{"id":18640,"date":"2013-06-26T16:18:01","date_gmt":"2013-06-26T20:18:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=18640"},"modified":"2013-06-26T16:18:01","modified_gmt":"2013-06-26T20:18:01","slug":"reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=18640","title":{"rendered":"Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Just finished David Wong's \"John Dies At The End\". It was very good: very funny. and actually a little scary at times. Crazy other-dimensional demon nightmare monsters attack the world and two slackers have to fix it. Feels a bit like an R-rated slacker Ghostbusters, but gets away with it by being so funny. I'm about to start the sequel.\n<li>Almost done with Nabokov's \"Pale Fire\". It's a brilliant and interesting construction: a 999-line poem followed by a critique of the poem done by someone who <em>really <\/em>wants the poem to be about something else - can't say much more without giving it all away. And while Nabokov was a brilliant writer and observer, the style he uses feels a bit dated 60 years out: very intricate, allusive, witty but exceedingly dry; some of his sentences take effort to fully appreciate.\n<p>Also, I struggle a little with the story because the narrator sounds so much like legendary buffoon, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/A_Confederacy_of_Dunces\">Ignatius J. Reilly<\/a>, that I can't take him seriously (am not yet sure if I'm supposed to, either). And since I can't shake the physical image of waddling, slovenly, hypochondriac Reilly, I can't believe the narrator could have physically done any of the things he says he did. My fault, not Nabokov's, though. <\/p>\n<li>\"Snow Crash\" was fine, except for the plot. The futurism was fun - though so much of what Stephenson describes has become Hollywood stock that I feel I would've enjoyed this much more if I'd read it 20 years ago. The ancient-religion-is-a-human-meta-virus thing felt silly, though.\n<\/ul>\n<p>You?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just finished David Wong's \"John Dies At The End\". It was very good: very funny. and actually a little scary at times. Crazy other-dimensional demon nightmare monsters attack the world and two slackers have to fix it. Feels a bit like an R-rated slacker Ghostbusters, but gets away with it by being so funny. I'm [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}