Reviews for The God of Nightmares

The average rating for The God of Nightmares based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-05-25 00:00:00 shawn banks There are certain things in books that seem to irrationally turn me off of them. Books that take place on ships is one of them (with some recent exceptions). New Orleans as a setting seems to be another. I don't know if it is the setting itself, or maybe it is an alien mindset to my own that holds sway in writers who either live there or place their novels there. I don't really know. I suspect I personally wouldn't enjoy visiting New Orleans, and that is fine. It is one less place I will never go to, which isn't a big deal since I don't really go anywhere, anyway. It's been awhile since I read this book, and my memory is already hazy. I'm going to try to stick with the few things I thought about writing about the book, which are stronger in my mind than the actual novel is. I thought about writing this review a few times, but stupid real-life sort of threw a dirty curve-ball towards me around the time this book was fresh in my mind and I should have sat down and written it. The novel is well-written, in that well-written way that competent contemporary fiction is crafted. It is the sort of novel that feels crafted. Like something that would be oooh and ahhhed about in a creative writing seminar. Something that I imagine people in like a 1980's Iowa Writers Workshop fell all over themselves about. To me it felt well-crafted but souless. Sort of like I imagine most of John Updike's books to be (as opposed to how I actually found the few John Updike books I read to be, which was well-written but derivative and somewhat repulsive). If this book were a movie it would have won an Oscar for Best Picture just because it is technically good while heaping on lots of social issues in ways that sound important but seemed to me to be kind of trite, in the way that a made for tv movie would deal with an issue like racism. Want examples? Can't give them to you, my mind has been scrubbed fairly clean, except that I remember that those are the basic ideas I meant to write about. Feelings about New Orleans, made for tv movie feeling, best picture, well-written. Hit all of what I meant to write. Go, me. Why write a review for a fairly obscure contemporary book that I felt blah about? Why give it three stars and not just give it one star to let the whole world know that I wasn't that happy with it? The book wasn't bad at all, it just didn't do much for me. Maybe it was the second hand humidity and heat soaking out through the pages describing New Orleans that made my brain feel so awfully sluggish that had me feeling the way I did about the book. But isn't feeling a problem? Aren't there supposed to be hard-truths to books and isn't it without hard and fast aesthetic rules to guide how we confront a book the whole act of reading becomes less-than serious and a dismal waste of time? Fuck feeling, right? Let's go for hard-facts, a checklist of what makes a book good and follow that checklist so that our opinions fall into dogmatic line. Feelings? Pshaw. A fairly interesting phenomena to me is the way people react to the whole Fifty Shades thing. I'm not interested in how it has been liberating to women or being dismissive about why people are reading 'trash' in droves (thanks for keeping the publishing industry going and helping to give me a paycheck!). What I've found interesting is how some readers of this sort of book categorize the writing in the book as good or bad in relation (to what I as someone who just makes assumptions but hasn't actually read the novels in question) to similar books. Was that clear at all? I've had this interaction quite frequently with customers, where they say like Fifty Shades but then want something well-written like it, but not like the un-well-written book (x), or they like (x) but found Fifty Shades to be awfully written. As an outsider observer I'd imagine that the writing is about the same. I've had similar experiences (but less frequent over the years) with people who want something well-written like Dan Brown, but not like poorly written like this other author of page-turners; and vice-versa. It's fairly interesting to me because I don't think I would see the difference in the not-so good writing (what I imagine, except in the case of Dan Brown and some of the other thriller writers of the NYT Bestseller variety who I have read some pages of and have seen that the writing is (to me) kind of painful to read) of any of these books. Of course, I'm sure that there are people who (if they cared to think about it) wouldn't be able to see the difference between say two 'serious' writers that one I'd say didn't write very well and one that I loved. Is the line something 'objective' or does it all boil down to feeling: subjective elements of what speaks or doesn't speak to a reader. Certain dogmatic types, certain types of personalities would like to boil down the subjective and rid it from the make-up of literary opinion. In almost all instances the ego-less objectivity is really just one person's personal feelings buttered up in haughty sounding terms and passed off as a gospel with providence and condemnation handed out as if from the heights of Mt. Sinai. There is no humility. It's part of why I have so little interest in reading works by the 