Flights of Fantasy discussion

Sorry for the very short notice of this one, but we made a last minute pick of Zone One for a suitably spooky Halloween read for October.

It's got ZOMBIES! :D

I have officially downloaded this to my kindle, so I will be reading soon! I have to finish Career of Evil, and then into the Zone.

Is anyone else planning to read this one?

I'll check in for this one! Should be able to get started early next week. I've been wanting to read something by Whitehead for a while.

Sweet! Look forward to discussing it with you!

I'll get to it this weekend probably

Ala wrote: "I'll get to it this weekend probably"

Sweet! I hope you like it better than my last pick. (Me too for that matter. :P)

Got a minor start on this one, just 20 pages or so. Lots of atmosphere and image, and some zombie action. Feels more lit-fic than pop-fic, but I don't mind that.

I really liked this image from early on:

"The ash smeared the city's palette into a gray hush on the best of days, but introduce clouds and a little bit of precip and the city became an altar to obscurity. He was an insect exploring a gravestone: the words and names were crevasses to get lost in, looming and meaningless."

Ooh nice! I'm going to start this one tonight I think. I was going to try to finish Magic Bites first, but I think I'm going to flip-flop my plan. :D

"You're not in the system. You might as well not exist." Where was The System now, after the calamity? It had been an invisible fist floating above them for so long and now the fingers were open, disjoined, and everything slipped through, everything escaped."

Going to keep opinions to myself 'til I've finished Friday. Regardless of what I might think, it's very quotable! :D

I started this one last night and I see what you mean about the writing, Beth!

I'm about 10% in on this now, and I'm not sure what to think about it. It's a weird start for me, in that it just kinda plops you down in the story, while also giving a bunch of flashback-y back story, but none of it really explains anything - it's just a bunch of random bits of things that happened and we're supposed to piece it together. I'm OK with that, but jeez... what the hell does "pheenie" mean?? LOL

Otherwise, I think that it's interesting so far, but kinda want it to get moving already and start.

I was going to ask you if you knew what "pheenie" meant, too. lol.

I'm at 80 pages or so, and by action movie standards not a lot has happened yet. I appreciate the dismal atmosphere he's creating with all the description, flashbacks and exposition.

Since it's a relatively short book (300-ish pages in paperback) I could put up with it being this way through its whole length, though I do hope there's some sort of point to it.

I did end up googling "pheenie" because I was like "is this real life slang that I'm just too old to understand now??" and it's not, thankfully (there's hope for me yet!). It refers to (view spoiler)[people who are convinced that society will come back after the zombies are gone... like a phoenix from the ashes. Mark doesn't seem to agree, though. (And, depending on what the cause of the outbreak was, I think I'm probably with him.) (hide spoiler)]

It's explained explicitly in the book, too. p.99 of my edition:

"Now, the people were no longer mere survivors, [...] but the "American Phoenix." The more popular diminutive "pheenie" had taken off in the settlements..."

I'm now done with Friday. Liking it a lot so far!

(Everything below is a minor spoiler, although it's almost entirely about "look and feel.")

One thing that's very believable to me is how much people are clinging to brand names from their past life, and anxiously awaiting new "corporate sponsor" arrangements with the camps so they can have their favorite products: bandages with an armadillo cartoon character, a particular brand of lotion, athletic shoes...

Mark Spitz is kind of a boring pov character. I'm sure it's deliberate. And also deliberate that he's given a moniker that doesn't really mean anything (an Olympic swimmer from the early '70s?), and that he's the ultimate B student, and all the things (aside from the monsters) that register on his consciousness as he's sweeping are rather ordinary remnants of office and home life.

The idea that everyone has their own version of PASD is interesting, and fairly realistic I think. Mark Spitz's PASD centering on the identity and individuality of the plague victims/skells is a nice touch.

I'm having a hard time getting into this one. It's just overly euphemistically wordy, and manages to not really say much with all the verbosity. It's painting a picture... but it's an impressionist style... you have to stand 30 feet away to see the image for what it is. That's my feel for this so far, anyway, and I'm not even 20% in. Sigh.

