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By Nico Vreeland, on January 16th, 2013 [In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]
 The Balloonist, by MacDonald Harris. Reviewed by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post.
When Michael Dirda calls a novelist “highly original,” that’s my cue to listen up. This is a reissue of a book first published in 1976, about a Swedish “aeronaut” who attempts, with two companions, to pilot a balloon to the North Pole. There are erotic flashbacks and bombastic philosophizing, but I’m most interested in the “bleakly exhilarating vision” and Dirda’s promise that this is “the perfect reading for winter.”
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, by Lawrence Wright. Reviewed by Janet Maslin in the New York Times.
This new book about the director Paul Haggis and Scientology will not be published in the UK over libel concerns, and won’t be published in Canada for murky reasons Random House declines to comment on. After this review, these issues become a bit clearer. Maslin says the book is “full of wild stories and accusations,” and that Wright quotes from “what is claimed to be a short secret Hubbard memoir,” which sounds every bit as suspect as Xenu. All in all, it sounds like this one provides more lurid details than salient new information.
The Miniature Wife, and Other Stories, by Manuel Gonzales. Reviewed by Hector Tobar in the L.A. Times.
Tobar doesn’t drop Marquez’s name in this review, but that’s who his descriptions remind me of. Gonzales’s debut story collection includes a man whose muscles wither as he composes music, a hijacked plane that stays in the air for twenty years, a unicorn, and lots of other fantastic elements. If there’s a 5% chance this guy is the next Marquez, then the book is probably worth a shot.
Wool, by Hugh Howey. Reviewed by Alison Flood in the Guardian.
The Guardian rather disingenuously compares Wool to Fifty Shades of Grey, because both began as fan fiction and gained such a following that they’ve been properly published. Wool is, in fact, a gritty dystopian story about a world where the outdoor air is poisonous, all humankind lives in one massive underground silo, and a priest class tries to keep the populace ignorant. Flood calls it uneven but really good when it’s good.
In brief: Everybody’s reviewing Jared Diamond’s new book, and we will, too, when I manage to finish it. In the meantime, here’s David Brooks on it. … The LA Times’s Winter Book Preview. … This hard-boiled noir novel might have the weirdest and worst cover I’ve seen in a while. … A graphic novel roundup via the BN Review.
By Roman Gladstone, on January 15th, 2013 Author: Jen Michalski
2013, Dzanc
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories.
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
The best introduction to Jen Michalski’s new book, Could You Be with Her Now, may be to compare the two novellas that make it up, I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner and May-September. They’re very different narratives, one violent and darkly comic, the other poignant and romantic, but they share some stylistic similarities – brief chapters that move the story along at a steady pace, clear, descriptive sentences that give the reader a vivid sense of the present moment. In the first, quotation marks are used to indicate speech; in the second they are not. The first is written in the present tense, the second in the past tense. These are stylistic choices that carry their respective stories. In the first, the protagonist lives in a sort of perpetual present; in the second, there’s a sort of elegiac sense of regret for a relationship that didn’t quite work, in the past.
I Can Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, and what does it signify? The idiot, Jimmy Dembrowski, is a fifteen-year old boy who lives in Baltimore. He has a strange sense of reality, puzzling over the people on television and people in the real world. Jimmy is obsessed with a television character named Megan. He wants her to be his girlfriend.
Jimmy and his older brother Josh spend a lot of time alone at home together after school, while their parents are at work, and one afternoon, Jimmy goes in search of Megan, who he knows lives in California, where she’s an actress, but he has no concept of where “California” might be. Thus, the title gives us an understanding of Jimmy’s lack of a sense of proportion, his skewed awareness of reality.
The upshot is that Jimmy wanders out of his neighborhood, gets lost, sees somebody he thinks is Megan, tries to make friends with her and, like Lenny breaking the neck of the mouse in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, accidentally kills the girl he thinks is Megan. Only, he doesn’t realize she is dead; he thinks she is feigning sleep, and he wanders off.
