[Deserted Isle Books is our new series in which our contributors discuss the one book they would choose if they were, well, stranded alone on a deserted isle forever. Read other installments of the series here, get your own copies at Powell's, and explore other series like this on our Special Features page.]
One book. Two sticks.
I’d love to have the sensibility to pack something useful, such as Stalking the Wild Asparagus, or anything else by Euell Gibbons, or perhaps Tintin in Tibet by Hergé, or even The Quest for Karla by John Le Carré. But God, who wants to lug that thing around, especially since cold war spy stories don’t have much of a shelf life after the first read. Besides, with a Tintin book I might end up saying nothing but “!” or “Wooah Wooah!” for the rest of my life, and with Le Carré I’d spend too much time thinking about stupid stuff, like why the BBC made only two insanely good mini series movies out of the trilogy (starring Obi-Wan Kenobi as head of Britain’s intelligence agency), and whether Karla would have been more formidable if he wasn’t Captain Picard, and so on.
Growing up in New Mexico among mathematicians and backpackers I’ve learned a thing or two about how to pack well when leaving civilization. There’s a tricky equation involving the actual weight of something in ounces, the emotional weight of what the thing is going to give back to you in terms of happiness, and some random factor of how many other uses you can get out of the object and the value of these other uses should things turn ugly. For example, a Frisbee can be used as a plate or a cutting board; it’s also good for fanning fires, and collecting rainwater. The stuff-sack that holds your sleeping bag during the day can be filled with fleece in the evening to make a nice pillow. A good night’s sleep improves the possibility of good decision-making under severe weather conditions. If you are not rescued for many years, you can wear the stuff-sack to keep your hair out of the way. Alcohol at high altitude is a fun thing, but beer is heavy, and the glass has to be hiked back out, so we compromised by leaving a 12-pack in a cooler at the trailhead as a reward for coming back to the real world, causing many of us to break into a run for the last mile. Some of us packed schnapps, which provided more bang for the bottle and went beautifully with hot chocolate like a game of Pooh sticks at a river crossing. Oranges were hotly contested, as was dental floss, open toed shoes and bakeless cheesecake mixes. … Continue reading »
[JABBIC is now on a monthly schedule. Look for the next one in January. Find previous installments here. And you can suggest covers we should use, or volunteer to write a blurb, by emailing us here.]
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JABBIC is kind of like Balderdash with book covers. Based only on the cover at right, three of our contributors made up a one-paragraph premise for this week’s contestant, One of Our Thursdays is Missing, by Jasper Fforde–coming out in March. Can you pick out the book’s real plot? (The answer will be posted in the comments later today.)
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1. With the real Thursday Next missing, the “written” Thursday Next leaves her book to undertake an assignment for the Jurisfiction Accident Investigation Department, in Fforde’s wild and wacky sixth BookWorld novel (after Thursday Next: First Among Sequels). As written Thursday Next finds herself playing roles intended for her real counterpart, BookWorld’s elite try to deal with a border dispute between Racy Novel and Women’s Fiction. It’s not always possible to know where one is in BookWorld, which has been drastically remade, or in Fforde’s book, which shares the madcap makeup of Alice in Wonderland, even borrowing Alice’s dodo. Outrageous puns and clever observations relating to the real book world abound. Fforde’s diabolical meshing of insight and humor makes a “mimefield” both frightening and funny, while the reader must traverse a volume that’s a minefield of unexpected and amusing twists.
2. Alive and hiding in South America, the fiendish Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele gathers a group of former colleagues for a horrifying project—the creation of the Fourth Reich. Barry Fowler, a young investigative journalist, gets wind of the project and informs famed Interpol detective Martin Thursday, but before he can relay the evidence, Fowler is killed. Thus Jasper Fforde opens one of the strangest and most masterful novels of his career. Why has Mengele marked a number of harmless aging men for murder? What interest can they possibly hold for their killers: six former SS men dispatched from South America by the most wanted Nazi still alive, the notorious “Angel of Death“? One man alone must answer these questions and stop the killings—Thursday, himself on the run from Interpol agents and the very people he is trying to protect. At the heart of One of Our Thursdays Is Missing lies a frightening contemporary nightmare, chilling and all too possible.
3. In this, his third book in the Thursday series, Fforde puts the idea of the sequel on its head. He writes part 4 before part 3. Aware that they’re inspiration for a book series, a small cell of criminals stole the manuscript for the third Thursday book from Fforde’s office. Now he’ll need to tap into the skill set of his famous Detective LaCroix character in order to hunt them down. The search for the missing novel blurs the lines borders between real and fiction. One of our Thursdays is Missing follows the wild creativity of Thursday Next: First Among Sequels like only Jasper Fforde is able. The fourth LaCroix mystery is Fforde’s third, and his best yet.
