[This is a new semi-regular feature wherein we'll highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it from the Special Features page.]

Percival’s Planet, by Michael Byers, reviewed by Suzanne Berne (New York Times)

Ms. Berne’s review is mostly plot and character summary, but luckily Byer’s plot and characters are quite interesting. The novel is a work of historical fiction telling the story of a Kansas farm boy who discovered Pluto. Berne’s description–”Mr. Byers reminds us that whether we’re gripped by desire for a new planet or for another human being, that yearning has dignity and its own strange logic”–makes this sound like a maybe-too-literary book, but the characters seem quirky enough that that may not be the case.

A Not Scary Story About Big Scary Things, by C.K. Williams, (Publisher’s Weekly)

PW doesn’t credit their reviews, which are only about 100 words long. It be faster for you just to read this review yourself. (Excerpt: “A boy lives near a ‘regular, ordinary, standard sort of forest,’ except that along with the usual perils of cliffs, bears, snakes, and wolves, there’s also an actual, awful monster with a penchant for scaring children.”) This is a children’s book so 100 words is probably sufficient anyway; I wish I could have found an example of the illustrations on the internet.

The Four Fingers of Death, by Rick Moody, reviewed by Troy Patterson (New York Times)

In what seems to be a work in the tradition of Breakfast of Champions and Pale Fire, Rick Moody’s new novel is told by “a long-winded ham” and “sci-fi horror hack” named Montese Crandall, writing in a dystopian 2025. The Four Fingers of Death is presented as Crandall’s novelization of a 2025 remake of a real B-movie from 1963. When I read Patterson’s decription of Crandall as “a figure far more baffling than an unreliable narrator: an anti-reliable author,” I knew I wanted to read this book.

The Lady Matador’s Hotel, by Cristina Garcia, reviewed by Carolyn Alessio (Chicago Tribune)

Ms. Alessio’s well-written review does a fine job of describing how this novel “captures many of Guatemala’s funny and grim contradictions, and probes their often freighted origins.” The book takes place in an upscale hotel, during a time of political instability. Garcia’s strentgh seems to lie in her characters. The few Alessio deems “cartoonish” she asserts are countered “through her more complex guests at the hotel and use of a clever chorus.”

Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen (Wall Street Journal)

Franzen’s name (and photo) has been everywhere this week, and Freedom is getting a lot of hype. The Corrections was pretty great, so hopefully this lives up to expectations. The WSJ (in a short article credited to “WSJ Staff”) rounded up a bunch of choice review quotes, so I linked to that. C4 will have its own review in a few weeks.

[I Loved This Book When... has to take a brief hiatus this week. It'll be back next Monday with new posts. In the meantime, this is a new semi-regular feature wherein we'll highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it from the Special Features page.]

Three Stations, by Martin Cruz Smith, reviewed by Olen Steinhauer (New York Times)

Three Stations is a short (243 pages) thriller set in Russia. Steinhauer says that Smith elevates the thriller to social criticism, and with such a small canvas, it’s easy to hope for a tight, small, beautiful knot of a novel. Although, Steinhauer also compares Smith’s hero to Stieg Larsson’s eponymous “girl” hero, which makes me wary—I don’t care for Larsson.

A Mountain of Crumbs, by Elena Gorokhova, reviewed by Kapka Kassabova (Guardian)

Kassabova makes A Mountain of Crumbs (which came out in January in the U.S.) sound like a charming, beautifully written book. It’s a memoir about Gorokhova’s life in Soviet Russia, but even the few brief passages quoted in this review feel novelistic—what that means for the book I’m not entirely sure.

The Glass Rainbow, by James Lee Burke, reviewed by Dick Lochte (L.A. Times)

Lochte reports that the new Burke is mostly the same old Burke (which is quite solid mystery, if you’ve never read him), with a few sprinkles of new stuff. This review is worth looking at just for the art that accompanies it—it’s about a thousand times better than the book’s actual cover.

