Carlos
A fairly middle-of-the-road spy thriller. Aside from centering female characters, it appears to be aggressively avoiding doing anything interesting.
In response to the rise of the “gritty” superhero movie (ie., the DC films of Nolan, Snyder), some critics pondered if maybe applying a serious approach to comic book subjects was really the best approach.
Red Widow reflects a similarly muddled mash-up of approaches, attempting to combine the process realism of a Le Carré with the heroism of a Ludlum. The result appears to pull the weakest elements of both, characters with the depth of a pop spy novel engaged in the exiting day-to-day of office politics.
The writing is mostly fine, but it's a largely forgettable story.
I hit the halfway mark and gave up. Is the zombie genre itself a kind of zombie, continuing to go through the motions of life while having nothing going on between the ears? Admittedly, I skipped World War Z (both book and film), but the first season of The Walking Dead is my last memory of a zombie tale rising above tolerable.
Initial reaction: Just by the law of averages, the movie is bound to be better.More thoughts: I keep telling myself I should write a review before this book vanishes from my memory. It's the sort of high-concept thriller that will quickly fade. There is a good chance that in a few months, the only thing I'll remember is that the author doesn't know the difference between Spanish and Tex-Mex cuisines.Final thoughts: Dark Matter isn't so much a bad book as it is two mediocre books often working at cross purposes. On the one hand, there is the thriller, the pulse-pounding excitement of a man thrust into dangerous situations and having to think on his feet to survive. One the other, there is the speculative fiction, the thought-provoking vista into how a man's choices define him and what happens when he confronts the road not traveled. That is, Dark Matter would like to be Sliding Doors meets Face/Off.Yet, those two impulses end up working at cross purposes. It's need to keep the pace up keeps the novel from really sitting with the spec fic elements, leaving most of the potentially intriguing questions about choice and identity to be dealt in really superficial matters. On the flip side, the sci-fi conceit is fantastic enough that the protagonist spends much of the novel dependent on underdeveloped secondary characters for exposition and even survival, robbing the character of agency. It's not until near the end that he finally starts making decisions which don't feel idiotic, but by that point it's too little, too late.I can imagine a better version of this novel, one in which the sci-fi and action beats are better integrated, the characters more fleshed out, a greater sense of mystery and wonder cultivated. However, the version of the story in this reality is dull and forgettable.Though not in any way related to Crouch's novel, I'd recommend the Starz series Counterpart for anybody interested in the combination of thriller and speculative fiction.
A novel about the tension between Argentine identity and American identity, where Argentina's Dirty War serves as the source of the conflict. Though well researched and beautifully written, it felt somewhat brought down by two big factors. The first is that the descent to Hades functions principally as a very long flashback, so there is little tension as to the outcome. The second is that much of the protagonist's motivation is linked to his unrequited love for the girl he grew up with, which gives the novel something of an “angsty white boy” feel.
About 90% of the way through, I had to pull up Wikipedia and check the publication date against Eco's biography. Was this one of those posthumously published unfinished works, such as Wallace's Pale King? No, Eco was still alive when this came out, so it seems to have been the novel he intended to publish.
Looking back on this novel, I find myself thinking of a snake swallowing an elephant. (Apologies to Saint-Exupéry.) Much of the fascination is wondering how the snake is going to pull that off. The snake in this example is the novel, Numero Zero, and the elephant is, well, pretty much all that stuff that shows up on the jacket: Operation Gladio, Mussolini, Licio Gelli, La Cosa Nostra, the CIA, right-wing death squads, the Cold War, etc. To avoid further belaboring this questionable metaphor, let's just say the snake puts up a good show but just as it unhinges its jaws and looks like it's going to get to swallowing, it takes one last look at the elephant, does whatever snakes do to shrug, and slinks off.
So, the novel isn't really about any of that, though there's enough of that included to form the basis of a paranoid thriller. What it's really about is a middle-aged academic who gets involved with a start-up newspaper in early 1990s Italy. One might say hi-jinx ensue, though these are principally of the low-stakes variety. While it feels slight compared to his other denser, more intellectually challenging works, the story was pleasant and managed to it at least one familiar Eco theme: how symbols are manipulated to create meaning.
In terms of craft, this tale of the Donner Party which incorporates elements of Wendigo/Skinwalker-type myths is solid, and yet I sometimes found myself asking what the point was. The Donner Party certainly didn't lack for horrors, so did the supernatural element really add anything? I never felt like the novel quite answered that question. 3.5 stars
I feel bad abandoning this one, since I'm a fan of Cat Valente's work. Still, it was due back to the library, I have other books I need to get to, and was starting to feel like a slog.
Maybe I'll come back to it again some time in the future, give it another shot and see if it was just matter of my mood, of bad timing or some other ephemeral factor.
