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By Nico Vreeland, on January 25th, 2012 [In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]
 The Flame Alphabet, by Ben Marcus, reviewed by J. Robert Lennon (New York Times)
Ben Marcus, while an excellent prose stylist, has never written a book with a “traditional narrative.” His latest, the uber-hyped Flame Alphabet, has only metaphorical plot struts (children’s voices become toxic to adults), but “It has a plot, and a protagonist, and at times it even threatens to become a thriller,” which makes it, as Lennon sees it, a hybrid of experimentation and traditional narrative. As should be expected, by virtue of Marcus’s extensive experience with experimentation, and null experience with narrative, the traditional implodes and the experimental succeeds. The implosion, says Lennon, takes with it the thrill of Marcus’s sentences, his greatest strength. I was on the fence about Flame Alphabet. Now I am not.
The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung, reviewed by David L. Ulin (L.A. Times)
Chan Koonchung’s first novel to be translated into English imagines 2013 in China, after a devastating economic collapse has crippled the rest of the world, and the Chinese government, thriving according to the Chinese government, has loosened its grip on its people. As the narrator says, “90 percent, or even more, of all subjects can be freely discussed, and 90 percent, or even more, of all activities are no longer subject to government control. Isn’t that enough?” It’s simultaneously a satire of contemporary China, in which only being censored a little would be a big improvement, and the West, where freedoms of speech and information are fiercely protected, but most citizens are too lazy to take advantage of them. David L. Ulin sorts this all out, as well as the role of atmosphere in fiction.
The Face Thief, by Eli Gottlieb, reviewed by Anna Mundow (B&N Review)
This thriller about face-reading and con artistry appears to be brash and melodramatic, if this line—spoken by the deceptive, seductive female lead—is any indication: “The real reason we have faces is to hold back what we’re thinking from the world.” That rather soapy philosophy hints at a narrative less rigorously realistic than perhaps a novel about the quite-real science of face-reading should be. But it could also be fun.
The Flight of Gemma Hardy, by Margot Livesey, reviewed by Sarah Towers (New York Times)
Emerson’s own Margot Livesey has a new novel, and it’s been getting a ton of press. Gemma Hardy is a combination and “recasting” of Jane Eyre and Livesey’s own childhood. Towers calls it “a delight.”
In brief: Authors are finally starting to take advantage of the unique abilities of digital books. … The L.A. Review of Books’s monthly crime fiction column is worth reading for crime fans. … And Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has inexplicably been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. The Onion A.V. Club gave Extremely Loud a rare unqualified F, and the it was voted 5th worst movie of the year in Vulture’s critics’ poll. Evidently its director threatened to keep running these tasteless ads unless it was nominated.
By Nico Vreeland, on January 24th, 2012 [This nuanced autobiographical novel is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Justin Torres
2011, Houghton Mifflin
Filed under: Literary
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
An avalanche of hype covered this book when it was published last summer. Its flap copy claims it is “an exquisite, blistering debut” full of “magical language” and “unforgettable images.”
That’s not exactly accurate, but it’s on the right track. Torres is not an especially gifted prose stylist; he falls into a fairly standard contemporary “young fiction” voice. Clipped sentences, long lists, lightly abraded grammar—all the hallmarks are here. It’s not bad, just not very unique. Like this:
These days, I sleep with peacocks, lions, on a bed of leaves. I’ve lost my pack. I dream of standing upright, of uncurled knuckles, of a simpler life—no hot muzzles, no fangs, no claws, no obscene plumage—strolling gaily, with an upright air.
You could’ve plucked that paragraph from a dozen debut novels this year. Luckily, Torres has a much more unique skill. He’s not a wordsmith, and not really a constructor of sentences, but there is poetry in his characters.
We the Animals should be rightly called a novella, both because it barely breaks a hundred pages, and because the story it tells features no real arc. Instead, Torres sets out to portray the emotional life of a young, poor family (evidently based on his own experiences growing up), and the nuanced web of relationships stretched among each of its members.
Three boys live with a listless, spineless mother, and a sometimes abusive, sometimes magnetically charismatic, sometimes absent father. The boys, their father is quick to tell them, do not belong much of anywhere.
We the Animals is about not fitting in and about loving your parents, and hating them, loving your family and hating them. It’s about being the smart one in the family, and also the weak one. It’s about the whorl of emotions that come up when there’s not enough for everybody. It’s about trauma. The traumas from outside are tough but predicatable. Those traumas that come from within the family are devastating.