Packing for Mars, by Mary Roach, reviewed by Peter Carlson (Washington Post)

This book bears all the fingerprints of Mary Roach, which Carlson is quite happy about (he calls her “America’s funniest science writer”). Packing for Mars sounds like a gross and hilarious account of the minutiae of space travel. The last Roach book, Bonk, was a C4 Great Read.

Elegies for the Brokenhearted, by Christie Hodgen, reviewed by Joanna Smith Rakoff (New York Times)

Hodgen’s second novel is a coming-of-age novel told in the second person, by the protagonist to the five people who made her who she is. Rakoff says the premise might seem obvious (sounds more cloying to me), but she claims “its execution proves deeply, satisfyingly original.” Sounds good.

[Find previous installments of JABBIC here. You can suggest covers we should use by emailing us here.]

This week’s JABBIC has a pretty intriguing and mysterious cover. Four of our contributors guessed the premise of Adam Ross’s novel with only this cover image available to them. Now it’s up to you: which paragraph below is based on the real novel? The answer, and who wrote which fakery, will be posted in the comments later today.

1.) MacDonald Rathwaite has had enough. The new gangster kids on his block call him “Mr. Peanut.” They think it’s funny, because he walks with a cane and cause his head looks weird. They think he’s stupid, they think he doesn’t notice. They don’t know him, and they sure don’t know what he’s done for a living for the past forty years—the job that gave him the limp, and shattered his skull. Rathwaite sat by when the gangsters sold drugs on his porch, and when they spray-painted the bodega on the corner. But when they start in harassing Lola, the young single mother who lives in 3C, that’s more than Rathwaite can take.

2.) It’s on the side of a tin on a shelf in every pantry in America: the smiling face of Mr. Peanut. But look closer…  Conrad Frayn is a defamed illustrator and aspiring artist. When he tries to relaunch his career with a new take on a marketing icon, he soon learns that he infringed on the wrong trademark. In this Pynchon-esque thriller, Adam Ross weaves a tapestry of commercial conspiracy and personal redemption that just might have you thinking twice before you pop open your next can of cashews.

3.) A factory mishap ships a popular brand of powdered makeup with exceptionally high levels of a peanut extract, causing allergic reactions and deaths nationwide. Disfigured from the incident, male model Antoine Feinderlacht uses the situation to rewrite the rules of fashion, and of terror, in this taut and hip thriller.

4.) Nathan and his friends thought they could ruin any teacher Cedar Creek Middle School could throw at them, but Mr. Peanut, their permanent substitute shop teacher, isn’t going to crack so easily. When even their best pranks fail to temper Mr. Peanut’s ardor for woodwork and whistling, the boys come to respect and befriend their teacher, making him an honorary member of the Creek Creep Gang. And when a mysterious figure from Cedar Creek’s past shows up at school asking strange questions, they must solve the mystery of Mr. Peanut’s mermaid tattoo, or else he, and the rest of the Creek Creep Gang, will be history.

5.) Alice Pepin’s lifelong struggle with depression, insecurity, and obesity comes to an abrupt end at her kitchen table when she is found dead with a peanut lodged in her throat. She has suffered suicide by anaphylactic shock—or so claims her husband, David, a quiet computer game programmer obsessed with working and re-working a draft of his unpublished novel, a violent possible masterpiece. Gradually, the two detectives on the case begin to see disturbing parallels between their own marital dramas and the Pepins’ cruel rotations of brinkmanship and adoration.

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[Find previous installments of Judge a Book by Its Cover here. Suggest covers to use by emailing us here.]

Judge a Book by Its Cover is basically Balderdash for new or forthcoming books.  A number of our contributors have made up synopses for an interesting-looking new book based only on its cover and title. This week, the book in question is Light Boxes, by Shane Jones.

Can you guess which of the following paragraphs is the real premise of Light Boxes, just by looking at the cover?

Answer (and who wrote which fakery) coming later today in the comments.

