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By Nico Vreeland, on December 7th, 2011 [This funny, accessible human psychology survey is a C4 Great Read.]
 Subtitle: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself
Author: David McRaney
2011, Gotham
Filed under: Nonfiction
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
10 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
Freelance journalist David McRaney’s first book is part psychology survey, part self-help guide, and part humor column. McRaney contends that we are all driven by a need to feel awesome and perfect. That’s an evolutionary advantage, because it means that those of us who aren’t very awesome (almost all of us) won’t commit suicide, and the human race can continue. But it also means that we civilians know next to nothing about the real reasons we like and do the things we like and do. Instead, we make up rationales and convince ourselves that our fables are truth.
Each of McRaney’s 48 chapters deals with a different way in which we deceive ourselves—”Self-Fulfilling Prophecies,” “The Bystander Effect,” “Confimartion Bias.” McRaney collects and synthesizes the results from a myriad of psychology studies, and interprets the ramifications with a healthy dose of sarcasm and humor. Here’s the one-paragraph summary:
You are a story you tell yourself. You engage in introspection, and with great confidence you see the history of your life with all the characters and settings—and you at the center as protagonist in the tale of who you are. This is all a great, beautiful confabulation without which you could not function.
The ways this confabulation plays out are often strikingly dramatic.
…
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By Nico Vreeland, on November 18th, 2011 [This multi-generation literary family novel is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Peter Orner
2011, Little, Brown
Filed under: Literary
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
Love and Shame and Love centers around a Jewish male named Alexander Popper, simply “Popper” as he’s known to almost everyone—I hesitate to describe him more thoroughly, because the book covers nearly his entire life (as well as several other lives). Is it fair to call him a “writer,” or a “Democrat,” or even a “man,” when each of those descriptors will, at some point or other, fail to apply to him?
The first time we see Popper, he’s almost 13, nervously waiting to talk to a local judge in what we’re told is a kind of Bar Mitzvah. Five pages later, Popper’s at college, getting a degree in creative writing and falling in love with Kat, whom he’ll eventually marry. Soon the novel backs up a generation and follows Popper’s parents, Philip and Miriam, detailing how they fell in love and had kids and then, as the title implies, how their love fell apart.
Then it’s back another generation, to detail Popper’s grandparents, Seymour and Bernice, and how their marriage fared before and after WWII.
It takes nearly three hundred pages to get back to Popper and Kat’s life after college, and those pages are a jumble of time periods, perspectives, characters, and relationships, intercut with letters and drawings and epigraphs. Even though Orner’s an excellent writer, this technique has a tendency to underwhelm and confuse, at least for the first half of the novel. The characters are too briefly described, too obliquely set in the chronology of the Popper clan (and more often set along a timeline of Democratic politics, which doesn’t much help). It takes close reading or half the book’s length to sort out exactly who’s who, and whom each section focuses on, because those clues too are well-guarded.
Eventually, though, a rich picture of the Popper clan emerges, and by the end, each tiny moment reveals an intimate, and often heartbreaking glimpse into the core of a life.
…
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By Charles Rammelkamp, on October 27th, 2011 [This dense novel is a C4 Great Read. Find it and other C4 favorites on our Great Reads shelf at Powell's.]
Author: Tom Frick
2011, Burning Books
Filed Under: Literary, Historical.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
10 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
Set in the early 1800’s in Robin Hood’s territory, Thomas Frick’s The Iron Boys is a real tour de force that takes the mayhem of the Luddites who resisted the Industrial Revolution as its subject. The term “Luddite” has long been used to describe a person who resists technological change, but it’s a sure bet that not many are really aware of its historical roots as an unorganized, almost spontaneous insurrection against the dehumanizing tendencies of the emerging capitalist economy.
The Luddites flourished in the second decade of the nineteenth century in the Northern English counties of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Ned Ludd, the mythical figure after whom the movement was named, was reputed to live in Sherwood Forest. The Luddites were crafts workers who largely had control over their lives and livelihoods until the advent of the textile factories, which dehumanized workers in the name of profits. Indeed, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was written to an extent as a reaction to Luddism, an eloquent treatise against the machine. Byron championed the movement in the House of Lords, a lone voice against the machine. The Luddites attacked the mills and smashed the machines that were ruining their autonomous way of life. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on October 13th, 2011 [This globe-trotting technothriller is a C4 Great Read. Find it and other C4 Great Reads on our Great Reads shelf at Powell's.]
