Ilium/Olympos, by Dan Simmons
For long plane rides, I try to find sf/f books to read because usually they're incredibly long, don't require much attention, and you can while away hours pursuing plot and plot alone. Unfortunately, I picked up Ilium and its sequel at the same time and brought them both on the plane. I'd read a Dan Simmons book in high school and it had been entertaining enough, but maybe that because I was in high school... who knows. These books were just straight up bad. I did end up finishing both, but primarily because I was so pissed that I'd wasted my money on them.
Basically, they're set in the distant future and super-evolved humans have, for reasons that go unexplained, adopted the personas of ancient Greek gods and have decided to reenact the Trojan war with Greeks and Trojans they've somehow created. (Actually, it is explained, but it's a supremely dumb explanation that comes in 1800 pages in, and does nothing to mask the fact that the author just said, Hey, this is a cool idea to base a book on.)
I don't think books can get any worse than this. There are a lot of heavy-handed allusions (made by robots!) to Proust, Joyce and Shakespeare, not to mention the near constant barrage of information about the Iliad and its characters, plus a sort of sci-fi section of the story that has to do with Earth in the far far distant future, which basically only serves to let the author show off his right-wing self-righteous world view.
Though, there is the unintentionally humorous habit the author has of describing things completely anachronistically. For example, at one point, one of the Greeks is described as feeling something like this: If theater had been invented at the time, he would have thought what he was witnessing was a farce.
I.shit.you.not.
A couple of Nero Wolfe mysteries, by Rex Stout
If you like detective novels, I'd give Rex Stout a try. His prose isn't the greatest, but the detective is good and the mysteries are amusing. My family has a long fascination with these books, from my grandmother on down, so I'm totally biased. Anyway, I re-read these whenever I'm home. If you were to pick one of them up, avoid the books that have three (or four) short mysteries in one volume, as they are generally unimpressive, unless you're a devoted fan.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
The Little Drummer Girl
by John Le Carre
I reread Spy simply because I'd run out of books and it was lying around at my grandmother's, but I'd forgotten how great it is. I'd be tempted to say it's the best cold war spy novel, but I haven't read all that many (and those I've read have been predominantly Le Carre books). Definitely a must-read, a page-turner, etc. If you haven't read any Le Carre, read this one first...
... and avoid Little Drummer Girl, which seems to distill all the bad things about Le Carre (he does women and love horribly) and avoids all that's really great about him (spy shit). A better place to continue Le Carre fandom is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and the two books that follow in the so-called Smiley Trilogy.
Tinkers, by Paul Harding
A surprising Pulitzer-prize win not only because it was published by a small press, but because the writing actually isn't bad. A sad, at times maudlin tale about a dying man in his last days and his memories of his father.
Despite some of the prose being pretty stellar, I didn't really take to this book, as it seemed to be a jumble of disparate parts smushed together to form a "novel." Reminded me of all the criticisms of MFA prose: too handled, too bland, and, with respect to the University of Iowa MFA (where Harding graduated from), too Marilynne Robinson. It definitely felt like Gilead-lite.
That being said, the man has an ear for prose, and I was surprised to find that I liked the book enough to (strangely, for me) look forward to his next book. Here, as an example, a passage I liked, and one I didn't:
He tinkered. Tin pots, wrought iron. Solder melted and cupped in a clay dam. Quicksilver patchwork. Occasionally, a pot hammered back flat, the tinkle of tin sibilant, tiny beneath the lid of the boreal forest. Tinkerbird, coppersmith, but mostly a brush and mop drummer.
Human consideration was no longer to be his, for that consideration could be expressed now only by providing physical comfort, and physical comfort was as meaningless to him (to it, for that was what lay before his family now--the it formerly he--at least to the extent that the he, although still figured by the struggling fading, dying it, was plumbing depths far, far from that living room filled with a weeping sister and daughters and wife and grandchildren and the it merely maintaining a pantomime of human life), was as meaningless to him now as it would have been to one of his clocks, laid out in his place to be dusted and soothed with linseed oil, fussed over and mourned even before it was was (because that is how the living prepare, or attempt to prepare, for the unknowable was--by imagining was as it is still approaching; perhaps that is more true, that they mourn because of the inevitability of was and apply their own, human, terrors about their own wases to the it, which is so nearly was that it will not or simply cannot any longer accept their human grief) as its broken springs wound down or its lead weights lowered for the last, irreparable time.
Of course, shorn of context, neither can mean all that much, but the second passage was rather inscrutable, and given its odd syntax, completely out of place in the novel, a riff with seemingly no purpose other than breathlessness.
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