1. Light Boxes follows the plight of a town battling to free itself from the brutal hold of the month of February, a meanie that has not allowed its wintry grip to lift for hundreds of days. When the despairing townspeople, led by valiant Thaddeus Lowe and his wife and daughter, suffer reprisals from February for trying to break the weather, a group of former balloonists don bird masks and, calling themselves the Solution, instigate a rebellion. Thaddeus’s daughter, Bianca, is kidnapped, along with other children, leading Thaddeus to plot ways to deceive February. Will they defeat February in time to save the town?

2. Shane Jones’s Light Boxes is a fictional memoir recalling the hilarious happenstance of its own creation. One snowy Monday, Jones and friends dressed as art-house movie penguins and stormed Penguin, Ltd., demanding that the powerhouse publish his book-in-progress (the plot of which was indeed progressing before the receptionist’s eyes). Penguin’s president, Morgan Freeman, who just happens to love art houses and penguins, gave the project a quick green light. Drama ensues when the 13-page manuscript was almost pulled for brevity. Thankfully, a 100-page color insert featuring the waddle in a variety of poses saved it in production. Light Boxes is well worth the $72 cover price.

3. For generations, the Grape family has lived by the Three Iron Laws: no women, no liquor, no knives. But then their youngest son, Gabe, is kidnapped by the notorious knife-wielding, booze-swilling, womanizing Parakeet Bandits. Gabe quickly learns that the outside world is much more fun than his forebears led him to believe, and he soon joins the gang. When his oldest brother sets out to bring him back to the fold, Gabe Grape must choose between his new life as a Parakeet and his devotion to his family.

4. In the tiny, remote town of Vinchizstrasse, the men all wear masks and the women all wear veils; in fact, it’s considered a sin to show your face to another human being. One spring, as the ice thaws to snow, the townsfolk begin acting weird—Henniger the butcher attacks Mrs. Leep and Jolimar the magician kills his assistant in front of a live audience, but neither has any memory of their actions. They quickly conclude that the people of neighboring town Tulingradstock (who have always been jealous of the Vinchaise) are forging masks and impersonating the Vinchaise men while committing horrible crimes. When Henniger and Jolimar confront them, the Tulingrash insist it’s a mind-disease that’s already crippled several other towns. Can the Tulingrash be trusted? The only way the Vinchaise can know for sure is to throw away their masks, but that might be more than they can take.

5. There are only five oiseau men left, and none of them have ever seen the sun. They’re condemned to spend their lives in Lincolntown, where it’s always cold and cloudy. At the bidding of invisible overseers, the oiseau perform mundane tasks like copying notes, folding papers, and whittling trinkets. Their ignorance about the outside world doesn’t protect them from an aching emptiness as they face the certainty of their extinction. However, just a few miles away in sunny Noirville, the Herschel family hides the only oiseau who’s ever escaped, and he’s been working tirelessly on a plan to free these mysterious men the only way he knows how…

Sales do not make a book "unputdownable"

Publishing is not a victim of the iPad, it’s not a victim of Amazon’s $9.99 pricing model, it’s not a victim of piracy, it’s not a victim, period. Publishing is slowly strangling itself by myopically hard-selling each and every title it cranks out, instead of nurturing the readers who sustain it.

I believe the novel is the best form of entertainment available to modern humans. Reading a novel offers a deeper, richer, longer, and more satisfying experience than any other media. I read four great novels last year (one, two, three, four). I enjoyed those four books more than any movies or TV shows I saw last year, more than any album, or live show, or play, or anything else.

But there were only four of them.

The flipside of the entertainment equation is that books are more expensive than movies, TV shows, or albums—more expensive in terms of both money and time. If you hate a movie, you’re out ten bucks and ninety minutes. A book might take up days of your time, and up to $25 in hardcover—if you read a bad one, the sting is much worse. And it gets exponentially worse when publishers overtly lie to their readers—like say, The Girl She Used to Be, which was nominated for a mystery award though it’s neither a mystery nor worth printing, let alone reading.

Publishers don’t seem to realize this, and they’ve taken a shotgun approach to bookselling: they think if they can fire enough tiny pellets of low-grade iron, one of them’s got to hit something. I’m here to disagree. …
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Twilight sucks. We don't have to keep talking about it. But we can, if you want to.