It’s a simple tale about three brothers trying to find their way in the world, and it’s simultaneously an infinitely detailed catalog of familial strife. And it’s one of the few books in the world still available as a library ebook. So there’s no excuse not to read it.
Similar books: Love and Shame and Love, by Peter Orner; The Believers, by Zoe Heller
By Sean Clark, on January 23rd, 2012 Author: Raymond Chandler
1939, Alfred A. Knopf
Filed Under: Mystery, Literary
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
As part of my quest to immerse myself in the mystery genre, I’ve been asking what books to pick up. Chandler’s books came up frequently, so I started with his first and most famous. For reasons that become immediately apparent upon reading, this is a seminal work in modern detective stories, and Phillip Marlowe (Chandler’s recurring protagonist, though this is his first novel) is the quintessential gumshoe. He’s tough, clever, wisecracking, and suave (and he drinks a lot).
Marlow is hired by a dying billionaire to uncover a blackmailer. He ends up embroiled in a large plot with many players. This is a hardboiled detective novel through and through. It’s full of socialites with dirty laundry, lowlifes with secrets, gamblers, pornographers, racketeers, and murderers. But it also has much greater literary chops than I expected. While there’s plenty of now-cliche hyperbole (“She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen’s lunch”), there’s also more eloquent writing found throughout. Lines like this:
Her eyes were wide open. The dark slate color of the iris had devoured the pupil. They were mad eyes. She seemed to be unconscious, but she didn’t have the pose of unconsciousness. She looked as if, in her mind, she was doing something very important and making a fine job of it. Out of her mouth came a tinny chuckling noise which didn’t change her expression or even move her lips.
The billionaire’s two wild daughters are at the heart of the blackmailing scheme. Eventually Marlow stumbles upon the younger daughter, drugged, naked, and posed for a camera. Beside the camera, a dead man. As he follows the case from clue to clue and suspect to suspect, Marlowe continually observes scenes with keen detail, giving the reader not just a visual, but a subtle sizing up of every person and place.
It’s not an overly literary book by any means, though. Roughly halfway through the book, the case seems pretty sewn up. But a few details nag at Marlowe, and acting on a hunch, he uncovers a whole ‘nother layer of plot. Here the book really kicks into hardboiled gear. I won’t spoil anything, but bodies pile up and Marlowe both deals out and receives plenty of pain. He keeps a cool head through it all though, eventually unravelling the mystery. Everything ties up in a very satisfying conclusion. I was caught a bit by surprise, but not due to any deus ex machina curveballs by Chandler. Just turns out Marlowe was a better detective than me.
This book is short and awesome. If you like mysteries and crime fiction at all–even if all you’ve read is Steig Larsson–and you haven’t already read The Big Sleep, go for it
Similar Reads: The Thin Man (Hammett), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Larsson).
By Nico Vreeland, on January 20th, 2012 Yesterday, Apple announced iBooks Author, a new Mac app that lets people create and distribute ebooks for the iPad. Immediately following the gleeful fanboygasms came the equally predictable backlash, like this piece in ZDNet that called the app’s end-user license agreement (EULA) “mind-bogglingly greedy and evil.”
 This reaction confuses me, because iBooks Author’s EULA says exactly what I expected it to say, namely that you can’t sell the books you make with iBooks Author through any distributor except Apple.
Why is this even a surprise? For one thing, iBooks Author is free. It’s obviously intended to ease creation of content for sale through iTunes, because Apple makes a ton of money on those content sales. Why would they make a free tool that would let users create content for other platforms? Why is not doing so “greedy” and “evil”?
On a more practical level, it’s frankly not that big a deal. If you’re formatting a traditional book (i.e. only words), then the process should mostly involve cutting and pasting those words from your .doc file. You will have to format your ePubs for other distributors separately, which is a drag mostly because ePub-formatting programs suck (when we publish books here at C4, we use Smashwords; it’s not perfect but it is better and easier than other formatting and publishing options we’ve tried).
So yes, Apple has not given you a free, easy, universal ePub creator. But iBooks Author isn’t geared toward creating plain old ePubs anyway, it’s specifically geared toward creating “Multi-Touch books for iPad.” In other words, this sort of thing. Because iBooks Author simplifies the formatting process, the rich-media interactive ebooks you make with it will almost certainly only work on an iPad. Even if you could export them to universal ePubs, they would look like garbage on all other devices.
