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By Sean Clark, on May 21st, 2012 Author: Jenny Lawson
2012, Putnam
Filed Under: Nonfiction, Memoir, Humor
Find it on Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
Jenny Lawson is an insane person. It’s a wonder her husband hasn’t drowned himself. Of course, when you’re talking about a memoir by someone who has zero historical impact on the world, insane is good, because insane is entertaining.
Here’s the plot of Lawson’s book: she grew up, went to college, got married, had a kid. She and her husband both work from home in Texas. And occasionally she’ll do weird things like buy a giant metal rooster welded together from oil drums. She’s got a thing for taxidermy (note the dead rat Hamlet on the cover). There aren’t any lessons to be learned from her, or deep insight to be gleaned. Luckily, she is very funny. Lines that seem to come out of left field are plentiful, like this:
I just bought a fifty-year-old Cuban alligator dressed as a pirate.
…
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By Arthur McCulloch, on May 17th, 2012 Author: George R.R. Martin
2005, Bantam
Filed Under: Fantasy
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
“Disappointing” best summarizes the fourth installment in A Song of Ice and Fire. I was thrilled by the previous book and delighted to see that Martin was finally starting to tighten up the plot lines. He focused his story within the broad boundaries that he’d established and poised the reader for a strident and exciting resolution. The forces of fire and ice were drawn together in what promised to be the burgeoning climax.
Instead, A Feast for Crows is predominantly an unwelcome tangent. New characters are introduced in the prologue, which is Martin’s normal pattern. However, where previous prologues have served to heighten and focus the main story line, this one opens a doorway to a continuously expanding world and endless possibilities.
Martin’s style has never lent itself to a riveting pace. He usually advances his story incrementally and adjusts the pacing to heighten the drama in certain moments. However, this book is flat. Very little advancement occurs along the main plot. He ties up a few loose ends from previous installments, but generally he just plods along, focusing on characters that have been to-date mainly incidental. I assume some of these characters will play bigger roles in future installments, but that’s not enough to satisfy the readers anxious to follow their favorite characters. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on May 16th, 2012  Author: Jennifer duBois
2012, The Dial Press
Filed under: Literary, Historical
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that began with a more aptly chosen pair of epigraphs. Lurking in the front pages of Jennifer duBois’s debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, you’ll find these two gems:
All of us are doomed, but some are more doomed than others.
–Vladimir Nabokov, from Ada, or Ardor
And if in this wide world I die, then I’ll die from joy that I’m alive.
–Yevgeni Yevtushenko
The novel’s action takes place at the extremes of optimism and pessimism expressed here. Everyone in this book is doomed (some more so than others), and yet the main characters never give up on trying to make something out of their inevitable descent, looking for answers to long-buried questions, looking to leave a mark, however faint, on history. …
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By Sean Clark, on May 11th, 2012 [This steampunk homage to Sherlock Holmes is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: George Mann
2008, Snowbooks
Filed Under: Mystery, Historical, Sci-Fi
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
10 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
If you’d listened to our most recent podcast (you didn’t, because the recording got messed up, so you might never hear it at all), you would have heard me say this was a Sherlock Holmes-y book that was sort-of-but-not-really steampunk. I was half correct; full of airships and clockwork automatons and laudanum benders and Queen Victoria on an artificial lung crafted from bellows, it’s squarely steampunk. But to define it as that would be to sell it really short. Rather than relying on the setting, Mann writes a good story, leaving the setting to seep in around the edges.
Before we go any further, I have a confession to make. There’s a blight on my reader’s record, a mark of shame I really need to correct. I’ve never read any of the Sherlock Holmes books. From what I’ve picked up (thanks mostly to Gregory House), this book shares a lot in common with Doyle’s beloved mysteries.
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By Sean Clark, on May 8th, 2012 Author: Micky Spillane (with Max Allan Collins)
2012, Titan
Filed Under: Mystery
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
Max Allan Collins, it seems, is making a habit of rewriting “lost” manuscripts left to him by deceased crime writers and releasing them with his name ahead of the original author. A little weird, but to his credit, this is the second such work of his I have read, and the second that I enjoyed.
Lady, Go Die! (it’s a cludgy reference to Lady Godiva, let’s get that out of the way) is a sequel to the very first of Mickey Spillane’s famous Mike Hammer books–I suppose the former sequel is now the third in the series. As you might expect, it’s a hard-boiled gumshoe mystery, full of gansters and goons, underground casinos, pretty women with chips on their shoulders, and murder. This book walks the genre line faithfully, so don’t expect anything groundbreaking or revelatory, but if you want a quick-to-read mystery full of fistfights and cheesy wisecracks, this certainly delivers. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on May 7th, 2012 [This intimate, intricate graphic memoir is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Alison Bechdel
2012, Houghton Mifflin
Filed under: Memoir, Graphic Novel, Literary
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
10 |
This impressive graphic memoir is a great book, but not in any way I think I’ve read before. The bulk of the novel consists of Bechdel’s therapy-related endeavors. She remembers episodes from her childhood in terms of various infant-development theories, she recounts her own therapy sessions as an adult, she interprets her dreams, she recounts conversations with her mother, and she quotes frequently from academic papers about psychoanalysis. In fact, the act of creating the book itself might have been therapeutic for Bechdel, because, as she says, “for both my mother and me, it’s by writing… by stepping back a bit from the real thing to look at it, that we are most present.”