It’s pretty easy to work up a good hate for intellectualism—especially the smarmy, condescending kind. Books (or “literature” if you want to get snooty about it) and the serious discussion of them sometimes get confused for just that sort of pretentiousness.

One instance of such confusion is an essay called “I Just Want to Read,” by Ann Nichols, in Open Salon. In short, Nichols bemoans the overuse of formal literary theory, and pines for the days when, like the title says, she could read just for pleasure.

She makes some good points, especially about the ease with which you can fake hifalutin-sounding insights about literature (just learn and use a few words like “postcolonial” and “metafictional” and you’ll get a B in most lit classes). But for the most part, Nichols’s anti-criticism rant irks me, for several reasons. Here they are.

Nichols starts with an anecdote that immediately sets off my internal BS alarms. It’s the old when-I-was-a-kid bit, this time about a wide-eyed girl with a stack of books and a dream:

I was reading critically in the sense that I liked or disliked books, and knew what did and didn’t make sense or appeal to me, but there was not, at that blissful time in my life, any imposition of an external standard of quality or any requirement that I investigate the author’s prerogatives or background.

First of all, critical reading is not the imposition of an external standard of quality. …
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The New York Times has done it again. When Michiko Kakutani savaged Beatrice and Virgil in the Times‘s regular books section, I jokingly predicted that the paper would print a second, less harsh review within two weeks. Looks like I should have put this in writing, and bet Nico five dollars. Exactly two weeks later, Robert Hanks would have made me some money.

The Hanks write-up is more of a detailed summary than a review, and the analysis is limited to two pretty tepid sentences:

Although his ambition is admirable, the literary complexity and the simplicity of feeling Martel is aiming for don’t comfortably mesh. “Beatrice and Virgil” has its rewards, but the frustrations are what stick in the mind.

Contrast that with this from the Kakutani review:

Though Virgil and Beatrice are sweetly engaging characters, the play in which they appear remains a derivative recycling of Beckett, and Mr. Martel’s efforts to turn their tale into a kind of philosophical meditation on the Holocaust result in a botched and at times cringe-making fable.

And, later

…they are another awkward element in this disappointing and often perverse novel.

These shenanigans are all too common in the Times. Akin to what reviewer Garth Risk Hallberg dubbed “The Kakutani Two-Step,” this might be called the Sunday Switcheroo.  I first noticed this with Kakutani’s savage review of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, which she called a “tedious, overstuffed novel” full of “a lot of pompous hot air.”

Ten days later, in the Sunday Book Review, there was this glowing review, in which Gregory Cowles calls Chronic City “turbocharged,” “astonishing,” and “intricate and seamless.”

The old switcheroo!

Imagine these quotes next to each other on the dust jacket, and you’ll see the problem.

In both reviews, I agree with Kakutani more than the apology-review that follows. But I disagree with the practice. Readers look to influential reviews in the NYT, WSJ, PW, Chamberfour, etc., to find out if a book is good first and foremost. From time to time, certain books will be controversial and warrant reviews from those who both love and hate them. Lolita is such a book, as is American Psycho and, recently, Jonathon Little’s The Kindly Ones. These seem more like back-pedaling to undercut vitriolic reviews. Readers find Kakutani’s review in the regular Arts section, where she savages the successful author, and the second piece—by an unknown reviewer in the Sunday Book Review—weeks later. Which review are we supposed to believe?

Maybe issuing conflicting reviews is a NY Times policy, but it sure is confusing to readers (not to mention how confusing it must be for the authors…”They called my book “Intricate and seamless” and “a tedious, overstuffed novel?”).

But if it works for the New York Times, it may work for C4. In the days to come, you can look for favorable reviews to off-set our least favorite books. Sean will rave about Going Rogue. Nico will put up a post touting the value of the Amish-slice-of-life genre in Plain Pursuit. And Eric Markowsky, long missing in action, will come back from retirement to praise the works of Douglas Preston. Stay tuned!

Drop everything and read Vernon God Little, by DBC Pierre, now. See other entries in this series here.

