Writing a time travel novel is a big endeavor. There’s a slew of things you can mess up, and even one loose end can unravel the entire plausibility of your plot.
Needless to say, when I read the premise of this book (alternate history, time travel, some guy trying to save the Titanic) and that it was a debut novel 15 years in the making by a practicing OB/GYN, I didn’t really expect much. Even a few hundred pages into this behemoth of a book, I still wasn’t really sure which way things would fall. Luckily, they fell toward the side of awesome. I found myself really enjoying this novel, churning through the last few hundred pages excitedly.
As you might expect from 750 pages of time-travel fiction, the plot gets pretty complicated. It’s hard to explain my thoughts on the book without a somewhat lengthy set-up, so bear with me.
Things start out fairly straightforward. A man named Wells has traveled back in time and finagled his way aboard the Titanic. He’s from our present and he’s attempting to “correct” history by preventing the ship’s sinking. While he does manage to affect history and avoid the iceberg that famously brought the boat down, the ship strikes a different iceberg while correcting course and sinks all the same. Thus, some of the people who died on the Titanic now no longer died, and history changes. … Continue reading »
When I hear “Master Blaster” the two things I think of are a midget riding a giant, and an NES game with better music than game play. This book has absolutely nothing to do with either of those things. Instead, The Master Blaster is a novel about a U.S. commonwealth in decline, Saipan, in a series of Pacific islands formerly exploited for cheap labor where what could be considered American-made products we churned out. Despite serious subject matter and a somewhat politicized plot, the novel sounds pretty funny; there appears to be no small amount of irony employed by the author. Maslin certainly seems enamored.
You can probably just read the first paragraph of this review and make a decision about whether you’d want to dedicate a few subway rides to this book. He also works “sad panda” into his evaluation. Thumbs up (seriously, I’d rather read a review like Dayton’s than anything the Chicago Tribune has ran in months).
Krause is a doctor in bio-acoustics who “lugs his recording equipment around the globe, seeking to capture the vanishing soundscapes of our rapidly changing Earth.” He sounds like a bit of a nutter, but in the good way. I’ve got a real hard on for nature documentaries, especially more recondite ones like Microcosmos and Sunrise Earth, so I’m all for a read on the Earth’s bio-rhythms and humanity, even with our music, is messing with that. He very well could come across as an aging hippie on a soap box, but I’m intrigued enough to learn for myself if that’s true.
Bonus Book Trailer: No trailer for you! It’s been a while since I came across a good book trailer that wasn’t at least a year old. I think people finally realized that book trailers are kinda stupid. So I’m retiring this segment from my WBBRs rather than scrounging for material or picking on fifth graders. If I actually do come across a good book trailer (probably won’t), I’ll share it as a true bonus.
You might have heard of Scott Pilgrim, the series of shōnen-like graphic novels brimming with nerdy allusions that was made into a movie with Michael Cera and Jason Scwartzman. I read and enjoyed those books, and so decided to pick up Lost at Sea, which O’Malley wrote prior the now famous Pilgrim series. Fast forward a couple years and I finally got around to reading it.
The style is very similar to Pilgrim. Not just the art is similar, but they both excel in characterization and derive from those strong characters a lot of heart. One of the things I really liked about Pilgrim was its use of geeky and often obscure pop-cultural references to deepen his characters in a unique way (a technique Ernest Cline used in Ready Player One with seemingly less success). The plot of the Pilgrim series was fairly bare-bones, but still they shined. While Lost at Sea goes about it differently, mostly eschewing Nintendo game references for more archetypal teenager experiences, it too proves to be deeper than it may appear on first glance. … Continue reading »
To be honest, this book sounds absolutely terrible. But you really ought to read any review with the headline “Discreetly Digital, Erotic Novel Sets American Women Abuzz.” Vintage (Knopf) shelled out seven figures for this romance novel and its two as yet unwritten sequels. That’s a heck of a lot for what is probably fairly mild sultriness mired in drivel; the decision is based primarily on hype from Australia and housewife blog shares, apparently because they want to be “making a statement that this is bigger than one genre.” Ugh.