 Author: Neal Stephenson
2011, William Morrow
Filed under: Literary, Thriller
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
A few weeks after Reamde came out, there was a bit of a kerfuffle about the ebook edition being full of typos. This is not surprising. The paper version has more than its share of typos, too. Not an overwhelming amount, perhaps two dozen mistakes over a thousand pages. But more than you see in most professionally published books.
I can entirely understand these errors. Reamde runs a thousand pages, roughly 400,000 words, and it was published just three years after Stephenson’s last novel. In addition, it’s a globe-trotting thriller, steeped in real-world facts and places, technology and tactics. And it has its own built-from-the-ground-up online virtual world.
It took me three weeks just to read this thing, let alone proofread it. I can’t even imagine editing or writing it. So a few mistakes are certainly forgivable. But they tell of Stephenson’s attitude toward writing, which has emphasized, in the past decade, length above all, moreso than ensuring the highest sentence-to-sentence quality possible.
This is not to say that Reamde feels rushed or shoddily produced. On the contrary, it’s very very good—entertaining, immersive, thrilling, fun, educational and full of great characters. But it’s not Stephenson’s best work. His best, in my mind, is still Snow Crash, the revolutionary information-disease cyberpunk epic that made his name. Snow Crash is also a hefty read at well over 100,000 words—I’d guess 150K—but it’s less than half the size of Reamde, and it shows a different Stephenson than the one from 2011. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on August 25th, 2011 [This funny, character-driven cyborg novel is a C4 Great Read. Find it and other C4 favorites on our Great Reads shelf at Powell's.]
 Author: Max Barry
2011, Vintage
Filed under: Literary, Sci-fi
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
10 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
Machine Man began its existence as a kind of blog through which Max Barry sent readers one page a day of the novel in progress. Those readers, who had to pay after the first 43 pages, gave Barry feedback that he sometimes incorporated into the plot of the novel. He even let the cover be decided by popular vote.
This sounds crazy. I mean, crowd-sourcing a novel? That’s a train wreck waiting to happen. That backstory made me skeptical of the book, to the point that I almost didn’t read it. Luckily I eventually did, and the novel itself overcame my skepticism and won me over in a big big way, because the end result, Machine Man the finished product, is delightful.
For the record, I have previously used the word “delightful” zero times to describe a book, but it’s been a long time since I’ve read one that comes together this well. Machine Man has a fascinating plot, outstanding (and hilarious) writing, and one of the all-time best sci-fi protagonists ever. It’s easily one of the two best books I’ve read this year. Let me tell you why. …
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By Mike Beeman, on August 12th, 2011 [This fine adventure story is a C4 Great Read. Find it and other C4 favorites on our Great Reads shelf at Powell's.]
Author: Carol Birch
2011, Doubleday
Filed Under: Literary, Historical.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
I read a review of this last Wednesday and, thanks to the magic and compulsive buying ease that comes with owning a nookColor, had finished by Sunday night. I’m ready to jump on the top of the pig-pile of glowing reviews. This book was a blast. How can you not like a novel that begins like this:
I was born twice. First in a wooden room that jutted out over the black water of the Thames, and then again eight years later in the Highway, when the tiger took me in his mouth and everything truly began.
As far as plot goes, this book is almost a mash-up. It has three distinct parts, each of which reminded me of an old favorite. The first section is solid Dickens: it follows Jaffy Brown, a London street urchin in the true Dickensian sense. (The son of a young “fallen” mother, we meet him happily walking the sewers, searching for coins in the muck with his bare feet.) A chance encounter with an escaped tiger leads Jaff to the title character, the eccentric Charles Jamrach, an overblown menagerie owner and importer of exotic animals who quickly takes the youth under his wing, where the innate animal magnetism that led Jaff into a tiger’s mouth quickly leads him to success. …
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By Sean Clark, on July 21st, 2011 [This time-travel-focused genre buster is a C4 Great Read. Find it and other C4 favorites on our Great Reads shelf at Powell's.]