4. Literature has officially jumped on the vintage bandwagon: Jasper Fforde’s series of thrillers featuring a cadre of female double agents strongly emulates the style of Ian Fleming’s classic Bond novels. In the latest installment, one of Peony Blumfeld’s girls – Thursday III – disappears while posing as a librarian to investigate a murder. The ladies put their heads together to unravel a cleverly woven web of suspects and motives. But as they delve deeper into their quest, some may find themselves falling into the snare of a killer before they can lay their own traps.
[Every so often on on our Twitter feed we'll point to something other than books that caught our attention. In this occasional series, we highlight a few of those things (and a few others). Follow it here.]
Peep Show (hilarious British comedy show; available on Hulu) , recommended by Nico
Exit Through the Gift Shop (the Banksy documentary—better than they say, and funny, too—find it here), recommended by Nico
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, by Kanye West (the latest Kanye album—and easily his best—play it here), recommended by Nico
The Other Guys (Will Ferrell/Marky Mark comedy—surprisingly hilarious—find it here), recommended by Nico
The Dead Chipmunk (an article in The Believer about jokes—read it here), recommended by Eric
Chacarero (awesome chilean sandwich shop, two locations in downtown Boston—beef or chicken, you can’t go wrong), recommended by Eric
Hyperbole and a Half (MS Paint webcomic about awesome stuff—the author describes herself as “heroic, caring, alert, and flammable”), recommended by Eric
“Open Water,” by Urban Waite (short story about a scuba diving class—available at AGNI online), recommended by Eric
Invariable Heartache, by KORT (album—Cortney Tidwell and Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner covering obscure country tracks from the Chart Records catalog—here’s a bit of a preview), recommended by Aaron
Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, by Mogwai (album—the Scottish post rockers latest varies the formula a bit, even verging on danceable, but retains the band’s trademark stormy mood—listen here), recommended by Aaron
Goldeneye 007 (Wii game—updates the classic game with a contemporary first person shooter feel, but doesn’t lose any of the goofy charm (and difficulty) of the original), recommended by Aaron
Bioshock, Mass Effect, Braid, Mother 3, and others (video games—for more info, read Sean’s post here), recommended by Sean
Spirit Kid (band—rocked the C4 mag launch party—tour dates and album info available on their site), recommended by Sean
The Go! Team (their new album, Rolling Blackouts, just came out and is as playful as its predecessors–listen here), recommended by Sean
Hamilton Carver, Zombie P.I. (excellent indie video series created by some friends of C4—watch online for free), recommended by Sean
The subtitle of this book, Despicable Embarrassing Repulsive, presumably refers to the types of characters that occupy its pages. That’s not altogether inaccurate, depending on whose perspective we’re looking from, but I didn’t find Garcia’s characters to belong to those descriptions. That is how they see themselves. Her ability to convey this is Voting Booth‘s greatest strength.
Through shifting narrative focus the book tells the story of a few California youths (a group of homosexual Latinos) during the 2008 election. Voting Booth is delivered through a blend of prose vignette and poem. Most scenes are 1-3 pages long (the whole book weighs in at a slim 70 pages). The story of the youths juxtaposes the somewhat disconnected world of addiction-fueling indulgence with the inflated patriotism and sense of civic responsibility that arrives with the build-up to an election and fizzles by the time the new president is inaugurated. … Continue reading »
I’m a sucker for reviews of biographies written by someone close to the biographed—a good one will have a way of whorling into half a memoir in its own right. And so: Kasparov reviewing a Bobby Fischer book? Yes, please. He recounts years of chess history and explains his own thoughts and feelings as part of the fray, but skates—or skirts—around the most interesting questions of genius and madness. Still, this is an outstanding piece.
Segnit based his debut novel on a handful of pub-walk pamphlets he “found,” written by a troubled, supercilious, (fictional) expert walker named Underhill. From the review, it’s difficult to clearly picture how Segnit frames the novel—which comes in the form of Underhill’s unfinished magnum-opus walking pamphlet—and how he handles the interplay between his own fictional persona and that of Underhill. Still, Hickling’s review makes the book sound charming and possibly successful, though such meta-novels are nearly impossible to pull off. This review is worth a read, if only to work out for yourself what this novel might look like—Pub Walks itself is hard to get in the U.S. as of now.
Last year, the mammoth vampire genre novel written by a “real” writer was The Passage (which is OK, but not nearly as good as the hype). Now Deborah Harkness, a history professor and nonfiction author, takes a hefty cut at vampires and daemons, as well as the witches of the title. Owchar bobs and weaves in his overly restrained review, at one point writing, “Can I just say how difficult it is for a guy to read this stuff?” but never quite drawing a bead. The Boston Globe‘s review, on the other hand, calls Witches “a Dan-Brown-worthy blend of horror-movie kitsch, New Age cheesiness, and romance-novel saccharine.” In sum: avoid.
I’ve never heard of Bruce Chatwin, a travel writer who died more than two decades ago, but I find something interesting in this kind of letter collection (though, perhaps tellingly, I’ve never actually read one). Still, if you’ve blazed through, say, the Kerouac/Ginsberg letters and still want more, this will be right up your alley. I especially enjoy reading a few choice K/G letters and imagining they’re correspondence between James Patterson and Nora Roberts.
