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By Marc Velasquez, on March 17th, 2010 Author: Chris Jones
Broadway Books, 2007
Filed under: Nonfiction, Literary
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
Don Pettit—genius scientist and American astronaut—was a last-minute replacement for the space team “Expedition Six,” a three-man crew who would spend an extended stay on the International Space Station (or simply, as its residents call it, “station”). Expedition Six’s supplies and rations were sent to station before Pettit was named to the team, so he had to make due with the clothes and the menu of the man he replaced. The shirts were too big and there was no coffee. NASA allowed Pettit only the small ration of space coffee that he could fit with him on his shuttle ride to station. They weren’t trying to be tight-assed, it’s just difficult and expensive to send stuff into space. Pettit would have survived without coffee, but in space, it was important to have even that small ration, a reminder of life on earth.
Let me take a step back. Out of Orbit‘s flap copy will tell you the “harrowing” tale of three men on a fourteen-week mission in the International Space Station. The men must overcome the tragedy of the Columbia explosion, which killed seven of their friends and grounded the shuttle program. With no shuttle scheduled to relieve them, the men are stranded, orbiting the earth without a ride home. Eventually, NASA decided that the men must descend back to the earth in an outdated Russian Soyuz capsule, which was, “at best, a long shot.” The book jacket would have you believe that this is a tale Michael Bay would be happy to turn into a blockbuster.
Luckily for the reader, Chris Jones doesn’t write with the same hyperbolic tone his publisher uses to sell books. Out of Orbit is less about the tragic Columbia crash and the extended mission it created, and more about space coffee and space dessert and space toilets and what really accounts for living as far as a human being can live from home. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on March 16th, 2010 [2010 Edgar Award nominee for Best Novel---see reviews of other 2010 Edgar noms here.]
 Author: John Hart
Minotaur, 2009
Filed under: Mystery
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
5 |
The Last Child follows 13-year-old Johnny Merrimon on his unceasing quest to find out what happened to his twin sister, Alyssa, who disappeared one year before the novel begins. Since her disappearance, Johnny’s life has taken a sharp downturn: his father left and his mother has taken up with an evil new lover.
The narrative switches between Johnny and Detective Clyde Hunt, who was assigned to Alyssa’s case and never solved it. Hunt still feels responsible for Alyssa’s disappearance and the wretched state of Johnny’s life, and he does all he can to protect Johnny and his mother.
Despite underwhelming prose and a few hiccups along the way, Child is a ferociously compelling mystery, full of suspense and tension. Of the five Edgar books I’ve read so far, Child is by far the best.
…
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Drop everything and read Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann now. See other entries in this series here.
 The book ended, dammit. It ended and I’ve been ruined for novels since.
I can’t even tell you if it’s anything like McCann’s other books. I’ve tried to read one, but always I close it after a few sentences, because its prose—adept enough, beautiful enough, intriguing enough—is breaking my heart. Just because it isn’t Let the Great World Spin.
I know people who’ve gone to see “Avatar” two, three, four times, because they can’t handle the shock of being thrust back into the real world. I get that impulse. But—screw the too-pretty, vapid, light-wreathed world o’ the giant Smurfs. Let the Great World Spin in the world I want to stay in, because it’s messy and human and hard and true.
Did that sound like a cliché? My apologies, but I am not alone. You need only glance at the reviews for this book to realize that attempting to describe it reduces people to vague, grasping hyperbole and lots of uses of the word “human.” Even basic description seems to elude reviewers. It’s a New York novel! That opens in Ireland. It’s about Philippe Petit’s famous tightrope walk across between the Twin Towers! Not “about,” not really. It’s written in the voices of several unconnected characters! Define “unconnected.” It’s a 9/11 novel! That takes place decades before the towers fell. (And yet it is, sort of: Before those planes flew into the towers, no one imagined they really could. And before a man strung a wire between the two towers and walked across, well, no one dared imagine that, either.)
A friend who had not seen the documentary movie “Man on Wire” told me she thought the tightrope walker a metaphor for God, the way beauty and wonder (and terror, anything that grand in its ambition) exist all around us, utterly unconcerned with us. Our lives are steeped in them, but we rarely notice.
True, but it’s McCann who’s the god here, his orchestration that adept. The characters in Let the Great World Spin are rarely physically alone. They share rooms and scenes despite different genders, different ethnicities, different ages, and McCann slides into each of their voices as though to say see, we really are all just human. But the effect never lets you forget that each is—that we all are—alone, suspended in our individual consciousnesses and mortal.