DBC Pierre is a Mexican author from Australia; his parents are English and he grew up largely in Texas. He was a cartoonist and a drug addict for a while, then he became an award-winning novelist on the first try. He’s not so easy to categorize, and neither is his work.

Pierre’s debut novel, Vernon God Little, won the Booker when he was 42. In it, our hero and narrator is Vernon Little, an awkward teenager in the small town of Martirio, Texas. Vernon’s voice is a mix of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye and Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces. In other words, funny, quirky, cutting, perceptive, and with a realistic hillbilly twang.

Before the novel begins, Vernon’s best friend, Jesus Navarro, opened fire in the middle of the high school and killed many people before turning the gun on himself. Since Jesus is gone, the town wants someone else to blame, and they settle on Vernon.

Those previous two paragraphs don’t seem to work too well together. But Pierre somehow pulls it off and Vernon God Little is the funniest book about a school shooting that you’ll ever read. …
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Starting this week, we’re using a new tag, babytown frolics. Basically, it’s the opposite of our Great Reads category. Where the Great Read designation recognizes outstanding literature that the reviewer thinks everyone should read, the babytown frolics tag designates awful literature that the reviewer thinks no one should read.

We’re not trying to pick on authors with this tag. Our contributors pick all their own books to review, nothing is assigned or required. So when a contributor writes a negative review, that reviewer genuinely thought he or she would like the book. Still, we make every effort to be even-handed and objective, and highlight the strengths of a book every bit as much as the weaknesses.

However, when a reviewer uses the babytown frolics tag, that means he or she thinks the book should never have been published. That means something in the book-producing, -marketing, -buying, and -reading process has gone seriously, seriously wrong.

All too often these days, certain publishers care about their bottom line, not just more than the quality of the books they produce, but to the exclusion of quality. A very important role in the publishing world is that of gatekeeper, the entity that keeps utter drivel from reaching the hands of innocent readers. Since publishers don’t seem to want this job anymore, we try to do our part to keep out the drivel. Most of the time we try to use a velvet rope, but sometimes we have to break out the tear gas. “Babytown frolics” is our way of trying to have fun while getting the dirty work done.

Occasionally, we might also drop the tag on an author whose ego and sense of entitlement has outgrown his talent (I’m looking at you, Douglas Preston).

The phrase “babytown frolics” comes from the pilot episode of the very funny animated show, Archer.

Some news about books and ebooks from around the web:

• What’s the purpose of libraries in the 21st century? Salon says the new main branch of the Cambridge Public Library (just blocks from C4 HQ) isn’t practical. The Guardian says libraries still matter in a digital age, and so does an Australian librarian (via). And Ars Technica reveals how libraries help America’s poor. We already know Macmillan hates libraries. I don’t enjoy this line of discussion.

• What’s the last great book you read? John Crace in the Guardian discusses how difficult it is to find a great a novel these days, because there are far too many books and publishers will tell you each and every one of them is mind-blowingly fantastic. I couldn’t agree more. Crace recommends genre fiction; meanwhile, on the Guardian’s books blog, a post about how shorter can be better for fiction. And then, crime novelist Ian Rankin discusses/defends crime fiction (via). I’m inclined to agree with all this, the only problem is that I’ve been reading all the Edgar award nominees—supposedly the best of the year in a genre that’s right up my alley—and not a single one of them has been great. It’s a nice theory, though.

• Piracy is still a hot topic, though now people are complaining that “piracy” is such a sexy word it makes people want to pirate. The ethicist at the NYT says you can steal a copy of an ebook you previously bought—counterpoint. Despite the ethicist, IsoHunt will essentially be shut down has essentially been shut down. Finally, Big Content wants the U.S.’s new intellectual property enforcer to eliminate peer-to-peer file-sharing. Good luck with that.

• Here is an article from the NYT about literature and cognitive science. Basically, it’s about how empathy relates to reading fiction, and how readers process interrelated or overlapping points of view. Or “what the scholars call levels of intentionality.” Read it.

Obligatory iPad and Amazon news—and lots of other stuff—after the break. …
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