“Fifty Shades of Grey,” an erotic novel by an obscure author that has been described as “Mommy porn” and “Twilight” for grown-ups, has electrified women across the country, who have spread the word like gospel on Facebook pages, at school functions and in spin classes. Or as the handwritten tag on a paperback copy in a Montclair, N.J., bookstore helpfully noted, “Yes, this is THE book everyone is talking about.”
This book also sounds pretty bad–but in the way that leaves me much more likely to read it. Basically it’s a thriller that links Soviet mind control experiments (grisly ones through lobotomy and the like) to activities of Stone Age neanderthals. As Lipez tells it, he’s done a fairly laughable job of it too. Phrases such as “Knox’s galumphing jalopy of a plot” and “To say that Knox’s prose is breathless is to insult lungs” are pretty funny. I wish I had a vacation in the near future, this silly book sounds like a great way to kill a plane ride.
We’ll end with a book that sounds like it might actually be good, and whose name would have lent itself better to the lead-off spot. Starters is the “start to a two-part sci-fi series in which teens rent out their bodies to wealthy older people, who control them via neurochip.” Done well, that’s a creepy premise to work upon. Carpenter seems pretty impressed. Her review is straight forward, but breaks down the book’s strength succinctly, enough to make me believe she may not have been predisposed to like this. She does, however, compare it to The Hunger Games series numerous times, books she clearly likes. I’ve yet to read those yet, but I hear they’re all the rage with the young people. If you’re into those, you will probably want to read this. And after reading praise like Carpenter’s, those that haven’t read them may want to pick this up anyway.
The only thing better than a terrific concept is one that is as well executed as “Starters.” Readers who have been waiting for a worthy successor to Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” will find it here. Dystopian sci-fi at its best[...]
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Quickly: Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru sounds pretty good. This guy agrees. Putin’s biographer compiles a list of “secretive reading.” If you want to probe a different sort of secret, maybe the kind on a grander scale, check out this Stephen Hawking biography.
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Bonus Book Trailer: Not new, but since Eric just reviewed this book yesterday, here’s the trailer for Super Sad True Love Story. It’s actually pretty funny.
When Donald E. Westlake died in 2008 he had over 100 novels under his belt. He left at least one unpublished, left in the care of fellow crime writer Max Allan Collins for some forty-odd years. Supposedly written in the ’70s, The Comedy is Finished was completed and ready for publication right around the time Scorsese’s film The King of Comedy came out in 1983. Although the motives and characters are different, the basic plot about a celebrity kidnapping was similar enough to his unpublished novel that Westlake tabled the book for fear of being called a copycat. After Westlake’s death, Collins found a publisher, and The Comedy Is Finished finally saw publication last month.
Set in the post-Vietnam days when yuppies begin to settle into the nascent ’80s, the novel focuses on an aging comedian, Koo Davis, who is kidnapped by a group of Marxist twentysomethings unable to move on from the radical days of the previous decade. Koo is pretty much a Bob Hope analogue, a relic of a past era of entertainment. Even through some traumatic experiences, he constantly manages corny one-liners and paraprosdokians.
At first this fell a bit flat for me, but Koo’s seeming incapability for seriousness reveals itself as a well-crafted shield for a deeply insecure and sad old man. Westlake’s effort isn’t high literature by any stretch, but he did touch a few nerves of emotion that serve the book nicely and left me genuinely surprised. … Continue reading »
[In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]
The Map and the Territory, by Michael Houellebecq.Reviewed by Elaine Blair (New York Review of Books).
