[This new column documents the books I give up on in my search for great reads.]
The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern
Given up at p. 15
I get a little skittish with super-hyped debut novels (cf.), so I kept my expectations purposely low for this one. Still, I was immediately uncharmed by its style, which felt sloppy and vague, the handiwork of an unsure author. This line especially caught my attention, from when the magician Prospero (authors: please stop calling magician characters Prospero) meets the daughter he didn’t know he had:
The bright eyes peering out from under a cloud of unruly brown curls are smaller, wider versions of the magician’s own.
How can something be both smaller and wider than something else? Shorter and wider, maybe, but widerness and smallerness are mutually exclusive. This might seem like a small thing, but it speaks to a lack of authority and control (and possibly talent) on the part of the author. I read until the end of the ebook preview, but I couldn’t be persuaded to pay for the whole thing.
I loved DBC Pierre’s debut novel, and I bought this latest one from Amazon UK over a year ago, eight months before its release in the U.S. I read the first two hundred pages with some interest, finding it well-written but largely undramatic. I saved the last third of the book for when I would write the review, just before its U.S. release date. Then I could never persuade myself to pick it up again.
The story follows a glutton (or gourmand) named Gabriel, as he tries to have one last decadent trip before his planned suicide. The trip itself was quite fun, but the second half focuses on his efforts to throw a party at a decomissioned airport, and, no doubt, his eventual decision not to kill himself after all. It felt much more hackneyed than the arcless first half, like Pierre wanted to give his hero something to actually accomplish. For me, it didn’t work.
I was an avid Terry Pratchett reader as a nerdy adolescent (Jingo was one of my favorites), and his latest Discworld novel, which seems to hint at a discussion of the right-to-death issues he champions, felt like a good place to return.
But, I couldn’t seem to get into it, and ultimately I gave up before finding the kind of rich, entertaining narrative I remembered.
The opening chapters center around a cop married to a very rich lady, and it devolves into a relatively dull comedy of manners as he shakes the wrong people’s hands and so forth. Perhaps Pratchett’s mind, understandably, leans toward more serious issues these days. Or perhaps it’s just more suited for nerdy adolescents. I can’t read Tom Robbins anymore either.
If overhyped debut novels make me skittish, marquee mysteries give me the downright willies (I blame this one and this one, for starters). So my hackles went up when Defending Jacob’s first chapter featured a phonetic pronunciation of a prosecutor’s funny name, Logiudice (“(pronounced la-JOO-dis)”), so that we readers wouldn’t lose the thread when this happens:
They called him Milhouse, after a dweeby character on The Simpsons, and they came up with a thousand variations on his name: LoFoolish, LoDoofus, Sid Vicious, Judicious, on and on.
“They,” in this scene, refers to everyone who worked with this guy: legal clerks, police officers, secretaries. Logiudice is a rising state prosecutor, ostensibly deserving of significant respect, but he has weird teeth, and so Landay wants us to believe he would be the butt of everyone’s jokes. And he also wants us to believe that one of the most memorable jokes these people come up with is calling him “Sid Vicious.”
These are stupid jokes that would not emerge among a group of real humans, except perhaps stupid humans whom I do not wish to read about, idiots who need to have a Simpsons reference explained to them in detail. (Note to Mr. Landay: one character calling another one “Milhouse” is not worth an explanation. (Note 2: Milhouse is nothing like Sid Vicious. Both names should not be applied to the same character in the space of two sentences.))
This might sound nit-picky, but I’ve read too many stupid, mechanical mysteries in the last year to get into another one by this kind of tin-eared writer.
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.
[At the end of every month, Aaron surveys the comics he read, celebrates the best, considers the rest, and takes stock of what it means to be a contemporary comic fan. Follow "The State of My Pull List" here.]
Spotlight
Mondo #1
There is a class divide in the comics community, and there has been for decades. But it’s not between haves and have nots, or red states and blue states; rather, it’s all about “mainstream” versus “ art” comics. Mainstream generally refers to superhero/adventure/fantasy comics published monthly in the 22-page format by one of the major companies (DC and Marvel, obviously, but also Image, Dynamite, Boom!, etc.), while art comics are graphic novels or otherwise whole collections published by Fantagraphics and Top Shelf, or serialized in journals like Mome, Taddle Creek, and McSweeney’s. Art comics are discussed and reviewed on The Comics Journal, mainstream comics are discussed and reviewed on Newsarama. Mainstream comics are produced by a group of writers and artists and are therefore sloppy, while art comics tend to be product of a single creator’s careful attention and concern for the story and art.