Later, when it becomes clear that the police have put two and two together and have come looking for Jimmy, Josh, in a misguided effort to protect his brother, takes him to a schoolyard and cautions him to wait there while he comes up with a plan. Jimmy does his best to obey Josh, but ultimately he wanders off and winds up with a long-distance trucker named Ed who entices Jimmy into the cab of his truck, sexually molests him, and they wind up inFlorida, where Jimmy is rescued when a suspicious driver sees Jimmy in the truck and calls the police. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on January 11th, 2013  Author: Lemony Snicket
2012, Little, Brown
Filed under: Mystery, Children’s
Find it at Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
The only book I’d previously read by Lemony Snicket (real name: Daniel Handler) is his adult novel Adverbs, which was surprisingly good. Though I quite liked the Lemony Snicket movie, I never got around to trying the Snicket books.
So when Handler/Snicket released the first of a new series, I jumped in. Who Could That Be at This Hour? is the first in the four-part All the Wrong Questions series, which delves into the childhood of the fictional author Snicket, and his apprenticeship to a mysterious organization of freelance detectives/fixers.
After reading the first half of this book, with its noir sensibility and tidy plot, I chose it as one of my best books of 2012. But after finishing it, I have to downgrade it a level because it doesn’t solve its own mystery. The four-part series, it seems, will cover a single mystery broken into four parts, which is quite irritating. …
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By Sean Clark, on January 10th, 2013  Author: Ian McEwan
2012, Nan A. Talese
Filed Under: Literary
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
Ian McEwan, you’re a dick. You are a phenomenal writer, perhaps my favorite living author. Just stop being a dick, please.
Sweet Tooth, much like 2003′s Atonement, is a showpiece of McEwan’s enormous talent. You can open either of these books to just about any page and find a beautifully crafted paragraph that will probably make you seethe with jealousy because you will never be able to write something that good, certainly not with consistency. The entire segment of Atonement that retells Robbie’s war experience in France is, to my mind, nearly perfect.
But for the same reason so many people look upon that book as a marvel and a masterpiece, I think it is McEwan’s most disappointing: you can practically see his dickish smile taunting you as you finish the final, plot twisting pages. Look at what I did, he seems to say, just because I can. By contrast, his earlier book The Cement Garden is short and messier but just as emotionally brutal. He doesn’t need to pull the rug he’s carefully woven over however many pages out from under the reader in the end, the rug is enough. (And that languishing metaphor exemplifies exactly why McEwan’s skill with words makes me jealous.)
[The are some spoilers ahead, so don't read beyond the break if that sort of thing bothers you. I'll make the rest easy for you: if you liked Atonement, you'll probably like Sweet Tooth; if you haven't read Atonement, read that first.]
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By Sean Clark, on January 9th, 2013 [In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]
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 Going Clear, by Lawrence Wright. Reviewed by Charles McGrath (New York Times).
I remember reading Wright’s New Yorker essay on Scientology that spawned this book a little while back. He seems aware that picking a fight with a religion everyone already more or less laughs at is more bullying than productive, so he wisely finds a “donkey” to bear the burden of a storyline for his book: former movie director Paul Haggis. Wright won a Pulitzer for his last book, and McGrath compares the author’s approach to that of Marc’s homeboy Robert Caro. Probably pretty good.
Find it on Goodreads.
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Only a Poor Old Man [and others], by Carl Banks. Reviewed by Michael Dirda (Barnes and Noble Review).
A lot of classic comics are getting some nice rerelease omnibus editions lately. Our own Aaron Block has a write up of a Flash Gordon collection coming out later this week. Here, Dirda turns his eyes towards comics, namely Scrooge McDuck comics. I never really read any Disney comics as a kid, except for this one Donald Duck one we had in French (and I didn’t understand), but I used to love DuckTales as a kid, so a collection of Scrooge comics is definitely something I’d be interested in thumbing through.
Find it on Goodreads.
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The Uninvited, by Liz Jensen. Reviewed by Carolyn Kellogg (Los Angeles Times)
Here’s a zombie book without zombies. Instead, children all over the world become homicidal maniacs. As if that’s not enough to turn you off, the book is also a crime story that follows a detective with Aspergers Syndrome. I have a feeling if this were reviewed by anyone besides the timid Kellogg (referring to a book’s “promising story” is soft-review for “it sucks, but maybe if a different writer had done something similar but completely different it might be okay”) they would tear it apart, because this sounds like a boring mess.
Find it on Goodreads.
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Quickly: Not sure why I even read this, let alone found it funny. I think I need to make a point to read at least one book from these series. Rich and looking to blow some cash? A bunch of Maurice Sendak art is going up for auction. Check out this years Golden Hatchet winners for pans.