I like Houellebecq. He’s a dark, somewhat crazy weirdo, which I tend to enjoy. I really ought to read more of his books. This one takes a different tack than what you might expect from him. As Blair explains in her open: “Jed Martin, the hero of Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, is the first of his major characters to make it to the end of a book without checking into a psychiatric ward or committing suicide.” Where most of those characters are talkative and oversexed, this book is centered around an artistic loner. Houellebecq, it seems, is trying to write the opposite side of the same lonely coin he has focused on for most of his career. If he can do something new and interesting while remaining a dark weirdo, I’m interested. This is a long, but astute, review that you should read.
Another taking-down of a genre book at Strange Horizons (they have positive reviews too). This one isn’t quite as thorough and agressive as the last one I pointed to, but Lewis–though he lays the summary on a bit too thick–does a good job of detailing just where things went wrong. His third paragraph opens with a sigh you almost hear, and his disappointment from there is clear. I can relate. There’re a lot of books such as this (it’s a post-apocalyptic western; I mean, that sounds cool) that I really want to like, and just can’t ignore their badness enough to enjoy the story.
Fingal is a fact checker, D’Agata is a douchey-sounding “nonfiction fabulist” who thinks fact checkers get in the way of his vision (“It’s called art, dickhead.“). This book does sound pretty fascinating though, depicting, D’Agata’s original writing along with Fingal’s annotations and their running dialogue. I definitely don’t agree with D’Agata’s idea of acceptable journalism standards, which he’s clearly all-in on seeing as he allowed this book to be published:
D’Agata’s response to these discrepancies, as Fingal kindly calls them at first, is basically: Who cares? It sounds better to say that all these events happened on the same day than it would to hobble the opener with lumpy qualifiers. “The facts that are being employed here aren’t meant to function baldly as ‘facts.’ The work that they’re doing is more image-based than informational.” Over the next 100 or so pages — the fact-checking comes to at least five times the length of the piece itself — Fingal questions not just a few dates but also the existence of entire conversations, etymologies, histories.
It’s a book a want to check out though, if for nothing else than a point of conversation. (Note: this is more of an essay than a review. Read Jennifer McDonald review the book for NYT here.)
Quickly: A lesson in trusting publishers: a novel rejected over and over sells three days after a pen name is applied… Great photobooks of 2011. Finally, RIP Dimitri Nabokov.
Bonus Book Trailer: Not sure I want to read the book, but at least Potter’s trailer for it is professional.
I finished this book almost 2 weeks ago and I’ve been thinking about it ever since: I’m still not quite sure whether I like it. Murakami is a brilliant writer, and I found a lot of joy while reading this book. But now that I’ve finished his latest (very long) novel, I’m not sure if I can say it’s a good book. That is to say: while I was reading, I was liking what I was reading; now that I’m done, I’m not sure I liked what I read. Does that make any sense at all? If your answer to that is yes, you’ve probably read Murakami before. (Note: I’ve tried to avoid spoiling anything in this review, but the zany nature of what Murakami writes means I’ll certainly reveal things that some readers might rather be left to discover on their own.)
[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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What We Talk About When we Talk About Anne Frank, by Nathan Englander. Reviewed by Michiko Kakutani (New York Times).
What a great title. Not only does it allude to one of the great short story writers, but it conveys a lot about this story collection in just a few words by walking the fine line of irreverance. Englander’s got chops, so a new collection by him is exciting. Like Carver’s collection, Englander ties his stories with a theme, but in his case, a much more direct one:
Whereas Carver’s stories focus on the difficulties of emotional connection and tend to feature isolated characters living in a present quite divorced from conventional social and political concerns, Mr. Englander’s people define themselves largely through their embrace — or rejection — of Jewish orthodoxy and tradition.
Woah, Anne Rice is moving on from vampires? Is she going to explore new creative angles and maybe write something literary and deeply personal? What’s that, it’s about werewolves? Oh.
Given the date, I gotta have at least one sex thing on here. This book looks like it might be a slog (though a far cry from stumbling through Foucoult). But the review is interesting enough. How the “origin” of sex was about 400 years ago in Britain is beyond me, but you can’t fault the guy too much for an imprecise title.