Strangely, I'd finished Valente's The Glass Town Game perhaps 2 or 3 weeks before this one. That one, a sort of Wizard of Oz by way of the Brontës, was delightful. So, I was expecting this one to be equally brilliant
I think it's really hard to pull off a work like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which Space Opera is aiming for. I figured Valente, a wonderfully talented writer, could have pulled it off. For lack of a better word, this just felt excessively twee, missing some element to ground it and make the jokes really pop.
Though Space Opera is better written, it reminded me of The Eyre Affair, another HGTTG-influenced work which didn't really work for me.
No star rating since I didn't finish, but the part I got through would probably be a 2.5 stars. I'm hoping I get a chance to revisit it and find I was wrong.
I don't know if it's the so-called “Covid brain,” but I managed to make it through the whole audiobook while absorbing maybe 5 - 10% of the contents. Then again, I had a similar experience with Northanger Abbey almost a decade ago. No rating, but if I ever attempt Austen again, I'll have to try an old-fashioned ink-on-paper book.
Una colección de artículos que Arlt escribió sobre crimenes en la ciudad de Buenos Aires, algunos que fueron después convertidos an aguafuertes. De interés a cualquier que quiere aprender sobra vida humilde de la ciudad en los principios del siglo XX, que le guste el género de “true crime” o la obra de Arlt en general.
Though not as brilliant as We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Haunting of Hill House is one easily one of the best haunted house tales ever written. Jackson has a talent at bringing out the creepy in the everyday world, making little mundane details of people's behavior or the construction of Hill House as unsettling as the more obvious strangeness going on.
Maybe because I'd heard so many good things about it, this book was something of a disappointment. It's an intriguing premise of a book, sort of a scaled-down version of House of Leaves, doing for possession/exorcism what HoL did for haunted houses. (There's even a Navidson reference.)
The story at the center is of a teen, Marjorie, whose erratic behavior leads one of her parents to believe she's possessed and bring in a priest to perform an exorcism. The exorcism becomes the subject of a reality TV program, which makes up another layer of the story. This is all being recounted by Merry, Marjorie's younger sister, as an adult. There's also a blogger whose posts comment on the reality show, who turns out to be adult Merry writing under a pseudonym.
It's an intriguing premise that never quite worked for me. Though the writing style was pretty good, it didn't reach the kind of complexity to story needed. Merry appears to be inspired by Merricat from We Have Always Lived in the Castle– She even poisons her entire family near the end of the story–but her voice never achieves the perfect balance of sinister and innocent, knowing and naive that Jackson achieved. While Tremblay can be complimented for even trying, the failure leaves something of a hole in the emotional heart of the novel.
The blog entries are a particular weak point. Some people hate the Johnny Truant sections of HoL, but at least Johnny felt like a real character. The blogs are written in a quirky, hyperactive style which winds up feeling like the narrative equivalent of the Steve Buscemi “How do you fellow kids?” meme. They also feel superfluous, the analysis they provide not serving to deepen the story but more to lampshade some weaker elements (some pretty direct rips from “The Exorcist”) and flatter or impress the reader (shout-outs to “The Castle of Otranto”, “The Haunting of Hill House” and various other Gothic classics).
The central premise of the title is the notion that stories and ghosts are analogous, possible stand-ins for each other, an interesting idea the novel never quite lives up to.
Delightful story set in Lovecraft's Dreamland's. When a young student at Ulthar Women's College runs off with a boy from the waking world, Professor Vellitt Boe sets out to bring her back, unaware of the complications she'll soon run into. Johnson's tale works both as a critique of Lovecraft's male-centered views and a loving tribute to the worlds he created.
Un libro algo diferente de Enríquez, menos Stephen King, mas Neil Gaiman. El libro relata una mitología moderna y tenebrosa, sobre los seres eternos responsables por las muertes resonantes de los gran ídolos del rock. Aunque el tema tiene la posibilidad de resultar en clichés o kitsch, el cuento que resulta es una meditación conmovedora sobre memoria y pérdida.
An intriguing experimental novel from poet/songwriter Cohen. It's a very Leonard Cohen book, fascinated with Catholic themes of suffering and salvation, concerned with the outsider's place in Canadian society. Some of the more outrageous elements feel very much of its milieu (of Hunter Thompson, Tom Robbins, etc) but Cohen's poetic way with language elevates it.
Interesting retelling of The Horror at Red Hook, shifting much of the emphasis to an African-American confederate of Robert Suydam.
In lieu of an analysis, here are strong and weak points –
Strong:
LaValle treats the themes of immigrants and poverty in early 20th century New York with much greater insight than HPL, turning one of his ugliest stories into a look at marginalization and resistance.
The characterization is solid.
The plot moves nicely and keeps the tension up.
Weak:
The prose is serviceable but sometimes clunky.
It significantly cuts down the plot, which means the climax comes nowhere near the psychedelic weirdness of the original.