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By Nico Vreeland, on February 3rd, 2012 [This unbearably bad sci-fi disaster is the latest babytown frolics.]
 Author: Rod Rees
2011, William Morrow
Filed under: Sci-Fi
Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
2 |
| Entertainment..... |
2 |
| Depth..... |
2 |
This was my own fault. I’d been reading a lot of books that were good, but not very memorable. I wanted something that would get my juices flowing, and that meant either a really good book… or a really bad one. Bad books are much easier to find.
I’d taken a look at the The Demi-Monde: Winter a few weeks before, and I’d given up because its writing, even in just the first few pages, was wretched—full of cliches and clunkily unpoetic. But then, wanting a bad book, I turned back. And I got a bad book. I got everything I was asking for and much, much more. I barely made it through a hundred of Rees’s dense, awful pages before I had to put it back down. This review will be less a review than a catalog of what makes this book so bad. Take a deep breath.
Premise
In the year 2018, the “Demi-Monde” is an elaborate computer simulation made to train military cadets to fight in “asymmetric warfare environments” like Iraq and Afghanistan. The bulk of the action, as you might guess, will take place inside the simulation.
So far, this is a solid, if boring, idea. It’s also rather dramatically weak. Militaries use a lot of simulations, and they use them because there’s no risk for the participants. But “no risk involved” is not a good recipe for a thrilling novel, so Rees has to turn up the heat. Unfortunately, a concussed 5-year-old could come up with a more coherent imaginary world.
First of all, there’s a critical flaw in the Demi-Monde itself: if you die inside it, you die in real life, much like the Matrix. That makes it a more interesting place to set a thriller, but an utterly ludicrous method of training your army personnel. If a simulation is actually life-threatening, what’s the point of it? Just send your recruits straight into battle, where at least their deaths might not be entirely in vain.
Next up in Rod Rees’s cavalcade of bad ideas: the fact that the Demi-Monde is restricted to technology from the 1870s. A military simulation in 2018 teaches its participants how to use muskets. By gaslight. Ugh.
…
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By Aaron Block, on February 2nd, 2012 Author: Courtney Taylor-Taylor and Jim Rugg
2012, Titan
Filed Under: Graphic Novels, Historical
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
5 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
| Visual Style... |
8 |
It’s not difficult to understand why the Red Army Faction, a leftist revolutionary sect that was founded in Germany in 1970 and existed in various forms for nearly 30 years, has inspired so many books, films, plays, songs, paintings, and other works of art. Young, politically minded people banding together under charismatic leadership, the journalist who puts her ideals into practice and co-founds the group, the campaign of violence, prison break, subsequent arrest and final fate of the leaders – the story is an a la carte menu for any kind of statement you’d want to make. And largely because of that appeal, it’s also easy to romanticize the group, and gloss over the consequences of the violent acts attributed to the them, which include 34 deaths. Even Uli Edel’s 2008 film The Baader-Meinhoff Complex, which effectively charts the group’s violent pathology, can’t resist a bit of mythologizing.
Courtney Taylor-Taylor and Jim Rugg’s graphic novel One Model Nation, originally published by Image Comics in 2009 and now republished by Titan Books, attempts a corrective to that dynamic, presenting the RAF as a frustration in the lives of four musicians who are trying to progress to the next stage of their career. But none of the criticism levied against the RAF, and Andreas Baader in particular, by the main characters amounts to anything more than insults like “assholes” and “turd.” They seem more concerned that their young fans’ sympathy with the gang has ruined some of their gigs and attracted unwanted police attention than with the RAF’s ideology, or the bombings and killings they commit. As an indictment of violent political action Taylor-Taylor’s story is toothless; it doesn’t fare much better as an account of a mythical band’s glory days. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on January 24th, 2012 [This nuanced autobiographical novel is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Justin Torres
2011, Houghton Mifflin
Filed under: Literary
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
An avalanche of hype covered this book when it was published last summer. Its flap copy claims it is “an exquisite, blistering debut” full of “magical language” and “unforgettable images.”
That’s not exactly accurate, but it’s on the right track. Torres is not an especially gifted prose stylist; he falls into a fairly standard contemporary “young fiction” voice. Clipped sentences, long lists, lightly abraded grammar—all the hallmarks are here. It’s not bad, just not very unique. Like this:
These days, I sleep with peacocks, lions, on a bed of leaves. I’ve lost my pack. I dream of standing upright, of uncurled knuckles, of a simpler life—no hot muzzles, no fangs, no claws, no obscene plumage—strolling gaily, with an upright air.
You could’ve plucked that paragraph from a dozen debut novels this year. Luckily, Torres has a much more unique skill. He’s not a wordsmith, and not really a constructor of sentences, but there is poetry in his characters.
We the Animals should be rightly called a novella, both because it barely breaks a hundred pages, and because the story it tells features no real arc. Instead, Torres sets out to portray the emotional life of a young, poor family (evidently based on his own experiences growing up), and the nuanced web of relationships stretched among each of its members.
Three boys live with a listless, spineless mother, and a sometimes abusive, sometimes magnetically charismatic, sometimes absent father. The boys, their father is quick to tell them, do not belong much of anywhere.
We the Animals is about not fitting in and about loving your parents, and hating them, loving your family and hating them. It’s about being the smart one in the family, and also the weak one. It’s about the whorl of emotions that come up when there’s not enough for everybody. It’s about trauma. The traumas from outside are tough but predicatable. Those traumas that come from within the family are devastating.