By Sean Clark, on January 8th, 2013  I used to listen to a lot of audiobooks in addition to reading a lot of books. Now I primarily fill that aural space with podcasts, though I do still like to keep an audiobook or two on my phone, just in case.
 What value! When I was listening to them avidly, Audible was my service of choice. They have a great selection, decent value in their monthly memberships, and a great app complete with “achievement badges” for frequent and taste-diverse readers. For older books, I frequented LibriVox, which has a huge database of free audiobooks from the public domain (namely Project Gutenberg). The quality varies; it seems a lot of the readers are either actors practicing their recording voices (good) or advanced ESL learners fine-tuning their fluency (not so good), but I found it to be a great way to passively absorb many of the classics I’s never been able to get around to reading.
 UI is nice enough, but hardly worth even $2. The Audiobooks HQ app by Inkstone Mobile, is a paid iOS app that plays and organizes these free LibriVox audiobooks. It also draws from another database, Globe Radio Repertory, which as of this writing had a whopping 4 titles to choose from, albeit good ones. That’s it; I couldn’t find a way to load an audiobook from an outside source, or to add some other database to draw from.
I’m not sure why you would spend money for this app unless you are a sucker. The UI is nice enough, I’ll give them that, but I’ll go ahead and save you $2 and recommend you just get these free books straight from LibriVox, open them with iTunes (whose UI is better), and bypass these middleman vultures altogether.
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[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]
By Nico Vreeland, on January 3rd, 2013 [This feature is a brief summary of interesting books coming out each month. Follow it here. Click the title links to find these books at Goodreads.]
Definitely
 Tenth of December, by George Saunders (out 1/8)
George Saunders won a genius grant for his sharp, surreal satire about the anxieties and neuroses of the modern world, but I think he’s as wildly popular as he is for another, simpler reason: he’s funny. I’ve been avoiding most of the hype about this latest collection so as not to spoil anything for myself, but the little I’ve read suggests that Tenth of December won’t disappoint.
 Gun Machine, by Warren Ellis (out now)
This line from Gun Machine’s flap copy might be the worst marketing gobbledygook I’ve ever read: “Warren Ellis reimagines New York City as a puzzle with the most dangerous pieces of all: GUNS.” The rest of the copy is similarly unreadable, but it seems to be about a cop who discovers a huge stash of guns that trace back to unsolved crimes over the past few decades. I’ve heard almost nothing but great things about it, and the silly premise makes me think that if it’s not great, it’ll be spectacularly terrible, and that can be fun, too.
 How to Think More About Sex, by Alain de Botton (out now)
I don’t imagine many people have a problem with the frequency of their sexual thoughts, but this book more specifically explores the “dissonance between what we think is normal and what we experience in real life during sex.” De Botton is a world-class thinker, and this latest entry in his “School of Life” series sounds like a winner.
 The World Until Yesterday, by Jared Diamond (out now)
The famed author of Guns, Germs, and Steel has a new book out about “traditional” (read: primitive) societies and how they differ from our “modern” society. For example, in primitive societies, parents carry their babies vertically, facing forward and let children make their own decisions. The result is that children learn to walk sooner and children become socially confident earlier and independent much faster. Fascinating stuff. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on January 2nd, 2013 [In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]
Tenth of December, by George Saunders. Reviewed by David L. Ulin in the L.A. Times.
You probably don’t need a review of the new George Saunders book to tell you anything more than the fact it exists, but Ulin does a pretty sharp job of sketching out how Saunders’s style lends weight to his genius grant-winning fiction. For fans, good news—this collection is more of the same—but also bad—it’s teasingly early, the book doesn’t come out for another week yet.
Hallucinations, by Oliver Sacks. Reviewed by Siri Hustvedt in the New York Times.
Similarly to Saunders, fans of Oliver Sacks just want more of the same. In Sacks’s case, that’s more of his “descriptive, narrative, case-oriented medical writing he has himself called “romantic.”” And this book looks to deliver in the vein of, as the title implies, accounts of hallucinations.
The Doctor of Thessaly, by Anne Zouroudi. Reviewed by Anna Mundow in the Washington Post.