It’s not a perfect book. As other reviewers have pointed out, some of the voices—particularly the prostitutes’—are a little forced, some of the coincidences a little too coincidental. Perhaps I should make this urgent a case only for a perfect book. But what is perfection? How human would that be? At the book’s heart is the messy complexity of life. At its heart is that full impulse, that full drive.
Read it, it will make you happy to be alive.
And then it will end, and you will be ruined for awhile.
I truly am sorry about that.
.
(Somewhat) Similar reads: Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathon Safren Foer; Things I Like About America: Personal Narratives by Poe Ballantine; the short story “Future Emergencies” by Nicole Krauss. And, of course, a documentary: “Man on Wire.”
By Nico Vreeland, on March 12th, 2010  Seattle Public Library On Wednesday, blogger Eric Hellman wrote this recap of an event at which Mamillan CEO John Sargent spoke (via). Sargent’s comments on libraries were quite distressing; he described borrowing library ebooks like this: “It’s like Netflix, but you don’t pay for it. How is that a good model for us?”
Yikes. Sargent’s anti-library-ebook argument is essentially that borrowing physical books from a library is a major drag, so people don’t do it so often. Borrowing ebooks is super easy, and that will bring the publishing industry to its knees.
Hellman, who actually asked Sargent the library question at the event, says this: “he has gaps in his knowledge of libraries.” I would put it in slightly stronger terms: it sounds like Sargent hasn’t borrowed a library book in 20 years, if ever.
Sargent doesn’t know about online card catalogs, which allow you to order physical books and have them waiting for you at the branch of your choosing. He thinks ten people reading a book will destroy it. He thinks anybody can get a card to any library in the country (in fact, you have to be at least a state resident, as I found out last year when I talked to Rachel Martin, a librarian at the Seattle Public Library). Basically, Sargent doesn’t know much about checking out books.
More troublingly, he seems to see libraries as foolhardy businesses that aren’t charging (and aren’t tithing out publishers) enough. Personally, I see free access to public libraries as a fundamental human right in an industrialized nation. It’s a sizable difference of opinion.
And I’m noticing something else: the more Sargent talks, the more dictatorial and greedy he sounds. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on March 12th, 2010 [2010 Edgar Award nominee for Best First Novel By An American Author---see reviews of other 2010 Edgar noms here.]
 Author: Attica Locke
Harper, 2009
Filed under: Mystery
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
3 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
Black Water Rising is a novel with two frustratingly unconnected story lines that are given almost equal weight. The primary narrative concerns a young black lawyer named Jay trying to carve out a law practice in early ’80s Houston. He and his wife go for a low-rent swamp cruise on their anniversary, they witness a crime, and they try to help a young woman running from a gunman. They drop her off at the police station and eventually a mystery unfurls.
The secondary narrative, interspersed with the first, is about Jay’s history with the SNCC (pronounced “snik”), a civil rights group in the ’60s that eventually split between proponents of nonviolent action, and Black Power-type followers of Stokely Carmichael.
One big problem with Rising is that these two discrete story lines have almost nothing to do with each other. The other, bigger problem, is that both are quite boring. …
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By Mike Beeman, on March 11th, 2010  Edited by Dennis Lehane
Akashic Books, 2009
Filed Under: Thrillers, Short Stories, Mystery
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
The Boston Noir collection marks our fair city’s induction in the roving city-themed noir series, “Book Noir,” from Akashic Books. Already the series has seen collections from Brooklyn, San Francisco, Baltimore, and Phoenix, among others. Dennis Lehane is an obvious choice as editor -I’d be be hard-pressed to come up with a close second in terms of Boston crime novelists. He proves a smart choice, as well, and has put together a collection of noir stories as he defines them: working-class tragedies. In this collection, Lehane explores not only crime, or, as he calls it “skuzzy people doing skuzzy things to other skuzzy people,” but explores what the Boston means to the people who live in, and more often just-outside, New England’s second-place city. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on March 10th, 2010
 What do these three have in common? They all have absolutely no business writing or "writing" books. News about books and ebooks from around the web:
- Vapidity will continue to rule the bestseller list. Sarah Palin plans to “write” another book (get ready, Marcos), Lindsay Lohan has plans to hawk her crazed mutterings, and Hilary Duff just signed a contract to write a series of young-adult Da Vinci Code-style caper novels (I kid you not). Previously, we learned about reality star Lauren Conrad, who’s writing novels (plural) despite having never read a whole book in her life (which you should do, if you want to write one). Then there’s always Dan Brown, a terrible writer of stupid books (even his website wants to be a movie)… but he has 80,000,000 readers. And let’s never forget Douglas Preston, a horrible writer who’s so overprivileged and out of touch that he attacked his own readers for not paying exorbitant prices for his crappy books. Please help me solve this. If you like any of those writers, do me a personal favor: stop buying their books and watch TV instead. TV does mindless entertainment much better than books, and then books can go back to being carefully crafted works of the imagination, and not just paycheck tickets cranked out by illiterate uncaring morons and vapid celebrities trying to cash in on their fleeting fame. Publishing industry: I hate you. To wrap up this rant, here is a grossly unreadable article about nothing, written by an editor from Knopf. It’s a joke, right? Nobody’s that bad a writer, especially not a professional editor, right? Right?