It’s a simple tale about three brothers trying to find their way in the world, and it’s simultaneously an infinitely detailed catalog of familial strife. And it’s one of the few books in the world still available as a library ebook. So there’s no excuse not to read it.
Similar books: Love and Shame and Love, by Peter Orner; The Believers, by Zoe Heller
By Sean Clark, on January 23rd, 2012 Author: Raymond Chandler
1939, Alfred A. Knopf
Filed Under: Mystery, Literary
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
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
Similar Reads: The Thin Man (Hammett), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Larsson).
By Nico Vreeland, on January 18th, 2012  Author: Daniel H. Wilson
2011, Doubleday
Filed under: Sci-Fi, Thriller
Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
Robopocalypse begins with the fun, rambunctious voice of Cormac Wallace, a commander in the human forces fighting a horde of killer robots controlled by a super-intelligent sentient robot that the humans nickname “Big Rob.” Or, at least they were once controlled by Big Rob. The humans have won the war, but they still have to stamp out the last waves of mindless robots, and Wallace does so with panache. When he encounters a swarm of “stumpers”—little scuttling robots who seek out the heat of human flesh and then explode—he tries desperately to spark up his flamethrower as they scramble up his cold metal armor, thinking this:
There’s going to be a temperature differential at my waist level, where the armor has chinks. A torso-level trigger state in body armor isn’t a death sentence, but it doesn’t look good for my balls, either.
Shortly thereafter, balls intact, Wallace discovers a massive archive of robot-curated files about the human-Rob war, specifically about the human “heroes” of the war (according to the intriguing word choice of the robots). The bulk of the novel then becomes Wallace’s selections from the archive—a series of vignettes from different perspectives and featuring different people. Essentially, it’s a collection of linked stories about the robot uprising and the New War.
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By Sean Clark, on January 12th, 2012 [This collection of spooky short stories is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: John Connolly
2006, Atria Books
Filed Under: Short Stories, Horror
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
5 |
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.
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By Sean Clark, on January 6th, 2012 Author: Jessie Crockett
2010, Mainly Murder Press
Filed Under: Mystery
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
4 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
2 |
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.
…
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By Nico Vreeland, on January 5th, 2012  Author: Yannick Murphy
2011, Harper Perennial
Filed under: Literary
Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
The first few pages of The Call can be a bit discombobulating. The main character, a 40ish man named David, is a veterinarian in rural New England. He answers calls from surrounding farms and ranches, and drives out to tend to different animals. The novel takes the form of David’s work diary, in which he records the calls he takes, his actions, the results, and his thoughts along the way. Like this:
CALL: A cow with her dead calf half-born.
ACTION: Put on boots and pulled dead calf out while standing in a field full of mud.
RESULT: Hind legs tore off from dead calf while I pulled. Head, forelegs, and torso still inside the mother.
THOUGHTS ON DRIVE HOME WHILE PASSING RED AND GOLD LEAVES ON MAPLE TREES: Is there a nicer place to live?
Quickly, the pages of the diary become a place for David to ponder and exposit about his life and the world. The form of the diary—with its procedural headings that David coopts to better reflect his own experiences—becomes a counterpoint for his interior life.
It’s a “voice-driven” novel in the sense that the voices of characters, especially David, form the experience of reading it. Luckily, David’s voice is charming and calm and occasionally funny, and that experience is a pleasure. …
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By Charles Rammelkamp, on January 4th, 2012 Author: Jessica Anya Blau
2011, Harper Perennial
Filed Under: Literary
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
10 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
Jessica Anya Blau’s Drinking Closer to Home is a sort of amped-up Anne Tyler novel, the story of a funny, chaotic family that fumbles its way to loving and supporting one another despite personal failings and the usual resentments that occur in families. Think of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant on steroids – or without any clothes on!
In Tyler’s 1982 novel, Pearl Tull, the 85-year old matriarch ruminates, “Something was wrong with all of her children. They were so frustrating – attractive, likable people, the three of them, but closed off from her in some perverse way that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. … She wondered if her children blamed her for something.” This could be Louise Stein’s reflection after she suffers her “massive” heart attack in Santa Barbara, California, in 1993, and her three children return home from their east coast locations to be with their mother and father, Buzzy, over the course of the next two weeks as Louise receives treatment. Only, Louise couldn’t care less what her children think of her, in the last analysis, as much as she loves them. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on December 29th, 2011  Author: Maile Meloy
2011, Putnam Juvenile
Filed under: Thriller, Fantasy, Young Adult
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
It’s 1952. Janie is a regular 14-year-old American girl, living in Los Angeles… until she discovers that her parents are Communists, about to be arrested for un-American activities. The family flees to London.
Once there, Janie starts flirting with a boy in her class named Benjamin, and they embark on a mission to spy on a man that Benjamin thinks is a Russian agent. Only, the man he meets is Benjamin’s own father, the apothecary of the title.
From there, Benjamin and Janie begin a fairly typical young-adult-novel adventure: they follow clues, use newfound powers, and become embroiled in a massive conflict with no less than the world at stake.
It’s a familiar arc, and while Meloy writes it well, it’s a relatively forgettable novel. Except, that is, for one aspect, a facet of the mythos of The Apothecary that’s fairly original, but also quite uncomfortable. (Minor spoilers ahead. If you want to go in fresh, skip the rest of this. If you like Harry Potter and the Lemony Snicket books, you’ll probably like this one, as well.) …
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