|
|
By Mike Beeman, on April 26th, 2012
[This outstanding collections of short-stories is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: Eugene Cross
2012, Dzanc Books
Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
If Dzanc books isn’t on your radar as a go-to press for outstanding collections of short stories, it should be. Once a year, for the past three years, a collection by Dzanc has blown me away. Lauran van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us was my gateway drug, and the way she combined the far-fetched and everyday made the collection one of my favorite books I read in 2010. In 2011, I read Knuckleheads, by Jeff Kass, laughing at the sometimes lunkish characters while shaking my head with recognition. So when I picked up Eugene Cross’s collection, Fires of our Choosing, I knew I was in for something good.
Cross’s book does not disappoint. A combination of Phillip Meyer’s American Rust and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’s Son, Fires maps the lives of working-class men and women who often find themselves a dice-throw away from being down-and-out, problems with love, family, and alcohol complicating perpetual crisis of the wallet and the heart. …
Continue reading »
By Sean Clark, on April 23rd, 2012 Author: Dirk Hayhurst
2012, C Hardcover
Filed Under: Memoir, Nonfiction
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
Dirk Hayhurst’s previous outing, The Bullpen Gospels, was a success largely due to its ability to relate a deeper life story through the framework of a minor league baseball season. The book was not without its flaws; namely, it didn’t have much of a narrative arc. Still its effortless humor and sentimentality made for a charming memoir that was one of my favorites of last year.
Out of My League, a direct followup, addresses the shortcomings of its predecessor, but falls a little short of recapturing what worked so well before. It’s a very good book, just one that suffers from trying a little too hard.
…
Continue reading »
By Sean Clark, on April 20th, 2012 [The insane and hilarious novel is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: Mark Leyner
2012, Hachette
Filed Under: Literary, Humor
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
Where to even begin with this book? This novel, if you want to call it that, is brilliant, perplexing, uproarious, and a little bit sad. One thing is certain: this is a superb bit of writing, and example of a writer at the top of his game, whose abilities with the written word put many of his contemporaries to shame. The rest is pretty much up for interpretation. If you want to glean more than just pretty bits of style from this book, come in prepared to to use parts of your brain you probably haven’t exercised in a while.
…
Continue reading »
By Nico Vreeland, on April 20th, 2012  Author: Kevin Barry
2012, Graywolf
Filed under: Literary, Fantasy
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
10 |
| Entertainment..... |
5 |
| Depth..... |
3 |
Kevin Barry is a wonderful stylist, a rare talent in the prose department. He writes City of Bohane in a gritty patois largely of his own making, halfway between Dashiell Hammett and A Clockwork Orange. Even so, it never gets too precious or contrived, and it never feels like Barry is reaching. That’s a very difficult feat, and the fact that Barry manages it for the entire novel without missing a beat, well, that’s nothing short of remarkable.
It’s a shame, then, that once you delve into the rich prose, there’s nothing inside worth getting to.
…
Continue reading »
By Arthur McCulloch, on April 19th, 2012 Author: Daniel Silva
2012, Harper
Filed Under: Thriller
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
3 |
| Entertainment..... |
4 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
Portrait of a Spy is about what you’d expect of a mass-market paperback spy novel. A new terrorist mastermind threatens the post-9/11 world and an elite force of spies must penetrate the evil network before it’s too late. Sigh.
The main character, Gabriel Allon, is a cross between a Dan Brown and a Robert Ludlum protagonist. Except, unlike Dan Brown’s hero, he’s not an art historian, he’s an artist. That’s right, an artist spy! No, seriously.
I actually think an artist spy could make for a unique and engaging character. Unfortunately, this book is missing a few pieces, and the most noticeably absent is character development. Gabriel Allon is a flat character, and throughout most of the book very little is invested in developing him any further. I get the impression that the author probably made more effort to establish his protagonist’s character in an earlier novel. Unfortunately, Portrait of a Spy is little more than Allon in action, and since the reader never really is able to connect with the character, there’s little reason to fear for his safety or otherwise care. …
Continue reading »
By Nico Vreeland, on April 6th, 2012  Author: Julianna Baggott
2012, Grand Central
Filed under: Sci-Fi
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
5 |
[WARNING: This review contains minor spoilers about the premise behind Pure's setting.]
When I first read about Pure, it sounded a lot like Suzanne Collins’s wildly popular Hunger Games series, but for adults. As it turns out, that’s a fair description, but it entails as many negatives as positives. Both series (Pure is the first in, of course, a trilogy) follow teenage girls in post-apocalyptic dystopias who find themselves thrust into central roles in the fight between the haves and the have-nots.