- Borders is broke and starting heavy layoffs. Three months ago, while discussing the Nook, I noticed that Borders notably had no plans to release its own ereader/ebookstore. I said this about it: “Oh, and also… remember Borders? I’d say they have about 2 years of financial solvency left. It’s going to be like a brontosaurus dying.” Based on my understanding of the financial gobbledygook in the article in that first link, that timeline was just slightly generous. Ebooks are the way of the future, bookstores. Don’t be shy.
- Two weeks ago, the NY Times published this article by Motoko Rich about the prices of ebooks vs. paper books. It included this chart, which got everybody in a huff because it claimed that ebooks selling for as low as $9.99 will provide as much profit to publishers (not authors) as full-price, $26 hardcover books. Among the respondents: Gizmodo, GalleyCat, John August, and almost everybody else in the world. I just have one thing to add. Rich estimates the costs of printing and shipping at $3.25. Since online hardcover prices max out at about $15, that means, logically, ebook prices should max out at about $12. Since some new, hardcover, guaranteed bestsellers go for even less (like Stieg Larsson’s next one, pre-selling at Amazon for $11.50), ebook editions of those should come in at sub-$10. Which means maybe readers asking for $9.99 ebooks wasn’t so astonishingly entitled after all. Maybe the Macmillan/Amazon kerfuffle lost Macmillan more than it gained them. Maybe publishers should shut up about prices and windowing and all those other caveats, and just put their weight behind ebooks. Stop treating your customers like enemies, and maybe everything will turn out OK.
By Eric Markowsky, on March 9th, 2010 There was a spare room off the main hall in the junior high wing of my elementary school. Sometimes the special ed. teachers used it for one-on-one meetings, but most of the time it sat empty save a desk, a ratty armchair, and shelves of innumerable Norton anthologies. When I was in the eighth grade, I spent a whole day sitting in that armchair, pulling pilly threads from the upholstery, reading Catcher in the Rye. It was the first time I ever skipped class.
When I read last January that J.D. Salinger had died, that’s where my mind went first, not to Cornish, New Hampshire and his forty five years of literary silence, not to the vault of unpublished works we’re all crossing our fingers for, but to a stuffy room I last saw twelve years ago. It was a hot day near the end of the school year. The chair was upholstered in a heavy fabric that made me sweat. There was no clock on the wall, and I hardly moved for hours.
I didn’t know anything about the book before I started reading except that it was important. I can’t remember now what I expected, but I’m sure it wasn’t Holden Caulfield. I was stunned by his voice. I’d never read anything so conversational and direct. I felt like he was right there in the room, skipping class, too, so he could tell me about all “this madman stuff” from last Christmas. The two of us could’ve been the only people left in the world for all I knew or cared.
Over the next few years I read all the Salinger I could find. I was disappointed there was so little, and, to be honest, the rest of his canon mostly confused me. I wasn’t ready for the subtlety of Nine Stories or the mysticism of everything else. Nothing else gripped me the way Catcher had; nothing else left me with the same impression of where I was when I read it and what that place smelled like.
