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By Sean Clark, on March 31st, 2010 so many reviews
all now glorious haiku
March after the break
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By Nico Vreeland, on March 30th, 2010 [2010 Edgar Award nominee for Best Novel---see reviews of other 2010 Edgar noms here.]
 Author: Jo Nesbø
Translated by: Don Bartlett
Harper, 2009 (English edition)
Filed under: Mystery
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
4 |
| Depth..... |
3 |
Nemesis is the second installment in Norwegian author Jo Nesbø’s detective series about the unfortunately named Harry Hole. I would describe it as a procedural novel, meaning the chief characteristic of the narrative is Nesbø’s tendency to exhaustively catalog each and every action taken and word spoken by Inspector Hole.
Nemesis is 500 pages long; it could easily be 300 pages, and we wouldn’t miss a thing. Much like Stieg Larsson, Nesbø suffers from a chronic lack of brevity and the result is a mildly compelling mystery wrapped in an extra few hundred pages of tortuous prose. Some questionable translating decisions exacerbate the careless feel of the book, and it’s ultimately not worth the read.
Read this book as a last resort on a cross-country flight. In any other situation, skip it. …
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By C. S. Clark, on March 29th, 2010 Drop everything and read these books by Lewis Caroll now. See other entries in this series here.
 We all know the story. But if you have not read the book, do so. If it is not too late, don’t spend $23 to see a computerized smile come flying at you in 3D and Johnny Depp in yet another role where you cannot help think pedophile. Instead, pick up a used copy of the book on Amazon for a penny (actual price) and go to the park and read it. Better yet, patronize your local library…and hope you don’t encounter that pedophilic character after all.
The story we know as Alice in Wonderland is actually an amalgamation of the two books Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I originally considered writing about just one of the two, but each are not much more than 100 pages and the font is bigger then I’m sure the numbers on the phone the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” lady couldn’t reach, so I’m cool with treating them as one. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on March 25th, 2010 [2010 Edgar Award nominee for Best First Novel By An American Author---see reviews of other 2010 Edgar noms here.]
 Author: Bryan Gruley
Touchstone, 2009
Filed under: Mystery
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
When pieces of a snowmobile wash up on the shores of Starvation Lake—near the small town of the same name—a ten-year-old accident involving the town’s famed hockey coach is reconsidered, and the history of Starvation Lake is drastically rewritten.
Gruley does best at character work; he captures the feeling of life in a small town and he sets up layers of history that blend together well. He’s not so good at plotting: the first half of Starvation plods along sedately, and Gruley doesn’t unleash any plot twists until the final 50 pages, when he dumps them all in your lap.
But while Starvation is lopsided plot-wise, it’s ultimately a satisfying mystery. …
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By Sean Clark, on March 24th, 2010
- Everyone seems to be touting the Great eReader Adoption as an iPad-Kindle war, but the Nook still looms (and also sports an iPad app) and the Alex is still on the way (and still overpriced). However if terrible customer service like this around haphazard products is what can be expected from Barnes & Noble, the Nook won’t stand much of a chance. Perhaps I don’t really understand why international buyers can’t have an instant download over the internet already, but I guess Diesel-ebooks allowing instant international “delivery” of ebooks is a good thing. (Really though, what do mail carriers have to do with ebooks, and what does “an innovative and evolutionary free digital shipping promotion” mean?)
- This year I’m once again a second round judge for the Amazon Breakout Novel Award. I obviously can’t talk specifics about the books, but it’s a pretty cool program so I wanted to stick in a link so more people could check it out. I like when the big guys open the doors for the small fries. You can see a full list of the entrants now, and if it’s run like last year’s was, more information about the books will be available once the short lists are narrowed down.
By Arthur McCulloch, on March 23rd, 2010 This book has been chosen as a Great Read
 Author: Robert Stone
Houghton Mifflin, 1974
Filed Under Literary
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
Dog Soldiers is a hell-ride full of tension and terror that carries the reader into the wildly unpredictable and dangerous world of drug trafficking in the 1970’s. Two amateurs, John Converse, a fear-wracked journalist who volunteered to go to Vietnam for “writing material”, and his disturbed wife, Marge, concoct a half-assed plan to smuggle three kilos of pure heroin from Vietnam to the U.S. Oblivious to the dangers involved, they quickly discover they have been set up by their source in Vietnam and are being pursued by a corrupt federal agent. …
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By Chase Hautau, on March 22nd, 2010 Drop everything and read One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, now. See other entries in this series here.
