The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

I can’t believe I hadn’t gotten around to reading The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie until now.

People are trying to kill a guy for writing this and I haven’t read it yet? What the hell is wrong with me?

Plus, once again, big fan of Satan. Satan in the title.

How could I go wrong? I gotta tell you, this book is easily one of the ten best novels I have ever read.

There is so much in here that I really need to digest it and maybe even reread it in the coming months before I can get a handle on it. I think that if most authors were to attempt something on this scale, it would end up being a mess, but Rushdie is up for the task.

Verses is congested with all kinds of crazy ideas and jumps from theme to theme, from story to story, from protagonist to protagonist.

We start with two fellows falling out of a plane that has just blown up. It doesn’t sound like it should be a funny chapter, but it really is. We follow them all the way down to earth as they miraculously land, unharmed.

We travel alongside them as they learn that maybe survival isn’t in and of itself the prize.

There is something more.

Then, Rushdie takes us back to the brothel where twelve prostitutes pretend to be the twelve wives of Mahound, the prophet.

Such sacrilege.

Then, it’s on to a disastrous pilgrimage with a delusional, leader who claims to be taking orders from the Archangel Gibreel. Is the prophet sadistic or foolish? Not only am I not sure, I’m convinced that Rushdie himself doesn’t know..

Rushdie juggles so many characters, so many stories, so many story arcs yet he weaves them together with such credibility that it really doesn’t feel as experimental as it really is.

It’s a rare novel that really experiments with theme, character, and story and is simple and accessible at the same time.

When it comes down to it, while Verses deals chiefly with religion, transformation, (one of our protagonists changes from a man to a faun to Satan himself and back again only to find that he really hadn’t changed much at all.) deception and death, on a broader level, it’s really about how we react to the unknown.

Rushdie studies both the insanity of belief and the stubborn arrogance of disbelief.

Goddamn, this book was good.

Rushdie’s style is so simple and lovely.

When he states that, “Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy,” it just really impacts the entire book with a very short, simple sentence.

I really need more time to digest and then I may post more thoughts on it in the coming weeks/months/years.

300 by Frank Miller & Lynn Varley

There isn't a whole fuck of a lot to say about this book.

If you’ve seen the movie, you pretty much get the point.

I actually enjoyed the graphic novel more than I enjoyed the film which I thought was entertaining, if over hyped and more or less forgettable.

If you liked the movie, you’d probably enjoy reading the book. If not, I’m not sure it’s going to win over any new converts.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

American Gods by Neil Gaiman, sat in my ‘to-read’ pile for like a year. First, before Evil Darien starts calling for my head, let me say that I loved this book.

It’s now on the very short list of book I’m likely to read more than three times before I die.

I had the thought when I read Coraline, with its many elements of The Thief of Always that Clive Barker had to be a huge influence on Gaiman, which is odd since they’re contemporaries, give or take a decade or so.

Reading American Gods, with so many ideas lifted straight out of The Great and Secret Show, (easily one of my ten favorite novels of all time) cemented the notion.

Ever since I first read Imajica, I’ve insisted that Barker is much more than a genre writer and I’m confident that I’ll be proven correct when he’s still being read after most of his peers are forgotten.

So, here’s the deal. Gaiman is brilliant. But so many aspects of his universe have been explored/created by Barker that I wonder just how good he really is.

I plan to read more Sandman to figure that out.