Damn, it is this good!!

Excerpt from Damned by Chuck Palahniuk

Are you there, Satan? It’s me, Madison. I’m just now arrived here, in Hell, but it’s not my fault except for maybe dying from an overdose of marijuana. Maybe I’m in Hell because I’m fat—a Real Porker. If you can go to Hell for having low self-esteem, that’s why I’m here. I wish I could lie and tell you I’m bone-thin with blond hair and big ta-tas. But, trust me, I’m fat for a really good reason.

To start with, please let me introduce myself.

How to best convey the exact sensation of being dead…

Yes, I know the word convey. I’m dead, not a mental defective.

Trust me, the being-dead part is much easier than the dying part. If you can watch much television, then being dead will be a cinch. Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.

The closest way I can describe death is to compare it to when my mom boots up her notebook computer and hacks into the surveillance system of our house in Mazatlan or Banff. “Look,” she’d say, turning the screen sideways for me to see, “it’s snowing.” Glowing softly on the computer would be the interior of our Milan house, the sitting room, with snow falling outside the big windows, and by long distance, holding down her Control, Alt and W keys, my mom would draw open the sitting room drapes all the way. Pressing the Control and D keys, she’d dim the lights by remote control and we’d both sit, on a train or in a rented town car or aboard a leased jet, watching the pretty winter view through the windows of that empty house displayed on her computer screen. With the Control and F keys, she’d light a fire in the gas fireplace, and we’d listen to the hush of the Italian snow falling, the crackle of the flames via the audio monitors of the security system. After that, my mom would keyboard into the system for our house in Cape Town. Then log on to view our house in Brentwood. She could simultaneously be all places but no place, mooning over sunsets and foliage everywhere except where she actually was. At best, a sentry. At worst, a voyeur.

My input: This is another book I simply went browsing in the bookstore.. Another book that managed to grab my attention.. At these sentences of "At best, a sentry" and "At worst, a voyeur", I was completely astounded and blown away by the magnificence of Palahniuk's own writings.. Words just can't describe the brilliance of this writer.. The writer was talking about the protagonist's experience of being able to be at two places at the same time and then he quickly summed it up by those brief deft sentences.. 

Over the years, I have seen the author's writings getting better and better by the day.. Not to say that his previous writings were not good, his latest offering was just simply breathtaking.. I was completely taken aback.. I knew it had to be modern because I had never seen such writings (poetry mixed with narrative) in such choice of words from any writers before, if you know what I mean.. 

The Sisters Brothers??

Excerpt from The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

I was sitting outside the Commodore’s mansion, waiting for my brother Charlie to come out with news of the job. It was threatening to snow and I was cold and for want of something to do I studied Charlie’s new horse Nimble. My new horse was called Tub. We did not believe in naming horses but they were given to us as partial payment for the last job with the names intact, so that was that. Our unnamed previous horses had been immolated, so it was not as though we did not need these new ones, but I felt we should have been given money to purchase horses of our own choosing, horses without histories and habits and names they expected to be addressed by. I was very fond of my previous horse and had lately been experiencing visions while I slept of his death, his kicking, burning legs, his hot-popping eyeballs. He could cover sixty miles in a day like a gust of wind and I never laid a hand on him except to stroke him or clean him, and I tried not to think of him burning up in that barn but if the vision arrived uninvited how was I to guard against it? Tub was a healthy enough animal but would have been better suited to some other, less ambitious owner. He was portly and low-backed and could not travel more than fifty miles in a day. I was often forced to whip him, which some men do not mind doing and which in fact some enjoy doing, but which I did not like to do and afterward he, Tub, believed me cruel and thought to himself, Sad life, sad life.

I felt a weight of eyes on me and looked away from Nimble. Charlie was gazing down from the upper-story window, holding up five fingers. I did not respond and he distorted his face to make me smile; when I did not smile his expression fell slack and he moved backwards, out of view. He had seen me watching his horse, I knew. The morning before I had suggested we sell Tub and go halves on a new horse and he had agreed this was fair but then later, over lunch, he said we should put it off until the new job was completed, which did not make sense because the problem with Tub was that he would impede the job, so would it not be best to replace him prior to? Charlie had a slick of food grease in his mustache and he told me, “After the job is best, Eli.” He had no complaints with Nimble, who was as good or better than his previous horse, unnamed, but then he had had first pick of the two while I lay in bed recovering from a leg wound received on the job. I did not like Tub but my brother was satisfied with Nimble. This was the trouble with the horses.

My input: At first, I didn't know about this book at all, let alone the author himself.. But having seen a lot of people raving about this book in their blogs, it kind of piqued my curiosity and in the end, I couldn't resist sampling a bit of the book myself, although knowing that the book falls under the Western genre (which is not really my type of genre and which is also a genre I'm not familiar with).. So I searched the Internet for the excerpt from the book.. 

I have actually read the above excerpt for quite a while.. I therefore somehow find it quite hard to recall my initial thoughts on the excerpt.. But based on my first impression of it, as I still manage to recall a bit (it can't be that hard, right? It's an impression after all), I managed to find the writings rather witty.. You just couldn't grasp where the narrator (in this book, Eli) was trying to lead you to.. For example, based on the excerpt itself, you could see that at one point, the narrator was meandering on some menial subjects like the lack of strength of his own horse, Tub  (named this time).. And then it ended up with the narrator thinking that his horse might be thinking "Sad life, sad life" to himself.. 

Later into the story, we could find that Eli, the narrator was in fact treated unjustly by his brother, Charlie.. Back to the narrator's comments about his horse, was he juxtaposing himself with his own horse (hence his horse was referred as a "he")? That was why I could find the writings full of such conflicts, more like self-deprecating satire of himself, which were simply pretty amazing and brilliant. This was why, after the narrator related about his brother's unfair treatment, it ended with "This was the trouble with the horses". Was he talking about himself or his horse again?

Regardless of its genre, it was obvious that the book was not written conventionally like all those Western book written before it (I therefore decided to read this book in the future).. Furthermore, the writings were a bit morbid too (the previous burned-to-death horse), which made the story altogether more interesting.. I also know that this book was shortlisted for Man Booker Prize i.e. all the more reasons to read this book!!

Post note: "Sisters" is the brothers' family name.. Eh, confusing?

Time

Excerpt from "The White Devil" by Justin Evans

Time had changed for Andrew. Back at Frederick Williams, it moved in horrible jerks, sometimes dragging out cruelly, he would measure out time in bummed cigarettes and drifting conversations he would pick up and discard around the common rooms like a small-town browser going back to a shop for the hundredth time. Then it would pounce. An exam. A paper due. As if time were some wicked funhouse machine, tuned by a mustache-twirling villain. But at Harrow, his isolation - fewer classes, fewer friends - slowed time, and made it a different element. At FW it had been fire: hypnotizing, then suddenly consuming. At Harrow, it was water: heaving, dense; deliberate.

My input: I'm still reading this book. What I can say about this book right now is that it has been hitting all the right spots most of the time.. The writings are utterly crisp, dense, wicked, chilling and playful..

Twitter..

I used to wake up to birds' tweets, now I wake up to human's tweets :P

Good Book, Nice Song

Sometimes when I'm reading on the lrt, if the book is good, I may miss a station.. However, while I'm driving, if a nice song is being played on the radio, I could miss a turning too :P