I looked up when the bell rang, surprised to find myself alone with the musty smell of old anthologies and cheap wood paneling. My classmates went streaming by the door without looking in. I watched them pass, and I thought about Holden alone in New York City, the freedom of no one knowing where you are. I waited until the hallway was empty, and then I waited a little longer. The hall was so quiet when I finally left that I could hear the echo of my locker latching as I walked out.
I’ve since reread all of Salinger, and though my favorites have changed (for the moment, Just Before the War with the Eskimos and For Esmé—with Love and Squalor) nothing has had a greater effect on me than Catcher in the Rye. As an aspiring writer, it taught me all kinds of things about voice and the relationship between the narrator and the reader, but it was as a reader that I felt something crystallize, something I never knew I’d understood all along as a lover of books, and something which, as an increasingly self-conscious teen, I was beginning to lose sight of: the pleasure of disappearing for a while.
By Sean Clark, on March 8th, 2010 Put aside everything you’re doing and read The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, by Steven Millhauser, immediately. (See the other entries in this series here.)
 For the record, my favorite, favorite book ever and a book I truly think any reader should drop everything for is Lolita. But I’ve harped on it on this site again and again already. I read a lot of books, though, and there are a ton I think every reader should read. Steven Millhauser has written a number of these and The Knife Thrower and Other Stories is my favorite of his. Read it now.
Millhauser was one of a handful of excellent professors I had in college, so I’m a little biased. If you’re reading this site, I’d be a little surprised you’ve never heard of him. But if somehow you haven’t read him, you should. He is undeniably one of the most precise and imaginative writers writing today. He is a fabulist and a natural storyteller with a knack for writing stories that are at once cerebral and accessible. …
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By Sean Clark, on March 4th, 2010  Author: Steve Almond
2010 (self-published)
Filed Under Literary, Short Stories, Nonfiction
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
5 |
(Note: to the best of my knowledge this book is only available through on-demand publishing via an Espresso Book Machine. There is one at the Harvard Bookstore)
This is a tiny little book, split into two parts of about 40 small pages each. It really won’t take but a minute to read, well, maybe an hour. One side is titled “Essays” and the other “Stories” and they are flipped 180 degrees, so neither (or both I guess) comes first. There are three separate covers to choose from, and Almond has already revised it once since the initial printing. I think I’m a fan of this new fangled on demand printing thing.
Seeing as I really only know of Almond as a fiction writer (I very much enjoyed his 2005 collection, The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories), I opted to open with the “Stories” half first. These are all short shorts, none longer than 4-5 paragraphs. There’s no plot thread connecting these and not much of a thematic line. Short shorts aren’t really a form I’m all that into. I read it like I do poetry, mostly for language and not so much for substance. I enjoyed these, but it’s not really the type of thing I tend to go back to. Almond is a talented writer, and the language is quite good:
This is where the cranes come to sleep, the ripped out yard-by-gravel mile between the bus terminal and the freeway still unconstructed, its fading gray ramps into nothing. They bundle here under night, clanking, steel thread and iron, the hard things of this world. Neglected by their soft owners, the cranes huddles and murmur old jokes, somber, worn, from the duties of lifting and sniffing on each other the perfume of oil going black. They know not to nod their giant necks, not to run their hooks against loose rebar. This is the hour of rest, when nothing is built or remembered. The wind through their loose parts is idle syncopation and notes whistle up, a song made with every measure of grace, as where honest labor has been done and fellowship means beast and machine. Sleep, good citizens, it is not yours to hear this sweet offering.
The “Essays” side of the book is the one I’d assumed I’d like less. Almond, however, surprised me with one of the best guides to writing I’ve come across to date.
Unlike the stories, Almond’s essays follow a sequence of questions and answers, almost as if he’s inserting his own responses into a writerly catechism. It’s really written for students (enrolled in a program or otherwise) of writing. But anyone who entertains writing fiction or is interested at all in the writing process should defintiely give this a read. And, speaking from many dreadful workshop experiences: writing teachers should read this, as well as a few of the books I’ve suggested below.
Almond’s now-recognizable voice comes through especially clear in these essays. He reminds me a lot of George Saunders: biting and sarcastic and a little insane, yet undeniably wise. He writes in a funny yet serious tone that screams authority but doesn’t demand it. Writers should read this book, and everybody should read Steve Almond.
Similar Reads: Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut (Vonnegut), On Writing (King), Eats, Shoots, & Leaves (Truss), The Evil B.B. Chow (Almond), The Braindead Megaphone (Saunders)
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