Those distinctions are tenuous and permeable – there are comics produced by Marvel and DC that are every bit as exquisitely rendered as something published by Drawn and Quarterly, and there are independent, creator-driven art comics that tell tedious stories with uninspired art. Talking this way doesn’t do much good for anyone who wishes to take comics seriously (another class distinction!). But that doesn’t stop fans, critics, and even industry professionals from ensconcing themselves in one camp or the other. I’m certainly not immune – I strive to be honest with my reading habits and taste in this column, and even a casual browse through each entry reveals that I read a lot of superhero comics every month. I’m not at all embarrassed or ashamed to enjoy superhero comics, but I acknowledge that my choice in reading (and, more importantly, buying) habits says something about what I value.
This division is a self-inflicted wound, and I didn’t think there was much to be done about it until I read Ted McKeever’s Mondo #1. The first of a three-part mini-series published by Image Comics, Mondo #1 is an oversized issue both in page count (40 versus the typical 20) and size (the pages are an inch wider than the standard format), and features a cardstock cover. In presentation it more closely resembles the heft and substance of the European album format, but priced and distributed like a typical issue of a monthly book (in fact, $5 for 40 pages is a better deal than the usual $3 or $4 for 20 pages.) I knew nothing about Mondo before I saw it on the shelf, and picked it up solely because of it stood out on the shelf, but didn’t seem out of place among other titles.
The story and art between the covers lives up to the promise of the format – Mondo was easily the best-looking book I read in February, if not the year so far (and probably 2011 as well). McKeever draws with an intense flexibility – it moves from scratchy and sketchy to intensely specific and detailed, sometimes in the same panel. “Cartoony” is an apt description of his art, but his line isn’t clean and elegant like Darwyn Cooke’s, or Cliff Chiang’s, or other artists who get categorized in the same way. One point of comparison would be Kevin Eastman and the early Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics, which had the same darkness and rich detail; another is “Liquid Television”, MTV’s animation anthology from the 90s that featured similarly intense, bizarre worlds and loose caricatures (and it’s worth pointing out that several “Liquid Television” segments were derived from the indie comics scene).
And like those “Liquid Television” shorts, Mondo is aggressively bleak, and a bit juvenile. The story follows Catfish Mandu, a meek, harried employee of a nightmarish chicken processing facility, who only communicates through chicken-like clucking. He’s haunted by visions of a demonic chicken, and when one of those visions leads to an accident at the plant he is transformed into a muscled, violent monstrosity, venting his rage at his tormentors by mutilating them. There’s also a subplot about developments on Venice Beach, and one featuring a psychotic young woman named Kitten Kaboodle, but they’re still just surrealistic tangents at this point.
Juvenile doesn’t have to be a bad thing, though, particularly when it’s executed this well. Take the introduction of Kitten Kaboodle – when harassed by a lecherous gas station attendant, she flips and rips his arm off at the elbow. It’s a grotesque moment of ultraviolence, but the gore is expressive, and is reflected in the lettering of the attendant’s scream. And the action is made more effective by the transition from the previous panel, a staggeringly detailed close-up of Kitten’s face, with pursed lips, jagged bangs, and giant, terrifying owl eyes prefiguring the violence of the next page.
I’m not naïve enough to think that Mondo is the model for the future of the medium – not every mainstream superhero comic will look this good, and I don’t expect Chris Ware to begin publishing monthly issues anytime soon. And I don’t know how other readers reacted to it – be they dedicated genre fans, “literary” readers, or those who seek out and enjoy comics of all stripes. But Mondo #1 has the potential to change a reader’s mind, no matter how it’s set, and encourage experimentation in taste. And if risk and experimentation become the norm, for readers and creators alike, then the comics community will be a lot healthier in the years to come. … Continue reading »
Alain de Botton seems like an eloquent intellectual who descends only occasionally into maddening pretension. His latest book, in which he prescribes that atheists adopt some of the practices and rituals of organized religion, is the kind of pretentious societal prescribing that should’ve probably been killed. Brooks indulges him for quite a while, teasing out the most enlightening facets of de Botton’s thesis, before finding that “many of his ideas seem silly.” This is a book to read about, but not one to read. Also, the sketch of de Botton’s idea for a “Temple of the Earth”—a Washington Monument that you stand inside to become non-deifically inspired—is something to see.
This odd review throws a wet blanket on my own anticipation of Rash’s latest novel, portraying it as a straightforward, mechanical tale of doom, described in simple language, with inevitable results. That would also be a fair description of Serena, Rash’s excellent previous novel, but Le Guin doesn’t find much to recommend The Cove. It’s cause for a bit of concern, if not yet panic.