Are You My Mother? is not funny, and the events it recounts are never earth-shattering—especially not compared to the central events of her first book, Fun Home, about her father’s closeted bisexuality and his suicide soon after Bechdel herself came out to her parents.
Instead of relying on these more traditional elements of story, Bechdel indulges her considerable talent for eliciting Nabokov-like patterns from the randomness of the world. She weaves a web of interconnected narrative tidbits—plucked from the entirety of her own life, as well as the lives of her parents, the memoirs and novels of Virginia Woolf, the work and life of Donald Winnicott, and many others—that echo and expand the smallest narrative hiccup until it ripples across the entirety of her existence. …
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By Sean Clark, on May 4th, 2012 Author: John Connolly
2011 Atria Books
Filed Under: Young Adult, Humor, Fantasy, Horror
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
10 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
A direct follow-up to Connolly’s wonderful 2009 book, The Gates, Infernals delivers everything you could want from a sequel. It’s another great adventure, and delivers all the wacky characters and narratorial humor that made the first book so exceptional.
After helping to save the world from an invasion from Hell, Samuel Johnson, with his trusty dog Boswell by his side, is trying to get back to a normal life. It doesn’t last long. The leader of the failed invasion, Mrs. Abernathy (formerly the demon Ba’al before he was trapped in the possessed body of Samuel’s elderly neighbor), seethes in Hell. The Great Malevolence–Satan–has fallen into a weepy melancholy following the defeat, leaving the underworld open to a tumultuous civil war.
Abernathy, in an attempt to restore her standing as Hell’s #2 demon, as well as save her own hide by preventing the traitorous demon Abignor from usurping rule, manages to open a small portal to Earth long enough to capture poor Samuel and Boswell. They will be an offering to restore the spirits of The Great Malevolence.
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By Nico Vreeland, on May 3rd, 2012 [This entertaining, fast-paced sci-fi novel is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Brian Evenson
2012, Tor
Filed under: Sci-Fi
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
I’ve been in a long, dark reading drought lately. I’ve been reading only mediocre books, it seems, for months now. I could barely remember what a great read felt like when I got hooked by Immobility.
It begins with a well-used premise, albeit one I’m a sucker for: a man wakes up with no idea where he is, what he’s doing there, or who he is. As the answers come in fits and starts, the questions of his identity and place in the world become dreadful, ominous, and traumatic.
His name, they tell him, is Josef Horkai. He’s been “stored,” as it turns out, which is dystopian lingo for cryogenic freezing. As he regains his wits, he instinctively, almost unconsciously, tries to murder one of the men who woke him up. He fails only because he falls off the bed; he’s paralyzed from the waist down. …
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By Charles Rammelkamp, on April 30th, 2012 Author: Willie James King
2012, Tebot Bach
Filed Under: Poetry
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
Willie James King, a widely-published African-American poet from Montgomery, Alabama, clearly writes in the long poetic tradition of western civilization, both thematically and metrically. The poems in his second collection published by Tebot Bach, Autumn’s Only Blood, are elegiac and lyrical in tone. Almost a dozen of the nearly fifty in this new collection are sonnets.
Dedicated to Troy Davis, an African-American man who was executed by the state of Georgia in September, 2011, for killing a police officer in Savannah in 1991, the collection begins and ends in autumn, in elegy. Davis was convicted on sketchy evidence and maintained his innocence for over twenty years. The book’s title comes from the dedication:
the spider lilies are
springing up all over
now, blooming, as if
they ought to be
this autumn’s only blood.
The spider lily, which blooms abundantly in the American South in autumn is a transplant from Southeast Asia, a flower full of the potent symbolism of tragedy.
…
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By Nico Vreeland, on April 27th, 2012  Author: Ron Rash
2012, Ecco
Filed under: Literary, Historical
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
I loved Ron rash’s gritty, atmospheric Depression-era novel, Serena, and I’m looking forward to the movie version, where the badass title character will be played by Jennifer Lawrence—lately Katniss Everdeen in the solid adaptation of The Hunger Games. But Rash’s follow-up to that electrifying novel, a lackluster collection of stories called Burning Bright, left me flat.
This latest offering disappoints in much the same way those stories did: it feels small and too quiet. In fact, The Cove feels like a short story idea stretched past its rightful size. It’s not bad, certainly, but it possesses only tiny patches of the dark tension and classic drama that made Serena so great.
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