Zouroudi’s latest mystery follows the Greek god Hermes, solving crimes on a Greek island. Mundow says, “Oh, dear. This sounds like any number of vile cozies that revolve around cats, witches, tag sales and cookie recipes. But Zouroudi’s novels are nothing like that. [They] are not only charming and engrossing stories, but also shrewd and often bleak portraits of individual weakness and social fragility.” Sold.
Pow!, by Mo Yan. Reviewed by Dwight Garner in the New York Times.
The 2012 Nobel laureate’s latest book to be translated into English “continues to sing his own peculiar and alluring song.” Garner gives a tidy overview of Yan’s work and sensibility, teasingly political but not directly so, and an idea of how this book fits into his catalogue.
In brief: Even an Arrested Development reference in the title can’t make this debut novel look anything but overwrought. … The latest entry in the Friday Night Lights high school football “genre” might be a head above the rest by virtue of its war-reporter author’s journalistic bona fides.
By C4 Staff, on December 27th, 2012 Dear C4 friends,
We hope you have enjoyed a festive December, whatever your holiday of choice may be. The final episodes of The Page Count’s 12 Podcasts of Christmas are now live. We hope you’ll forgive the deterioration that happened as our long day of recording podcasts for you progressed. If you enjoy this even 1% as much as we enjoyed recording it, we couldn’t be happier. Thanks for reading and listening, and thanks for 3 great years; we look forward to all the fun to come as we set out on the site’s fourth. See you in 2013!
Mazel tov,
Aaron, Eric, Marc, Nico, and Sean
  
  
You can either stream The Page Count episodes from the player below, or you can subscribe for free on iTunes or your favorite podcast player by searching for “Page Count.” Links and show notes can be found here.
By Sean Clark, on December 24th, 2012 [This marks my third year of doing one of these end of the year roundups for story-centric video games. I guess it's a thing now. You can check out previous entries here, and look for my new bi-monthly column on wordy vidyagames coming debuting sometime in January.]
As I mentioned in my Best of 2012 post, this has been a pretty hectic year for me. Right along with not being able to read as many books as I’d have liked, I didn’t have much time to play games either. When I did, it was mostly on a Sunday morning when I should have been studying or on the train when I could sneak in a half hour with my 3DS. So while my pool to draw from is a little shallower this year, it forced me to choose only the games I really wanted to play, making my choices much easier. Here are the 10 games I played this year that scratched my inner book geek game itch.
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Fez (XBLA)
Before even getting into the story stuff, this game looks and sounds beautiful. It’s got one of the better soundtracks for a game this year (this is my favorite–seriously check it out.) The game is fun too, a mix of 2D and 3D spatial platforming where pretty much the whole point of the game is to explore. Where this game will really tickle your inner nerd though, is when [bit of a spoiler] you realize the game has its own written language and philology that you can investigate and use to your advantage. It’s really hard to explain without giving too much away. If you’ve got an XBox you should download Fez.
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999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (DS)
A lot of my train ride game playing was spent with games like 999: “visual novels” that are more akin to a choose your own adventure book or 90′s computer adventure games than your typical modern fare. The plot is pretty captivating. You wake up in a strange room and quickly learn it is a death trap that you will only survive if you can solve a puzzle. Soon you meet other characters, each with a particular back story and idiosyncrasies and you must find a way to work together to escape (it’s a lot like the movies Saw or Cube, but with a glossy, Japanese sheen). There is no way you can actually beat the game on the first try, you will die, and have to start all over. At first this infuriated me. But since you are able to take your experiences (and knowledge of the other characters) into account the next time around, you can make different decisions. When eventually you reach the “true” end, it’s a bit of a mindfuck that makes it all worth it–one of the better bits of plot writing (in any medium) I’ve encountered in a while.
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Dust: An Elysian Tale (XBox)
What starts as a pretty looking button-masher that feels a bit like the Secret of Nihm cross-bred with Sanjuro, turns into a deep and pretty damn dark story that is about as affecting as a game about a bunny rabbit rönin can possibly be. While the setting and gameplay differ greatly, the basic layout has a distinct Metroid feel to it, which I always appreciate.
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Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode 3 (XBox, iOS, Steam)
The first two games in this series, based on the popular web comic, were good but not great. When the series was cancelled, Zeboyd Games, the two-man outfit who made the excellent Cthulhu Saves the World was tasked with bringing their own style in to revive the series. It worked out great. The game’s look and feel will feel right at home to any fan of 16-bit RPGs and the writing is sharp and funny. You can get this for a song on a number of platforms.