'great critics' who tell us what to think about a book. I know what to think about a book that I've read, it's what I feel, how it affects me, what it inspires me to think about, it's when I read the book, what bullshit I had going on in my life, what bullshit had already passed in my life. Each and every book I've ever read was read as part of my life, maybe the book didn't do anything for me, maybe it radically changed the way I thought about things, maybe Different Seasons isn't the best book ever written, maybe today if I read it I'd find the four stories in it to be uninteresting, maybe it's not a good book (or maybe it is), but it is one of the most important books I've ever read, it was the one that moved me into reading "adult" fiction, and my rating on this site I've tried to reflect the way a book felt to me when I read it, rather than what I might think about it now. Am I going on a tangent from what I meant? I might be. Sure, I wouldn't defend Stephen King as being great literature, maybe he is but I haven't approached him since I was 19 years old (with one un-remarkable instance), but I'm also not interested in slagging off on people who still do like him, or who think he is a great writer. He speaks to them, they enjoy his books. And there is probably as much in them to someone who loves them as there is to me in the books that I love. What would be the point in attacking them? What am I trying to say? Reading by what the 'greats' tell you to read is pointless to me. Parroting opinions because someone like Nabokov (for example) say didn't like something is stupid. No one but Nabokov was Nabokov. When I see something he has to say it might be interesting, and it might put something in a different context than I'd previously thought of, but his tastes aren't mine. It's not like I'm going to start going around collecting butterflies just because it is something he liked, his reading of everything that he ever read was shaped by his own history and it's not mine. I choose him as an example because he had a great passion for condemning things and then being somewhat of an asshole about anyone having the gall to disagree with his pronouncements. I could say the same thing though about Harold Bloom, or even someone like Jonathan Lethem (who doesn't appear to be an asshole when people disagree with him) who I have quite similar tastes with and who I have found some great writers by following his lead but who except as a pointer towards an author I might not have ever tried before I leave his opinions to be his own and focusing on trying to make sense of my own response to the books I've read (I only used Lethem here because reading his collection of essays recently has turned me on to a few writers who I never thought of reading before). It doesn't matter if people agree with me about what I read. I'd prefer not to be told I am wrong, stupid, myopic etc., for enjoying something that I did, and not have my experience with a book discounted as being some kind of personal failing. I'm probably a hypocrite here, and I've probably written tons of reviews where I do this very thing, and I know there are at least a couple of reviews I've written that I'd be happy to have never-written for this reason, but which I let stand (and sometimes even continue to defend on principle) because I think of all my reviews taken together has a record of sorts of my reading for the past five years and some odd months. It's an inconsistency, but I fail at being the person I would like to be all the time. All I can do is keep trying to be better. I think that this feeling of needing to condemn others who don't like what you like, or who like something that you don't like is a residual feeling from things like religion and paternalism; from feeling that you need to have a boss tell you what to do, that there are strict right and wrong ways of doing things and the whole cognitive dissonance that arises when someone doesn't agree with you. I'm sure we all want to believe we are right, but forcing this inner feeling to be right is just another version of same thing that makes evangelicals feel like they have the only true answer and it is their obligation to convert everyone to their way of thinking. At least this mindset makes sort of sense to me when it comes to metaphysical truths, but when it is extended to something like books it's just another sign of being an asshole who feels that their way of seeing things is the only way things should be. , But of course I'm just being wishy-washy and dwelling in the world of subjective feelings and not glimpsing the Platonic perfection of what literature should be.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-11-02 00:00:00 Raymond Rundus Denne boken er rett og slett vakker! Det er 1942, Helen er 22 år, og flytter fra moren sin og den trauste amerikanske landsbygda til fargeklatten New Orleans. Det er første gang hun står på egne ben, og må forme egne meninger, egne vennskap og ta egne valg. Fox skildrer den frihetsfølelsen det er å flytte hjemmefra og bare ha seg selv å tenke på, men klarer også å få frem de mørke sidene ved samfunnet som Helen kanskje ikke helt klarer å akseptere. USA 1942 er rasisme, homofobi, en gryende andre verdenskrig og klasseskiller. Les sakte, for Fox skriver så godt, hvert avsnitt gir noe å tygge på. Og like godt oversatt til en svært passende nynorsk av Tove Bakke!