The Hunger Games offers a simple premise and structure, with obvious good guys and bad guys. The main character, Katniss, has to survive a battle royale fight to the death with 23 other teenagers. The rich people who orchestrate the battle are evil, and the poor children forced to fight are good (mostly).
Along the way, Katniss’s progress can be tracked by how many children still survive, and Collins offers regular twists and turns that propel the plot. Collins’s prose is plain and slightly juvenile, as should be expected, and you could call just about any facet of the series “simplistic” without stretching the truth. The characters, the setting, the way the action plays out, the moral questions with easy answers—all of these aspects of The Hunger Games are as uncomplicated as they are primitively satisfying.
By contrast, Pure offers a messier, more tangled, much less satisfying dystopian world. …
Continue reading »
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
Find it on Goodreads.
| 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. …
Continue reading »
By Arthur McCulloch, on March 28th, 2012 Author: George R.R. Martin
2003, Bantam Spectra
Filed Under: Fantasy
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
Martin’s third installment in A Song of Ice and Fire is phenomenal. The set-up of the first two books finally begins to really deliver, and the reader, who’s already invested numerous hours in this story, is rewarded for his adherence. At around halfway through this installment, much of the tension that has been mounting swiftly comes to a head. Although the reader may not be too pleased with the fate of some characters, the excitement is undeniable.
Martin’s timing accounts for much of his success. He pushes the fastidious depiction of his world and vision to the tipping point of being wearisome, then reins in his characters and his plots deftly, drawing the unfurled plot lines of A Storm of Swords together like fingers in a gauntleted fist. In what has been heretofore an increasingly vast world of “endless” characters, the players start to gravitate toward the same locations–even if they don’t yet meet. …
Continue reading »
By Eric Markowsky, on March 23rd, 2012  Author: Simon Van Booy
Harper Perennial, 2009
Filed under: Literary, Short Stories
Find it on Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
Love Begins in Winter appeared on my desk wrapped in silver paper this past Christmas. It wasn’t on my wish list, but I accepted it with all the love that was intended from someone who had a hunch about me and about this book. You might consider my review a belated thank you card for a favorite gift, or else a form of retroactive wishing for what I have already been given.
These are rare and wonderful stories, subtle in tone, ambitious in scope, and Romantic in vision. Each one performs a precise balancing act that spans multiple settings, voices, and perspectives, a feat rendered all the more impressive by a general lack of flash in the writing. Van Booy’s prose is direct and unadorned, as enjoyable to read as it is challenging in its depiction of conflicted emotions.
But perhaps my favorite thing about the writing here is the boldness of it. “Music is only a mystery to people who want it explained,” says Bruno Bonnet, the cellist who narrates the title story. “Music and love are the same.” Van Booy’s characters are prone to lofty speculations like this, and the success of these five stories lies in their ability to support their most challenging observations, persuading readers with precise, evocative detail.
…
Continue reading »
By Charles Rammelkamp, on March 22nd, 2012 Author: Mark Carp
2011, Xlibris
Filed Under: Literary, Short-Run
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
Written in the serviceable prose-style of a newspaper reporter that keeps the reader turning the pages, Mark Carp’s new novella, Cain, Abel and the Family Cohen, tells the story of the rapid rise and breathtakingly precipitous fall of Jonas Cohen, the youngest child of Rabbi Abraham Cohen. Related largely in the first person by Jonas himself (with a couple of minor but confusing switches in point of view in several places), Carp takes us through the beginning of the recent financial crisis when the housing bubble burst, financial institutions tanked and the economy went to hell. Jonas, a recent college graduate and hotshot financial analyst, has just joined the Frick Group, a New York hedge fund where he had interned for several summers.
A precocious investment analyst, Jonas foresees the downturn in the housing market when he arrives in New York to begin his job (his family is from Baltimore where his father leads a congregation) and notices the vastly overpriced properties. He quickly does his research and advises his boss, A.J. Buckner, about the imminent decline in prices and advises him that the Frick Group should begin “shorting housing indexes,” a maneuver to maximize shareholder profits by betting on the decline in housing prices. A real estate broker by day, Carp writes with authority about this in a concise and enlightening manner while furthering his plot.
Jonas’ predictions and advice pan out and he becomes something of a Wall Street celebrity, interviewed on business talkshow programs and consulted for his insights into the economy. A wunderkind, by his own description. …
Continue reading »
|
|