Apple won’t own your copyright, your content, or the versions you make for all other platforms. You’re free to use that content however you please, even according to that reactionary ZDNet writer’s reading of the EULA. Claims that “only Apple can ever publish your work” are simply not true.
So everybody please calm down about this EULA. It’s not nearly as greedy or evil as they’d have you believe.
By Aaron Block, on January 20th, 2012 [At the end of each month, Aaron surveys the comics he read, celebrates the best, considers the rest, and takes stock of what it means to be a contemporary comic fan. Follow "The State of My Pull List" here.]
Spotlight
 Secret Avengers #20 In his 2011 mini-series The Red Wing, one of my favorite comics of last year, Jonathan Hickman uses time travel as more than just a plot device meant to complicate the narrative and give readers a fun puzzle to solve by the final issue. That isn’t to say that the plot isn’t so tangled that it can’t be untied, but simply that Hickman describes his concept of time travel in more poetic terms (aided, it’s worth nothing, by diagrams drawn into the scene by series artist Nick Pittara) and seems less interested in the mechanics of time travel than in its effects on the story’s emotional arc. By playing with our expectations of what time travel means Hickman brings some of the danger and volatility to that sci-fi trope. Warren Ellis does the same thing in Secret Avengers #20, but from the opposite direction – rather than eschewing the paradoxes and details of time travel, Ellis luxuriates in them, creating an elaborate puzzlebox of a story that doubles as a character study of Black Widow. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on January 18th, 2012  Author: Daniel H. Wilson
2011, Doubleday
Filed under: Sci-Fi, Thriller
Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
Robopocalypse begins with the fun, rambunctious voice of Cormac Wallace, a commander in the human forces fighting a horde of killer robots controlled by a super-intelligent sentient robot that the humans nickname “Big Rob.” Or, at least they were once controlled by Big Rob. The humans have won the war, but they still have to stamp out the last waves of mindless robots, and Wallace does so with panache. When he encounters a swarm of “stumpers”—little scuttling robots who seek out the heat of human flesh and then explode—he tries desperately to spark up his flamethrower as they scramble up his cold metal armor, thinking this:
There’s going to be a temperature differential at my waist level, where the armor has chinks. A torso-level trigger state in body armor isn’t a death sentence, but it doesn’t look good for my balls, either.
Shortly thereafter, balls intact, Wallace discovers a massive archive of robot-curated files about the human-Rob war, specifically about the human “heroes” of the war (according to the intriguing word choice of the robots). The bulk of the novel then becomes Wallace’s selections from the archive—a series of vignettes from different perspectives and featuring different people. Essentially, it’s a collection of linked stories about the robot uprising and the New War.
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By Sean Clark, on January 17th, 2012 [In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]
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Theft of Swords, by Michael J. Sullivan. Reviewed by Liz Bourke (Strange Horizons).
Here’s an Irish student systematically savaging a terrible sounding fantasy book. She does a few things here I really like: 1. Offer the author a pass since it was originally a self-published title, but criticize the publisher and editors who picked it up for not doing anything to fix it. 2. Dissect Sullivan’s ignorance of Early Modern grammar. 3. Summarize the book in a lengthy write up that is undoubtedly more entertaining than the book itself. It might be a little mean, but sometimes it’s really fun to read someone just lay in to a bad book (or movie), and besides team Sullivan comes out looking like chumps more than anything. Good stuff.
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Blueprints of the Afterlife, by Ryan Boudinot. Reviewed by Paul Di Fillippo (Barnes and Noble Review).
This review is comprehensive to say the least. Read it if you want the skinny on Boudinot’s career and an overview on slipstream fiction in addition to a review of this book. It’s actually a pretty informative overview, so the review is worth the read just for that. Also, this book sounds pretty cool, and Di Filippo reviews it aptly. I like lines like this in reviews:
Boudinot takes this finely wrought but perhaps thematically underpowered mimetic-absurdist vehicle and drops in a rocket-powered speculative engine.
I’m pretty sure I saw Nico with this book not too long ago, so I’ll leave the C4 judgment to him. Look for his review sometime soon.
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Aim for the Head, by various authors. Reviewed by William Grimes (New York Times).
A collection of “work [from] more than 50 zombie poets” might be a fun read. Who knew there were any “zombie poets,” let alone fifty? I’m not very well-versed (sorry) in modern poets, so I’ve never heard of any of those Grimes mentions or quotes, but poetry readers sould give it a gander and see if there’s anyone they recognize. And for those who still like zombie books like I do, the review’s a short but interesting read in its own right.
