10-day meme: Day 7
4 books
+ The Magic Bottle by Camille Rose Garcia
The Magic Bottle is a weird sweet little children's book, more for adults than children (maybe for weird children with relatively advanced reading abilities), by the Pop Surrealist artist Camilla Rose Garcia. The underlying message is environmentalism, but it's filled with so much imaginative goodness that I can't help being okay with that. The illustrations are wonderful, and I actually love the writing as well, they mesh together to create this gorgeous, whimsical, wacky world populated by the strange, cute creatures of Camille Rose Garcia's art. It flows and roils with life. The world has no relation to reality, and I like that. Her cutesy, melancholy, and acid trip-like style features constantly weeping, lugubrious-looking cartoonish characters. Lines from the book:
He has peered inside the ears of screaming bolivian monkeys, and browsed under the graves of dead virgins.
He was, after all, a very sensitive underwater sea creature unused to the gaggy smells humans find so pleasant.
He could hear a faint whistling coming from the front, a lullabyish tune that sounded jolly in a way if you like the sound of butterflies dying slowly in a meatlocker.
The smell could be considered pleasant, if you like the smell of burning hair in an ice cream shop.
Yellowy sulfite poisons were excellent for ridding the world of birds, while the only thing to kill a Black-Footed Elephant was a mixture of clown’s blood and arsenic.
“The sand is giving up, the sun will soon throw in the towel.”
They fell through a long earthy tunnel, twisting here and there, catching a glimpse of earthworms and moles, treeroots and molten lava, then straightened and splashed into a jewely aquamarine underworld, slowly moving with the quiet symphony of life.
A giant octopus, red in color with luminous eyes, put his face against the bottle and smiled subconsciously, for he had no lips with which to smile. Whales slept and starfish daydreamed.
+ The Collector by John Fowles
This has long been one of my favorites. It'll always remind me so strongly of early-1960s England. Sometimes hailed as the "first psychological thriller," anyone who seriously uses this label to describe it obviously has never read it. There's nothing of the thriller in it. It's about a lonely, semi-psychopathic young man, a dedicated butterfly collector, who is obsessed with a beautiful art student named Miranda, and after winning the lottery, builds a hidden home for her, and kidnaps her. The first half and last small portion of the book are told from his perspective; his style has a curious effect of somehow both grayness, draining the life and energy out of language, and expressiveness, very effectively suggesting his feelings and attitudes. The middle part of the book is Miranda's diary that she writes during her imprisonment, which is a huge contrast to him.
+ Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
Murakami is one of my favorite living writers, and Hard-Boiled Wonderland is my favorite novel of his so far. Everything I love about him is in it in spades. It's amazingly inventive, with this wildly outlandish, fantastic, and thought-out science fiction story, I love the quiet absurdity of the characters, and it's totally enjoyable and engrossing.
+ Three Lives by Gertrude Stein
A lot of people can't stand this book, and I can sort of see why, with its constantly repetitive, rambling, circular language (well, it is Gertrude Stein), but there's something very touching and...truthful about real life to me about it. I don't really know how to describe it. But it's become lodged somewhere in my mind as a book that was deeply affecting to me, almost quietly so.
+ The Magic Bottle by Camille Rose Garcia
The Magic Bottle is a weird sweet little children's book, more for adults than children (maybe for weird children with relatively advanced reading abilities), by the Pop Surrealist artist Camilla Rose Garcia. The underlying message is environmentalism, but it's filled with so much imaginative goodness that I can't help being okay with that. The illustrations are wonderful, and I actually love the writing as well, they mesh together to create this gorgeous, whimsical, wacky world populated by the strange, cute creatures of Camille Rose Garcia's art. It flows and roils with life. The world has no relation to reality, and I like that. Her cutesy, melancholy, and acid trip-like style features constantly weeping, lugubrious-looking cartoonish characters. Lines from the book:
He has peered inside the ears of screaming bolivian monkeys, and browsed under the graves of dead virgins.
He was, after all, a very sensitive underwater sea creature unused to the gaggy smells humans find so pleasant.
He could hear a faint whistling coming from the front, a lullabyish tune that sounded jolly in a way if you like the sound of butterflies dying slowly in a meatlocker.
The smell could be considered pleasant, if you like the smell of burning hair in an ice cream shop.
Yellowy sulfite poisons were excellent for ridding the world of birds, while the only thing to kill a Black-Footed Elephant was a mixture of clown’s blood and arsenic.
“The sand is giving up, the sun will soon throw in the towel.”
They fell through a long earthy tunnel, twisting here and there, catching a glimpse of earthworms and moles, treeroots and molten lava, then straightened and splashed into a jewely aquamarine underworld, slowly moving with the quiet symphony of life.
A giant octopus, red in color with luminous eyes, put his face against the bottle and smiled subconsciously, for he had no lips with which to smile. Whales slept and starfish daydreamed.
+ The Collector by John Fowles
This has long been one of my favorites. It'll always remind me so strongly of early-1960s England. Sometimes hailed as the "first psychological thriller," anyone who seriously uses this label to describe it obviously has never read it. There's nothing of the thriller in it. It's about a lonely, semi-psychopathic young man, a dedicated butterfly collector, who is obsessed with a beautiful art student named Miranda, and after winning the lottery, builds a hidden home for her, and kidnaps her. The first half and last small portion of the book are told from his perspective; his style has a curious effect of somehow both grayness, draining the life and energy out of language, and expressiveness, very effectively suggesting his feelings and attitudes. The middle part of the book is Miranda's diary that she writes during her imprisonment, which is a huge contrast to him.
+ Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
Murakami is one of my favorite living writers, and Hard-Boiled Wonderland is my favorite novel of his so far. Everything I love about him is in it in spades. It's amazingly inventive, with this wildly outlandish, fantastic, and thought-out science fiction story, I love the quiet absurdity of the characters, and it's totally enjoyable and engrossing.
+ Three Lives by Gertrude Stein
A lot of people can't stand this book, and I can sort of see why, with its constantly repetitive, rambling, circular language (well, it is Gertrude Stein), but there's something very touching and...truthful about real life to me about it. I don't really know how to describe it. But it's become lodged somewhere in my mind as a book that was deeply affecting to me, almost quietly so.