In brief: Here’s another front in the same war as the Harkness novel: the L.A. Timesgives West of Here a very charitable write-up—the Globecomes down a little harder. 19 months ago, Cambridge cops arrested Henry Louis Gates, a Harvard professor, for breaking into his own house not far from C4 HQ—19 months is a pretty quick turnaround for these two books. Finally: The New York Review of… movies?
[Deserted Isle Books is our new series in which our contributors discuss the one book they would choose if they were, well, stranded alone on a deserted isle forever. Read other installments of the series here, get your own copies at Powell's, and explore other series like this on our Special Features page.]
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A Swig Of Summer: On Reading Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, Even On An Island
You read it always, whether trapped on a deserted island or aboard a sinking ship. Drink a glassful while hovering atop Mount Everest, and one swig more while riding the avalanche on the way down. No matter what situation in which you find yourself, Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine will always be your tonic. Equal parts nostalgia and yearning, readers find themselves raising glasses to Greentown, 1928, to the young, spry boys who inhabit the place, slipping on fresh tennis shoes on the first day of summer only to peel away their sweat drenched soles once September dies. … Continue reading »
I stumbled upon Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things a few years ago and really loved it. At some point I’ll go back and reread it for review, then probably crown it a Great Read too. That book was engrossing, surprisingly deep, and quite dark. Despite being about demons trying to incite Armageddon and annihilate the human race through a trans-dimensional wormhole, The Gates is not a dark book. It provides levity with cheeky humor and a colorful cast of characters (both demonic and not).
Samuel Johnson, who is 11, and his personable dachshund, Boswell, while staying out past their curfew, espy a weird Satanic ritual take place in a neighbor’s basement. The neighbors are possessed by demons and set about opening a gate to Hell in order to allow The Great Malfeasance to lead his army through and destroy the planet. How did the first demons get through? Because of a tiny particle that escaped the CERN hadron collider. … Continue reading »
The new mag is also available as a free ebook in a variety of DRM-free formats. You can download it here, or from the links just below. Super-awesome paperback copies are also available from the Harvard Book Store. They are only $12 and the bookstore’s offering free shipping through February.
We’re proud of Issue #1 and we hope you enjoy it. Happy reading.
When I kicked off this year’s Edgar reviews, I predicted, based solely on its cover (pictured), that Caught would be “cranked-out bestseller schlock” with terrible prose. In fact, I think that’s exactly what Coben’s publishers are aiming for. Stacked up against the likes of Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly (not to mention James Patterson and all the name-brand factories), C0ben appears to be leading the field. It’s easy to see why he was plucked from among the commercial mysteries for an Edgar nomination.
On the other hand, held to the standard of his potential—which he touches only briefly, perhaps half a dozen times throughout this novel—Coben falls short. He’s a half-evolved mystery writer, having taken one step forward from the pack, but still with his back foot mired in cheap jokes, ludicrous characters, flat grabs for easy emotion, and all the other hallmarks of the mediocre bestseller. … Continue reading »
[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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The Oracle of Stamboul, by Michael David Lukas. Reviewed by Tess Taylor (Barnes and Noble Review).
Right off the bat, Taylor describes this novel as “fabulistic” and I knew it was up my alley. I like books that flirt with magic or the supernatural. This book, which sounds to be a picaresque of sorts, seems to do that well–though not, according to Taylor, without flaw. 19th-century Turkey isn’t a place you see too many books set, so that should lend it a fair degree of uniqueness and charm. Like Taylor says it certainly “seems as likely a place as any for real magic to thrive.”
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Gone, by Mo Hayder. Reviewed by Maureen Corrigan (Washington Post).
How do you go about writing a review of a book you know is hackneyed and all plot, yet also entertaining and appealing (aside from using C4′s handy 3-category scoring system)? Corrigan gives a pretty good example. Sure, the review contains a lot of plot summary, but that’s the meat of what the book has to offer. Still, she does a nice job of identifying what it is about this book that grabbed her and why it will appeal to fans of mystery/thrillers.
This book sounds delightfully dark. The title hints at sci-fi schlock, but that’s not what Stuckey-French delivers. A 77-year old woman hunts down the doctor whose radioactive treatment killed the woman’s daughter years earlier and “sporting a pseudonym and a Welsh corgi, strolls by the house every day in hopes of catching him alone outside, and one day she does.” But since he has Alzheimer’s the killing is not satisfactory revenge, so she goes after his oddball family. Read the review, this is an intriguing book.
Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, so it seems appropriate to include this book. Mostly because it posits that rather than representative of a lofty emotion, kissing is biological:
…despite its exalted status as one of the world’s most passionate activities, the kiss has evolved for a single blind purpose: to get you into bed so you can propagate the species.
Drop that line over a nice candlelit dinner to really turn up the heat.
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