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Quickly: Speaking of zombies, Cory Doctorow has a write up on the latest Walking Dead collection–which I just read and is very good. Helpful tips on how to write (in just 3 pudding cups). And, spending $50,000 on Das Kapital seems contradictory.
A.
Bonus Book Trailer: This one is done by fifth graders, and is far, far better than most of the trailers I share on these posts.
By Sean Clark, on January 12th, 2012 [This collection of spooky short stories is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: John Connolly
2006, Atria Books
Filed Under: Short Stories, Horror
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
5 |
I’ve still never read any of the crime fiction Connolly made his name with, but this is the third supernatural book of his I’ve tackled and loved: it’s just as good as the others. Perhaps as a result of his experience writing thrillers, Connolly has a real knack for building tension. The stories in this collection range from a few pages to over a hundred, but each is expertly paced and crafted. He manages to write stories that are taut and spooky without dipping into cliche or camp. His The Book of Lost Things reminds me of Stephen King at his best, and the mood and creativity of The Gates readily compares to Neil Gaiman’s work. This collection of scary tales marries those styles almost perfectly.
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By Nico Vreeland, on January 11th, 2012 [In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]
 Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That?, by Henry Alford, reviewed by Charles Isherwood (New York Times)
The world—or at least a large percentage of the people I see on my commute—could use a lesson in manners. Alford, a “humorist” (a kludgy word for a supposedly fluid entity), offers a “whimsically haphazard” survey of manners. While certain of Alford’s strategies sound more passive-aggressive than effective, maybe that’s sounder than my personal tactic of staring at bus-riding cell phone talkers and pointedly following their conversation until they get creeped out and hang up.
Smut, by Alan Bennett, reviewed by David L. Ulin (L.A. Times)
David L. Ulin quietly but insightfully dissects Alan Bennett’s new pair of novellas. This is the kind of thing Ulin excels at:
Here, Bennett highlights a conflict central to both novellas: that there is a difference between pretense and self-preservation, and the roles we play (matron, widow) often serve to protect our inner selves. At the same time, there’s more at work here—since what we try to conceal is often obvious anyway.
In the end, Smut doesn’t sound like my kind of book. But the review is worth your time.
Terrorists in Love, by Ken Ballen, reviewed by Dina Temple-Raston (Washington Post)
This arresting nonfiction book attempts to discover and explain the reasons that Islamists turn to violent jihad. It’s composed of six anecdotal stories about men who were involved in violent jihad for various reasons. Ballen, the founder of an anti-terrorism nonprofit, comes to the conclusion that a lack of love on earth inspires these wayward souls to win God’s favor in the afterlife. It is, as Temple-Raston notes, not a very all-inclusive theory, but the discussion about it is quite interesting.
Treasure Island!!!, by Sara Levine, reviewed by Rebecca Barry (New York Times)
“I’m partial,” confesses Barry, in the opening of this review, “to a book with exclamation points in its title.” Not me. I’m gunshy about them, ever since the one in Swamplandia! turned out to be a bear trap. However, I am partial to “a rollicking tale, shameless, funny and intelligent,” which Barry claims for Treasure Island!!!. Before I get my hopes up, there’s no mention of either treasure or islands. It sounds, honestly, like another one of these literary novels whose purpose is to subvert all your expectations. It better be funny.
In brief: A “pale, lifeless” Jeff Bezos biography disappoints. … Houllebecq’s latest is also his first to feature a main character not modeled on himself. … The guy who named the main character of a long-running series “Harry Hole” writes a series of children’s books about farts? That makes sense, actually. And Simon & Schuster, the publisher who will readily sell their dignity, publishes it? That also makes sense. Carry on. … Christopher Paolini’s house is crazy. (Also, kids, when a major paper comes to do a profile on you, put on some damn shoes for the pictures.)
By Sean Clark, on January 9th, 2012 A year ago I put together a list of 10 video games worth playing for their stories. Here are 10 more (mostly) recent games for players really into narrative or strong dialogue.
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10. Cthulu Saves the World (Steam, XBLA)
This little indie darling came out of nowhere. You can get it for around one dollar, and that’s a steal. A send-up to 16-bit era JRPGs, this has the Lovecraftian “hero” break all convention and go on a quest to enslave the world’s minds. The writing is full of self-referential wry wit that really makes this worth your time. …
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