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By Eric Markowsky, on February 15th, 2013  Author: Jehanne Dubrow
2012, Triquarterly Books
Filed Under: Poetry
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
Just after the Soviet Union collapsed, my family hosted a member of an exchange group visiting our small New Hampshire town from the nascent Russian Federation. His name was Vladimir. I don’t remember anything about him except that he was good at darts and he loved grocery shopping. We must have taken him to Shop’n’Save every other day to pick out a new variety of juice.
I hadn’t thought about Vladimir in years, and then I came across these lines in Jehanne Dubrow’s Red Army Red, from the poem “Bag ‘N Save”:
… We walk the aisles
of twenty kinds of paper towels, the display
of Reynolds plastic wrap, the perfect smiles
that gleam from every tube of crest. We’re lost.
Dubrow’s sonnet evokes an indulgent sense of awe I now recognize in my memories of Vladimir and his friends, overwhelmed by possibilities yet reveling in being overwhelmed, like someone finding satisfaction even in a stomach ache after a long anticipated meal. I was just a little kid when he visited, but Dubrow’s poem helped flesh out a character I could only vaguely recall.
For me, this was the most powerful aspect of Red Army Red, giving a shape, an expression, in some cases even a whole gangly adolescent body, to a not so distant chapter in history. If you have any memories of the last days of the Cold War and what that meant, no matter how young you might have been then–or if your family never hosted a shopping addict from Russia–you’ll find powerful echoes in Dubrow’s personal history in verse that help make history personal. …
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By Sean Clark, on October 2nd, 2012 This sprawling, Pulitzer-winning historical novel is a C4 Great Read.
Author: Michael Chabon
2000, Random House
Filed Under: Literary, Historical
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
10 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
“The Great American Novel” is a phrase that gets tossed about a lot and has, like “The American Dream,” diluted into a platitudinous insincerity suggesting a prize hiding behind a life of toil–if it was ever even more than that. It’s a romanticism: pour your heart and soul into the everyday grind of life, and eventually you’ll reach some sort of transcendence. We all had one kid in our high school classes that was going to write the next Great American Novel, indeed maybe we were that classmate. There aren’t, of course, roughly 24,000 Great American Novels published yearly.
Indeed, there are very few books befitting of the title. There have been many great books by Americans, sure, but how many define a generation, or at least a time and place; how many raised their authors so some higher level or even immortality. Not many. You’ve got Huck Finn and Moby Dick. Then there was a proliferation of candidates that came out of the Lost Generation, but since the 1920s the case is harder and harder to make definitively.
Not many would argue against Catcher in the Rye or On the Road (indeed, I bet if you ask 10 people to name The Great American Novel at least 6 pick Kerouac’s wandering story), but it gets tougher from there. Check out this list from Wikipedia. You could make a pretty good case against most of them–Kerouac’s not on there (I agree), but Ken Kesey is (I disagree). I think Lolita is the best book of the 20th century, but Great American Novel it is not. And I bet Franzen just loves being included on this list, and while I loved Freedom, I’m not sure I could prove it is demonstrably more qualified than The Corrections.
In most all respects, Chabon’s Pulitzer effort is the very definition of what a novel should be. It is not the Great American Novel, but it is all about the elusive quest for that ideal. …
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By Sean Clark, on September 7th, 2012 [This ambitious mystery novel is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: Ariel S. Winter
2012, Hard Case Crime
Filed Under: Mystery, Historical.
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
5 |
It’s pretty easy to write off a debut novel of 700ish pages that sets out to mimic 3 great masters of a genre. Indeed, I procrastinated for nearly a month, leaving my review copy unread while I kept pushing other books ahead of it in my never-ending reading queue. That was a mistake; this book is great.
I’m fairly new to reading mysteries, and I’m actually only familiar with one of the three authors being mimicked by Winter. He does a great job of emulating Raymond Chandler, though, and though I can’t speak to it directly, the stylization varies enough between segments that I’ve no doubt the same can be said about the mimicry of Georges Simenon and Jim Thompson. …
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By Sean Clark, on August 6th, 2012 Author: Guy Adams
2012, Titan
Filed Under: Sci-Fi, Mystery, Historical
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
5 |
| Depth..... |
1 |
Of course, anyone entering into a book titled Sherlock Holmes: The Army of Doctor Moreau expecting anything deeper than “The Jetsons Meet The Flintstones” is guaranteed disappointment. So I’m going to go on the assumption you’ve looked at the cover, seen the title, the magnifying glass, and the hechtgrau dragoon with a boar’s head, and are on board with all that.
