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By Nico Vreeland, on March 19th, 2013 This inventive, hilarious sci-fi novel is a C4 Great Read.
 Author: Leonard Richardson
2012, Candlemark & Gleam
Filed under: Sci-Fi
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
Boing Boing is something of an unreliable place to get book recommendations. In 2011 Mark Fraunfelder called Ready Player One “the best science fiction novel I’ve read in a decade,” which made its shruggable mediocrity an unpleasant surprise.
So when Cory Doctorow said that Constellation Games “IS AN AMAZING BOOK,” I wasn’t expecting much. A debut novel, from one of Doctorow’s writing students, about a video game reviewer who makes contact with aliens. That could go wrong about a million different ways, and it can only go right maybe three. Its cover seemed to sound an extra warning; I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an uglier one, including this one.
But the Kindle version was only $5, and I’d been jonesing for sci-fi lately, so I ponied up, expecting almost nothing. Imagine my surprise when I found that Constellation Games IS AN AMAZING BOOK. …
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By Sean Clark, on March 12th, 2013 [This coming of age quasi-mystery novel set on a reservation is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Lousie Erdrich
2012, Harper
Filed Under: Literary, Mystery
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
I went into this book (which won the 2012 National Book Award) completely blind, on purpose. When it comes to books that I expect a lot from (hype is one thing, collecting a bunch of awards is another), I sometimes prefer to not read even the jacket copy. So i had no idea what this book was about. My immediate association was to think of Patrick Swayze (Roadhouse; round-house kicks in Roadhouse), and thankfully that was way off the mark.
Before anything else, I was struck by Erdrich’s descriptive prose. Here’s the beautiful opening paragraph:
Small trees had attacked my parents’ house at the foundation. They were just seedlings with one or two rigid, healthy leaves. Nevertheless, the stalky shoots had managed to squeeze through knife cracks in the decorative brown shingles covering the cement blocks. They had grown into the unseen walls and it was difficult to pry them loose. My father wiped his palm across his forehead and damned their toughness. I was using a rusted old dandelion fork with a splintered handle; he wielded a long, slim iron fireplace poker that was probably doing more harm than good. As my father prodded away blindly at the places where he sensed roots might have penetrated, he was surely making convenient holes in the mortar for next year’s seedlings.
It’s a great description that does a great job of foreshadowing the story to come. This is a story about about a family’s seemingly futile struggle against unseen forces and the pull of decay. It centers around Joe, a young Native American teen on the cusp of maturation, who suddenly finds his world crashing down around him–and the gritty realities of his world weighing on him heavily. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on February 5th, 2013 This Calvino-esque collection is a C4 Great Read.
 Author: Antonio Tabucchi, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks
2013, Archipelago Books
Filed under: Literary, Short Stories
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
I’d never heard of Antonio Tabucchi before I tore open the wrapping on a copy of The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico this past Christmas. Turns out, he was one of the most celebrated Italian authors of the modern era until his death just this past year. His name stands along side the likes of Primo Levi and Italo Calvino, and for good reason.
The stories in Flying Creatures more than live up to comparison with the works of any other postmodernist masters. Tabucchi renders narratives as light as air in rich, thoughtful prose. These pieces are fabulist, historical, experimental, philosophical.
But rather than laboring the point any further myself, let me share how Tabucchi characterizes the tales collected here (as translated by Tim Park) in his brief introduction to Flying Creatures:
I would have liked to call them Extravaganzas, not so much for their style, as because many of them seem to wander about in a strange outside that has no inside, like drifting splinters, survivors of some whole that never was. Alien to any orbit, I have the impression they navigate in familiar spaces whose geometry nevertheless remains a mystery; let’s say domestic thickets: the interstitial zones of our daily having-to-be, or bumps on the surface of existence.
If that’s enough to make you want to run off and read these stories, I won’t blame you if you stop reading this review right here. If you still need more convincing, then let me tell you about “The Passion of Dom Pedro.” …
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By Nico Vreeland, on January 25th, 2013 The latest Saunders is a C4 Great Read.
 Author: George Saunders
2013, Random House
Filed under: Literary, Short Stories
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
10 |
I have no idea how George Saunders does it. His stories have some kind of alchemy that I can’t figure out. As many as half rub me the wrong way, but the good ones are exceptional. This collection is no different.
While reading Tenth of December I jotted down notes, as I usually do, trying to come up with an explanation—or at least a theory—for my shifting reactions to George Saunders. After thousands of words’ worth of contradicting notes, I still can’t figure it out.
For certain, some of his old tricks are turning stale. There are two stories (“Escape from Spiderhead” and “My Chivalric Fiasco”) in which characters take satirically named drugs (Docilryde™, KnightLyfe™) administered by a sinister institutional overlord personified by a dumpy middle manager. Both take place in typical Saundersian locales (prison/drug trial facility, amusement park). Both offer decent prose but disappointing endings.
But another quintessentially Saundersian story blew my doors off. …
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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
Follow it on Goodreads
| 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 Nico Vreeland, on June 15th, 2012 [This intense mystery is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Gillian Flynn
2012, Crown
Filed under: Mystery, Thriller
Find this book at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
A month ago, an article in the New York Times detailed how commercial authors like Lisa Scottoline now feel pressure to write faster than ever, some cranking out two novels a year in order (so they claim) to stay at the forefront of their readers’ minds.
I won’t list all the reasons this is bad for the publishing world, because Gone Girl happens to be a much more eloquent argument against the two-books-a-year publishing model.
Gillian Flynn writes one mystery every three years, one mystery worth at least half a dozen of the crappy, wooden thrillers cranked out by the Lisa Scottoline method. Flynn’s previous book, Dark Places, stunned me with its excellent execution of a tricky premise, and it instantly became one of the top five mysteries I’ve ever read. Now Gone Girl joins it and indicates that Flynn just might be the best mystery writer alive.
…
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By Marc Velasquez, on June 4th, 2012 [This collection of essays about music is a C4 Great Read]
 Author: Rick Moody
2012, Back Bay Books
Filed Under: Nonfiction
Find it on Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
10 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
For an essay to be great, it must be balanced. The writer must be overly knowledgeable about his subject and yet also accessibly present said subject. I don’t want to read essays written by an author who knows less about his subject than I do, nor do I want to read essays by a writer who makes me feel like an ass for not knowing enough. I want to feel like I’m learning, not like I’m being preached to.
In his collection On Celestial Music, Rick Moody displays his deft ability to write essays. In all thirteen of the collection’s pieces, Moody finds the sweet spot, striking that balance between teaching and preaching. The book is presented as a collection about music, but the essays are really much broader, covering creativity, and life itself.
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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
Find it at Goodreads
| 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 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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