This book sounds really good. The son of a kidnapped mother and orphanage warden father living in North Korea eventually becomes a kidnapper himself. By Powers’s account, Johnson has done his research and recreated a very complete, and harrowing, vision of a world that is very difficult for much of the West to fully comprehend. If the writing is as good as she makes it out to be, and the “crafty, even devious story work” Johnson uses employs holds up, this could become a book we hear a lot more people talking about.
I really like meticulously plotted novels. This book–a “big snowball: an avalanche of events that starts with the mugging of an elderly woman”–looks to be just that. I’ve never heard of Penelope Lively, but after reading Kakutani’s review, I think maybe I should have. Her impression of the book is astute and worth checking out.
This one’s pretty heavy, but also looks quite interesting. Scheffer “was the Clinton administration’s point man on international justice … [and] senior adviser and counsel to Madeleine Albright.” During the mid-to-late 90s, the U.S. and Albright (along with other countries in the U.N. Security Council) launched an “effort to entrench accountability for mass atrocities as a central principle in international affairs.” In other words, trials for war crimes such as the world had not seen since Nuremberg. The U.N. focused first on Slobodan Milosevic and the genocide in Yugoslavia. I could keep going, but if international politics interests you, just read Dworkin’s review for yourself.
Bonus Book Trailer: You’ll need some of those old red and blue 3D glasses for this one. The purple coloration really makes the boobs in this (NSFW) video really something to look at.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. … Continue reading »
As of late, for what reason I’m not sure, I’ve been enjoying the quick-read gratification of trade mysteries and thrillers.
Although its title isn’t very original, and it won’t be winning any awards, Live Free or Die managed to scratch this newfound itch of mine just fine. At times the book read a bit housewife-y, but ultimately it all added to the charm. I got a Murder She Wrote kind of vibe, if that makes sense. There’s a quaintness to the narrative at work that complements its secluded town setting nicely.
[In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.] . Distrust That Particular Flavor, by William Gibson. Reviewed by Dwight Garner (New York Times).
When I think of William Gibson, I think of cyberpunk, not journalism. Still, it’s nice to see an author step away from his normal genre and offer something that is, by the very nature of an essay collection, more keenly focused on writing rather than story. Gibson, much like Phillip K. Dick, is a sci-fi master known for his own particular ambiance and outlook that transcends most of the more lowly genre far. I’ve never read too much of either of them, but smaller portions of writing that a presumedly less heady than most of Gibson’s collection of work is something I’m certainly interested in reading. . Into the Silence, by Wade Davis. Reviewed by Richard Raynor (Chicago Tribune).
This book looks interesting enough, but I’m mostly including it because I liked reading Raynor’s review. Here’s an example of how to nicely sum a a book in a relatively short paragraph:
In his magnificent, if perhaps overlong, new book, “Into the Silence,” Wade Davis tells the full story behind this almost mythic story, imbuing it with historic scope and epic sweep, perceiving the quest to conquer Everest as an emblem of Britain’s damaged nobility and infatuation with heroic failure. The background here, the foul compost from which the grail-like purity of the Everest endeavor grew, was World War I, the “Great War,” which signaled curtains for the great, lumbering European empires and obliterated almost an entire generation of young men. The few who survived the apocalypse in the mud of France came back broken and haunted.
If you’re into history books or (or mountaineering) this book looks worth a peek. The review goes on to be written just as well as that excerpt, so it’s worth reading regardless. .
So Carrie Fischer has memory loss from elective electroshock depression therapy and that’s her impetus for writing her recent books? Whoa. A book by Princess Lea about depression doesn’t really interest me at all. But I do remember hearing good things about her first memoir. This appears to be more of a collection of anecdotes of weird things that happened with random celebrities, which is kind of funny. Stein certainly seemed to enjoy reading it, so maybe it’s deserving of a shot.
. Quickly: One last 2011 recap, with capsule reviews. An Umberto Eco interview I’m bummed I missed the first time around. Semi-accurate visions of tomorrow. A more accurate vision of the past (in which Britons mock dwarves and rape victims). And here’s an interesting bit on lycanthropy. . Bonus Book Trailer: Captain Nobody actually seems like a decent enough YA book. The trailer has some interesting art, but also a lot of pictures that appear to be of random people pulled from the internet. And the narration sounds like they called someone in off the street and recorded him in one take.
This is a book that will in no way exercise your mind, or place any demands upon you as a reader. When I first started it, I read the first few pages, gave a book-snobby, mocking laugh, and put it right back down on my counter. I scooped it up on the way out the door to work a few days later, since I was running late and couldn’t remember where I had left 1Q84.
I crushed through the first third or so of the book on my commute that day, and found myself engaged and ready to read on the next day. A thriller about team of detectives hunting down a serial killer, The Darker Side takes a lot of cues from The Silence of the Lambs, and, since the murders center around a theme of Catholic contrition, even more from Seven. … Continue reading »