Okay, for those of you that remain, yes this is a mash-up of Sherlock Holmes and H.G. Well’s The Island of Dr. Moreau. Adams is faithful to his source material to the point of reverence, which is great. But unfortunately the book exemplifies the reason most fan fiction isn’t published: the “what if” premise is more interesting than the story. This is not the sort of case readers usually see Holmes tackle; tell me the idea of Holmes and Watson pursuing manbeast mutants who’ve kidnapped the Prime Minister through the London sewers doesn’t sound more akin to a DuckTales episode than an hour of Masterpiece Theater. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on June 29th, 2012  Author: Audrey Schulman
2012, Europa Editions
Filed Under: Literary, Historical
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
In December 1899, Jeremy, a young American engineer, takes a job overseeing the construction of a railroad through British East Africa. In December 2000, Max, a young American ethnobotanist, accepts an assignment to search for a vine with astounding medicinal potential hidden in the mountains of Rwanda.
As these dual narratives unwind side by side throughout Three Weeks in December , they produce strange and surprising echoes, both concrete and thematic. Though separated by a hundred years, the two protagonists find themselves locked in similar conflicts with social and physical circumstances. The novel proves to be as much about Jeremy and Max and their personal struggles as it is about the African continent, about its status on the world stage and the story of global development over the past century.
At the same time, Three Weeks in December is also about man-eating lions, a tribe of gorillas, murderous warlords, child soldiers, and repressed desire–which is all to say that it’s as thoughtful and well-observed as it is gripping. This is a smart book that will keep you turning pages, something you can recommend to a wide variety of readers, like, for example, the entire population of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Three Weeks in December has been selected by the Cambridge Public Library for its annual Cambridge Reads program. If, like Chamber Four, you are from the Cambridge/Boston area, you’ll definitely want to give this book a shot and then go check out this fall’s author event with Audrey Schulman at the CPL on November 8th, where she’ll discuss the genesis of her multi-faceted novel. [Also check out my interview with Audrey here.] …
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By Nico Vreeland, on May 24th, 2012 [This beautiful but traumatic graphic novel is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Craig Thompson
2011, Knopf Doubleday
Filed under: Literary, Graphic Novel, Historical
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
| Visual Style... |
10 |
One of Thompson’s big influences for Habibi was obviously One Thousand and One Nights (or The Arabian Nights), a collection of stories framed by the tale of the sultan’s wife, Scheherazade, who tells the sultan a riddle or story every night, so that he will be entertained enough not to execute her. Habibi has several such frame stories, and dozens of anecdotes and parables inside them.
The outermost frame story concerns the traumatic life of a girl named Dodola. At the age of nine, Dodola’s father sells her into wifehood, which is not unlike sexual slavery. Soon, thieves attack her husband’s home and kill him, and then sell her into literal slavery. At the slave market, Dodola finds an orphan baby on the verge of death. She adopts him, or steals him, and escapes. She names him Zam, which means water. The primary storyline of Habibi revolves around the love between Zam and Dodola.
I wasn’t quite expecting this widely-hyped graphic novel to be a harrowing story about sexual trauma. Dodola spends almost the entirety of the story either selling her sexuality or having it stolen from her. There’s a lot of rape, and a lot of underage sex.
There’s also a whole lot more going on, an impressive array of nested stories and themes, including meditations on Islam and Arabic, stories from the Qur’an and the Bible, riddles, magic squares, alchemical formulas, and more. Throughout it all, Thompson’s beautiful visual style (see the gallery at the bottom of this post for examples) is nothing less than captivating. …
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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
Find it on Goodreads.
| 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 Nico Vreeland, on April 27th, 2012  Author: Ron Rash
2012, Ecco
Filed under: Literary, Historical
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| 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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By Sean Clark, on April 2nd, 2012 [The taut time-traveling novel is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: David J. Kowalksi
2012, Titan
Filed Under: Sci-Fi, Historical, Thriller
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
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. …
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