nathanael West While I'll still hold that the film is superior, its mix of brutality with regards to the Argentine treatment of homosexuals and political revolutionaries as well as its effective emotional resonance make this a powerful read.Ħ. I read this book as part of my Undergraduate Research Scholar final essay. Now we're getting to the books I actually really liked. "El beso de la mujer araña" by Manuel Puig I still love his films, but I kind of wish, in this case, I didn't know how the sausage was made.ħ. He also comes off as cruel to people different from him. While his involvement during the largest political conflicts of the early twentieth century are fascinating, I really wanted to know more about his artistic processes. Basically, he paints himself as a ludicrously rich brat who turned into a bit of a boring old man. The autobiography of one of my favorite directors reveals itself to be the memoir of a man I think of much less now. Unfortunately, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson deifies Pynchon to the point where he drags the author's flaws into the film. It's not a great book, but it provides enough excellent springboards for a great movie. It ranks better than "Breakfast of Champions" by the mere virtue of being genuinely funny at times and having at least some slivers of melancholic pathos.Īnd on another note, what disappointed me so much about the film adaptation was how close it was to the source material. In its ridiculously complicated story of a pot-smoking private detective in 1970 Los Angeles, the book seems more concerned with crapping on the sentimentality of modernist writers and showing off how it's smarter than its readers. Similarly with Vonnegut's book and with, I assume, the rest of the post-modernist writers, it's way too "zany" for its own good. It's more for Herzog completionists than for anyone else. It's definitely the weirdest book I read, but also probably the most boring. It's a bit unfair to judge this against the rest of these reasonably cogent books as it's essentially a stream-of-consciousness diary written by a weird German director as he treks across Europe, but it has some interesting moments. Sex, drugs, and booze is just another Tuesday night in the life of the 21st century twenty-something. Besides the occasionally cool factor of listening to it on my road trip out to Los Angeles while driving on precisely the same roads Kerouac describes, the book is pretty boring by today's standards.
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At least Tucci is a good reader and is able to differentiate characters without doing creepy voices. But damn, the joke of explaining every single mundane object in the story as if the reader were a zany alien reading about zany characters gets old fast. Every single page just screams, "ZANY ZANY ZANY IRONY ZANY!" I'm sure Vonnegut's a better writer than me, and this wasn't so bad that it made not want to read his other works. "Breakfast of Champions" by Kurt Vonnegut