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Pheonix Wright: Ace Attorney (DS, iOS)
This was the first of the “visual novels” I got into this year. There’s not much game here, but the story is fun and engaging. You are a defense attorney, and you must interview witness to learn information, then make objections and present evidence at the right times to clear your clients’ names. It’s not grounded in reality at all, so the plots are crazy and the characters varied and quirky. It might be a little too Japanese-zany for some tastes, but if this sort of game is up your alley, the $5 asking price for the up-rezed iOS version is a steal.
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Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Wii)
I’m a huge Zelda fan, and to be honest this game left me a little disappointed. My expectations of Zelda are a bit unreasonable though, and it’s by most all accounts a very good game–one of the best pieces of software for the Wii–it just focused a bit less on exploring than I would prefer a Zelda game did. The trade off for that, however, is the increased focus on storytelling. For a series of games that are largely similar in plot, it’s interesting to see Nintendo finally focus on characterization and actual dramatic themes. It sets out to be an origin story that coheres a lot of otherwise hard to sync plots from previous games and does an admirable job of pulling it off.
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Little Inferno (WiiU, Steam)
This isn’t so much a game as a toy. Basically it’s a fireplace simulator. I know, doesn’t that sound enthralling? It’s actually pretty engrossing. The game situates your television or monitor (or the WiiU gamepad, but it looks really nice on the TV) as your new fireplace, and you have mail-order catalogues from which you can pick out things to light on fire. The combustible stuff is weird, from spider eggs to toy cats stuffed with fake poop, and you progress by burning “combos” based on wordplay or themed clues: for instance for the clue “Cold War” you must burn “Uncle Sam’s Blam Blams” and “Russian Nesting Dolls” at the same time. Occasionally you’ll get letters from a neighbor, and weather updates from some crazy guy in a balloon, and from these a dark, Tim Burton-esque story of the apocalypse begins to form. It’s a great little diversion, and it comes from good pedigree, as this company’s last game, World of Goo, was solid fun.
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Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii)
This is probably the best looking game on the aged Wii. It’s a sprawling, lengthy game, and a ton of fun. It’s fairly difficult to explain the plot, but basically it’s a fun cross of sci-fi and fantasy; the world is a real pleasure to explore. The characters are all interesting, if a bit boilerplate, and though the combat systems take a little getting used to, once you get the hang of things it’s easy to appreciate the innovation. Definitely worth the time for RPG fans, just make sure you’ve got a lot because the average length for this beast is 65-100 hours.
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The Last Story (Wii)
From the creator of the original Final Fantasy comes one of the better RPGs of the last few years. It’s fairly short, but that works to its benefit. Most of the systems are streamlined and uncomplicated, so you get to focus on the story. The story doesn’t do anything too original, but it does tell itself quite well. The real strength here is the cast of characters. It’s not often enough a game actually devotes time to nuanced characterization (FFVI and Mass Effect are on a short list of examples I can think of), so the payoff here is excellent. If you have a way of playing Wii games, this one is a must. (And if you don’t, go here and now you do.) As a bonus for us book nerds, the game is packaged to look like a book.
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The Walking Dead (XBox, PS3, PC, iOS)
I love the Walking Dead comics, and have a love/hate relationship with the TV show (I currently am leaning back toward loving it). This game is without a doubt better at storytelling than either (and for the most part uses unique characters). It’s set up as episodes, with 5 currently available as the first season and (hopefully) more coming soon. There’s very little playing; it’s more or less an animated choose your own adventure story. But the choices you have to make range from uncomfortably dark to down right grisly. Will you let a woman in distress continue to agonize loudly as human bait being eaten alive in order to grant your group more time to escape, or will you put her out of her misery with a bullet to the head? Choose fast, if you hesitate she suffers and you won’t benefit… I played this on the XBox, but if you have an iOS device its touch interface is probably the best way to take in the experience.
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Honorable Mention: Paper Mario Sticker Star
A charm-soaked offshoot from regular Mario fare, the Paper Mario games are much more story-focused semi-RPGs. This one goes the extra mile in the visuals department, using the 3DS’s capabilities to render the whole game to look like cardboard shoe box dioramas. The story here isn’t very meaty, but the writing is pleasantly witty and self-referential.
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