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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 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
Find it at Goodreads
| 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 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
Find it at Goodreads
| 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 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. …
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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.
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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
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. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on March 8th, 2012 [This heartbreaking portrait of an Indian slum is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Katherine Boo
2012, Random House
Filed under: Nonfiction
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
10 |
In the forty-odd years since New Journalism broke down the walls between reporter and subject, the first-person voice has become a plague in the world of nonfiction.
In certain situations, stories can benefits from reporters’ active involvement—like, say, if the reporter is Hunter S. Thompson and whatever he’s doing is more interesting than whatever he’s supposed to be covering.
But usually, these days, the word “I” points to some weakness or flaw in the writing: a lack of solid material, or a lack of effort on the part of the writer. By explaining how he came to find certain subjects, he can gloss over whether or not those subjects are crucial—or even important—to the story at hand.
For example, in a recent issue of the New Yorker, a piece about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker included mini-profiles of two signature-gatherers for the petition to recall Walker. The writer, William Finnegan, finds his first signature-gatherer, Joanne Staudacher, seemingly at random, and then latches onto another one through her. Finnegan writes:
Staudacher said that her hero was another Oshkosh circulator, known as Fighting Bob. I asked to meet him. Staudacher contacted him, and Bob—Bob Bergman—and I rendezvoused in downtown Oshkosh. Indoors.
This paragraph is mostly fluff, but it uses the writer’s personal experience as connective tissue between the two circulators. Why did Staudacher call Bob her hero? How had they met? Are either of these people central in any way to the signature-gathering? Are they average gatherers or did everyone else have a different experience?
The sentences describing how Finnegan moved from Staudacher to Bob obscure a lot of those points, and they make it feel like Finnegan talked to precisely two gatherers. But there are worse ways this technique, in the wrong hands, impacts journalism. From the next paragraph in the same article:
[Bob] had collected, he told me, eight hundred and thirteen signatures to recall Walker …
By sliding in that “he told me” Finnegan distances himself from the facts of the situation and from having to, like, count signatures. He also makes that statistic entirely worthless as a piece of reportage. That “he told me” translates to “I didn’t confirm.” It’s accepted laziness, and it’s become pervasive in today’s journalistic landscape.
So it’s refreshing and engaging to read a nonfiction book from which the author has absented herself entirely, leaving only hard-won facts to take her place.
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By Robert Cooperman, on February 28th, 2012 [This collection of exemplary short fiction is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: Patrick Michael Finn
2011, Black Lawrence Press
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
10 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
10 |
Patrick Michael Finn’s award-winning second story collection, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet, depicts the grim industrial nightmare and post-industrial hell of Joliet, Illinois. Think of Dante’s Inferno and Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” shuffled together and you begin to get a picture of just how grim this world is, and how pitilessly Finn depicts it, while still making us care about these characters stuck in their blighted urban Ninth Circle of Hell. But when the damned are stuck in hell together, they do hellish things to each other, and nothing namby-pamby like the infernal and eternal talkers of Sartre’s No Exit. No, these are all-American sinners, who take no prisoners, and have no pity for themselves, so why should they have any for their victims?
So in the course of the opening story, “Smokestack Polka,” a kid whose father has died of a heart attack on his walk home from his job at the Joliet railyards tries to kill the loathsome wife- beating thug who tries to put the moves on his mother, six months after his father’s death, at his cousin Reenie’s wedding. The brick the unnamed narrator on the roof hurls down at Tomczak barely misses its target, and Tomczak takes the incident for an accident and concludes the story with, “But let’s get the hell out of here. This fucking place is falling apart,” which, whether Tomczak realizes it or not, pretty much describes all the lives depicted in this powerful collection. …
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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 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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