 Gabriel García Márquez does not blend fantasy and reality into one surreal realm. Mr.Márquez creates instead an environment where each sphere vies for dominance. The reader might forget whether the novel takes place on the Earth the reader understands viscerally until he or she stumbles upon one ethereal scene that impresses upon the reader the book’s dual nature before it dissolves and allows reality to resume. However, I defy the reader to confess that he or she did not feel Mr. Márquez’s universe as the reader feels his or her flesh.
He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places.
This narrative manifests for the reader physical and emotional impressions as deeply as a rifle’s butt dully collapsing a soldier’s skull. It is not whimsy that makes so powerful the author’s writing. It is intent. To doubt that Mr. Márquez did not want to thrust a people’s reality into the reader’s side is to miss his motivation. …
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By Sean Clark, on March 18th, 2010  Author: Chris Cleave
2005, Knopf
Filed Under: Literary
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
I would have liked this book far better in 2005. It’s not bad by any means, and Cleave is a great writer (I picked his Little Bee as my Best Book of 2009). However, at this point–jaded as it sounds–I’m a little sick of novels dealing with Western responses to terrorism post 9/11. Incendiary offers some strong characters and stronger narration, even if the plotting gets a little unbelievable and the themes are a little stale (to be fair, they weren’t nearly as such in 2005 when the book was published).
The narration is a tad abrasive at first. It’s written from the perspective of a poor and uneducated widow in London. This nameless protagonist’s slang and poor punctuation, while initially a bit off-putting, grows on you once her intelligence begins to seep through. Cleave does a fine job of playing on his reader’s assumptions and building a unique and dynamic character from that base. Similarly off-putting at first, she continually speaks to Osama bin Laden, as if the book is a letter to the terrorist kingpin. This annoyed me in the early chapters, felt gimmicky and maybe even sensationalist, but eventually it clicks, and I later felt it added to the emotional weight of the tale. …
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By Marc Velasquez, on March 17th, 2010 Author: Chris Jones
Broadway Books, 2007
Filed under: Nonfiction, Literary
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
Don Pettit—genius scientist and American astronaut—was a last-minute replacement for the space team “Expedition Six,” a three-man crew who would spend an extended stay on the International Space Station (or simply, as its residents call it, “station”). Expedition Six’s supplies and rations were sent to station before Pettit was named to the team, so he had to make due with the clothes and the menu of the man he replaced. The shirts were too big and there was no coffee. NASA allowed Pettit only the small ration of space coffee that he could fit with him on his shuttle ride to station. They weren’t trying to be tight-assed, it’s just difficult and expensive to send stuff into space. Pettit would have survived without coffee, but in space, it was important to have even that small ration, a reminder of life on earth.
Let me take a step back. Out of Orbit‘s flap copy will tell you the “harrowing” tale of three men on a fourteen-week mission in the International Space Station. The men must overcome the tragedy of the Columbia explosion, which killed seven of their friends and grounded the shuttle program. With no shuttle scheduled to relieve them, the men are stranded, orbiting the earth without a ride home. Eventually, NASA decided that the men must descend back to the earth in an outdated Russian Soyuz capsule, which was, “at best, a long shot.” The book jacket would have you believe that this is a tale Michael Bay would be happy to turn into a blockbuster.
Luckily for the reader, Chris Jones doesn’t write with the same hyperbolic tone his publisher uses to sell books. Out of Orbit is less about the tragic Columbia crash and the extended mission it created, and more about space coffee and space dessert and space toilets and what really accounts for living as far as a human being can live from home. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on March 16th, 2010 [2010 Edgar Award nominee for Best Novel---see reviews of other 2010 Edgar noms here.]
 Author: John Hart
Minotaur, 2009
Filed under: Mystery
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
5 |
The Last Child follows 13-year-old Johnny Merrimon on his unceasing quest to find out what happened to his twin sister, Alyssa, who disappeared one year before the novel begins. Since her disappearance, Johnny’s life has taken a sharp downturn: his father left and his mother has taken up with an evil new lover.
The narrative switches between Johnny and Detective Clyde Hunt, who was assigned to Alyssa’s case and never solved it. Hunt still feels responsible for Alyssa’s disappearance and the wretched state of Johnny’s life, and he does all he can to protect Johnny and his mother.
Despite underwhelming prose and a few hiccups along the way, Child is a ferociously compelling mystery, full of suspense and tension. Of the five Edgar books I’ve read so far, Child is by far the best.
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Author: Jo Nesbø