Ulin’s opening line reads: “I want to talk about criticism, about what it is and how it operates.” He never really quite gets there, not in the way I wanted from one of the country’s best book critics writing about another critic whom he obviously admires. But along the way, Ulin’s meanderings are worth the trip, and it seems John Leonard would’ve liked it that way.
This might be one of those books that everybody likes but me—it wouldn’t be the first time. Ron Charles writes pretty sharp reviews, and he’s obviously smitten with Groff. She writes good characters, I’ll stipulate that, and it sounds like this novel will play to her strengths (interiority, as opposed to interaction). But I’m still not buying.
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.
This weird biography follows Larry Hillblom, who took a part-time job as a courier in law school, founded DHL (he’s the H), forced out his two partners, got rich, sold his shares, and then quit and became “a glorified sex tourist, trolling the dives and brothels of Vietnam and the Philippines for pubescent girls.” Weird, and gross, but sounds like it could make for a good story. Burrough positively gushes over it, saying, “Mr. Scurlock has returned with a story that is everything I enjoy in a book: strange, exotic, inspiring, extensively researched, clearly written and, yeah, sort of creepy.” This despite the fact that Hillblom’s chasing after teenage prostitutes is too distasteful for more than an oblique mention in a family newspaper.
Shadid’s final book, a memoir about his time restoring his grandfather’s house in Lebanon, might not be as important as a lot of his Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting, but it sounds as epic and elegant as such a book could be. Shadid evidently incorporates his family’s history in the Middle East, and his own personal history in war zones, to craft a compelling and impressive narrative. (For more on Shadid, and his death last month by horse allergy while on assignment in Syria, check out this piece by the photographer who accompanied him on that last trip.)
Gessen’s “political history” of the reign of Vladimir Putin (who was elected president of Russia by a suspiciously wide margin last Sunday) sounds fiery and cutting, if perhaps biased. Wood, by contrast, comes off as a Putin apologist, saying that, even if you’d call Russia amoral and destructive, at least Putin has “a coherent long-term strategic vision for his country.” It’s a weak defense, and Wood’s review sounds almost as “furiously accusatory” as he calls Gessen’s book. Still, a profile of a career KGB agent and government manipulator should obviously be taken with a grain of salt, no matter what it says.
Completing the nonfiction quadfecta this week, Taylor’s book is an oral history of London, compiled from five years’ worth of interviews with “subway workers and sex workers; homeless people and millionaires; enthusiasts and malcontents; immigrants and old-timers; the practical and the dreamy; people going and people coming.” Lyall’s verdict finds the result sympathetic, entertaining, and wildly diverse. For more, trying China Mieville’s recent sprawling piece on the same city.
In brief: Slate’s new book section has a lot of promise, even though it has relatively few actual book reviews. Here’s a piece about an existential kids’ book, and here’s one on the horrors of the pregnancy classic, What to Expect When You’re Expecting. … Random House, as it turns out, isn’t as cool as it looked like they might be for a second. … The Lorax, a crassly commercialized adaptation of a classic Dr. Seuss book, rockets to the year’s best opening weekend. Looks like selling out pays. … And the takeaway from this piece is that Amazon is moving away from monopolization. Those boycotts are working.
[This feature is a brief monthly summary of interesting books coming out this month. Follow it here. Click the pictures or the title links to find these books at Goodreads.]
Here’s what I know about Nick Harkaway’s new book: there’s a gangster in it, and it runs about 200,000 words. And I’m not sure about the second point. I’ve been studiously avoiding any and all information about Angelmaker. I’m going solely on my experience with Harkaway’s last novel, The Gone-Away World, a rollicking, inventive, and wholly entertaining post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel. It was so good that I’ve been looking forward to his followup for years.
Like Angelmaker, I haven’t been reading much about Leyner’s new novel, but that’s more because Leyner’s writing tends to be unsummarizable. You might call him surreal, or avant-garde—he’s very funny, to me at least, but the average Goodreads reader HATES him. So if you’re thinking about picking this one up, ignore all the flap copy and most of the reviews and just try out the first few pages. You’ll be able to tell pretty quickly whether you’re into it or it makes your skin crawl.
Bernie Krause, a naturalist and musician, examines how animals create and utilize sound, and interprets soundscapes as evolutionary mechanisms instead of just mindless cacophonies. He also explores and explains how the growing noise of human civilization threatens to drown out natural sounds altogether. Sounds like the book version of a David Attenborough documentary, which would be fine by me. Speaking of the effects of human noise, here’s an amazing Attenborough clip in which a lyre bird has learned to imitate the sounds of cameras and chainsaws.
[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.