 Author: Félix. J. Palma
2011, Atria Books
Filed Under: Literary, Historical, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Romance.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
There’s very little I can say about this book without spoiling something. So I’m going to try something a little different to start. Let’s do word association. Take a look at this list and see how many things you think could help make for a good story:
Victorian romance. Parasols. Hoodwinks. Murder. Historical figures in fictional situations. Meticulous plotting. Vengeance. Paradoxes. Bawdiness. Secret societies. Blackmail. The Terminator. Drunk British whores. Jack the Ripper slaughtering drunk British whores. Minority Report. Tribal magic. The time machine in H.G. Wells’s attic. Street brawls. Apocalyptic robot battles. Dimensional rifts. Time travel. Henry James and Bram Stoker having a sleepover. Time Cop. Lava guns. Immortal dogs. Naive girls easily coerced into sex. Parallel universes. Steam powered automatons. Fourth dimensional dragon-like beasts. Sword fights.
Pretty good odds for an entertaining book right? Right. In any case, if that piqued your interest sufficiently, go ahead and skip the rest of the review, pick up this book, and enjoy. Read on and I’ll try and explain a little more substantively, but be aware that while I’ll try to limit them, there will be spoilers after the break. If you already think you want to read the book, do so, then return to my review in the future (oooooh).
Last chance to avoid SPOILERS. Okay, you’ve been warned. …
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By Aaron Block, on July 20th, 2011 [This comic book history/treatise/memoir is a C4 Great Read. Find it and other C4 favorites on our Great Reads shelf at Powell's.]
 Author: Grant Morrison
2011, Spiegel & Grau
Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction, Graphic Novel
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
10 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
In Supergods, a nonfiction exploration of superheroes as a fictive phenomenon, comic book writer and artist Grant Morrison argues that Superman is humanity’s greatest accomplishment. From anyone else that might be considered a cynical statement; of all the scientific and artistic achievements, across centuries, nothing scores higher than a gaudily costumed, flying strongman born in a medium that’s not even 100 years old?
But Morrison is absolutely sincere—he contends that superhero comics are not just entertainment for children and fodder for blockbuster movie adaptations, but windows into a separate reality populated by gods that fight intensely pitched battles for good, of which Superman is the best and brightest.
Morrison’s is a delightfully optimistic premise, doubly refreshing when considered next to the daily articles and blog posts about the imminent death of the comic book industry. Those writers worry (rightfully so) about relevance, demographics, and market share, while Morrison knows that the stakes are actually much higher. How appropriate that a book about the history and potential of superheroes aims to save the world. …
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By Sean Clark, on June 14th, 2011 [This unique novel is a C4 Great Read. Find it and other C4 favorites on our Great Reads shelf at Powell's.]
Author: Umberto Eco , translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock
2005, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Filed Under: Literary, Historical.
Get a copy at Powell’s.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
10 |
| Visuals... |
9 |
When I reviewed Emma Donoghue’s Room, I noted that its most standout feature was the narrator who had to create his own context for the world around him, as he lacked the social upbringing most of us take for granted. I wish I had read The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana before then, as Eco does something quite similar, and he’s much more successful at it.
Rather than a boy who grew up in a rape-cave, MFQL is about an old man who has lost his episodic memory due to a stroke. Giambattista Bodoni (who goes by Yambo) awakes in a Milanese hospital lacking not only his memories but his entire sense of self. His associative abilities have been crippled. He knows what a toothbrush and paste are, but not what it feels like. He does not remember his name, or know who his wife and friends are. An extremely well-read dealer of antique books, Yambo retains all his knowledge of what he’s read. But he’s lost all attachments to them. I know, I know, amnesia stories are about clichéd as they come, but Eco is a brilliant writer, and he pulls it off as if it is the freshest of ideas. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on May 27th, 2011 [This funny, grueling addiction story is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Patrick deWitt
2009, Mariner
Filed under: Literary
Get a copy at Powell’s
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
After reading Patrick deWitt’s excellent new Western, The Sisters Brothers, I went straight out and found his only other book, Ablutions. It did not disappoint.
Ablutions follows a nameless Hollywood bartender, a degenerate drunk on a steep downward trajectory. He spends his nights drinking free Jameson and warring with regulars at the bar he works at and hates; he spends his days suffering atrocious hangovers and fighting with his wife. Generally, he mislives his life.
I don’t entirely know how deWitt sold this debut novel, because that thumbnail description doesn’t begin to do justice to this funny, lovely, tragic, gripping book. …
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