I hate when zombie books are boring. :(

Aw, sorry to hear that, Becky. I'm right around the halfway point (didn't read it or much of anything else over the weekend) and expect to not have any problems finishing it. I suspect that it isn't going to turn around and become something different in its second half than it was in its first, but I'll report back later...

It reminds me a bit of Annihilation in being more about setting a scene and/or mood than... things happening. Impressionistic is a good way to describe it.

Well... to be fair, I generally have been trying to read this before bed, and being tired isn't really helping my brain pick up what the book is putting down. I keep reading and re-reading sentences and not making headway on their meaning. LOL I think maybe if I switch it up some it might work better for me.

I also didn't get much reading in this weekend. The hubs and I hung curtains and relocated my office (again) and rearranged stuff this weekend, so not much time for the reading.

Nope. No reading yesterday. I woke up with a migraine. It wasn't a bad one for me, but it left me feeling pretty bleh all day and with eye pain and pressure (like a sinus headache) so I wasn't trying to focus on words anymore than I had to for work.

So I mostly focused on my audiobook with my eyes closed. I'm hoping to finish that (the audio) tonight, and then come back to Colson.

Hope you're feeling better today, Becky! Migraines suck. Just total life-stoppers.

I'm back into this after being a lazy bum through a social weekend and a federal holiday. More thoughts soon. ;)

They really are. I am feeling better today, thanks! :)

Sigh... well this isn't going great. I have picked this up a bunch of times, but read a line and then lose interest, which is SUPER disappointing. I really want to like his writing , but I'm just not into it right now.

I keep finding ANYTHING else to read. Which is not a great sign.

Same. Kept picking it up, kept putting it down.

So DNFing and moving on.

Becky wrote: "I keep finding ANYTHING else to read. Which is not a great sign. "

I feel ya, Becky. Not on this one, necessarily, though I find I can't gulp it, and sipping isn't entirely satisfactory either.

Go ahead and cut bait if you want, and find another seasonally appropriate book that's more fun for you. It won't hurt my feelings. :) I'll put up some final thoughts when I'm done.

OK, I'm moving on with my life then. I'll try another one of his books another time.

Sorry for the back to back duds. :(

I got this on audible and got about 2 hours in and gave up and returned it to audible to get my credit back. I can’t say that it was bad per say, but I’m still zombied our from the resurgence of zombies about 5 years ago. Unless it’s a super fresh take, I’m over zombies for another 5 years.

I think I'm the only one who's still in this! My opinion of it hasn't changed at all: cool style, tolerable only in tiny, occasional doses. That's why I've read 150 pages in the last two weeks and have been way too easily distracted by other things. :|

On the whole I think it might have been a better sell as a novella or something even shorter. A tone piece with very little plot really doesn't need to be novel-length, even if as novels go it isn't all that long. But I'm in the home stretch--only 50 pages to go--and I'm gonna finish it, dang it, even if the end is exactly the same as the beginning. See you then!

Kudos Beth! You have the patience of a saint. I am of the opinion that unless the book is 1000 pages, I should NOT be reading it for a month. And not really even then. If it's 1000 pages, it should be so good that it makes me not want to put it down.

Finished! Finally! and... things happened on Sunday!! I did rather like the ending but am not 100% convinced it was worth the arduous trip. Letting off on the hyper-literariness and adding more "heart" (however you might define that) would have done it a lot of good.

Beth wrote: "Finished! Finally! and... things happened on Sunday!! I did rather like the ending but am not 100% convinced it was worth the arduous trip. Letting off on the hyper-literariness and adding more "he..."

Woooooow. A whole month. O_O

I'm not a person who can read a book in a day or anything like that, but I kept getting distracted by other things and/or feeling disinclined to pick it up. On an absolute pages-per-hour level it didn't go any more quickly or slowly than anything else I might read.

Beth wrote: "I'm not a person who can read a book in a day or anything like that, but I kept getting distracted by other things and/or feeling disinclined to pick it up. On an absolute pages-per-hour level it d..."

I'm impressed by your staying power. Once I notice I've been stalling on the same book for that long, its auto-DNF.

Taurus stubbornness in action for once, maybe? Heh.

Ditto, MrsJ! I don't have the patience anymore... AT ALL.