Rob
This was a book club pick. I quite enjoyed it. It's set in the '50s, and the premise, as the Goodreads blurb notes, involves desecration of dead bodies in a small Southern town, but most of it is about a protagonist's desperate flight to report it to someone who will listen before he's caught and killed. Not too much more I can say plotwise without venturing into spoiler territory.
Since I didn't care for the last book club pick, I was pretty stoked to have enjoyed this one. The writing is strong; the first sentence is pretty flowery, and while I enjoyed it, I was initially worried it would make the novel too hard to read, but Gay doesn't spend the entire novel dropping descriptors on you by the shovelful and it's perfectly readable.
Not great. Prose is noticeably weak. Interesting premise, but until very near the end I didn't feel like the author had done all that much with it.
Enjoyed this. When I finished it I wondered how they could continue; it turns out this is the last “main” volume, although there have been some other offshoot volumes. Nemo is still the best.
Okay but ultimately unfulfilling. This was recommended to me because I said I wanted some Batman stuff that showcased some of the cool villains. That's exactly what this is, but I should have been clearer about what I want – this is a showcase and nothing more. What I guess I really wanted was something that explored one of the villains in-depth. But that doesn't really happen here.
Decent story for what it is but it feels like Batman: Dilletante Edition.
Pretty standard Sedaris, and whether I enjoy that or not is a matter of mood. Like all of his books, it's in turn funny and upsetting.
Frequently amazing, powerfully written, and constrained from brilliance.
This is a fictional work with a (very small) amount of magic, and is not formally set on Earth, but it is essentially the Spanish reconquista recast. The cast is large, but it is centrally concerned with two strong – but not ruling – figures from the Asharite and Jaddite faiths and civilizations, their shifting loyalties, the rulers they serve, their friendships. Both of those religions, and a third, the Kindath, are pretty clearly representative of real-world religions.
I enjoyed the book very much and I loved most of the characters, but it suffers from some common writing complaints, mostly to do with the plot being too “pat.” The warriors are too good; some of the characters too noble; certain death too frequently averted; everything works out a little too perfectly most of the time. It feels like an airbrushed history.
As a top-flight, grade-A novel, it leaves a bit too much to be desired. As a B-rate one, it blows most of the competition out of the water.
Fore beginning, I should note that this book doesn't really offer the sort of unified theory that its title suggests. That's okay by me – I knew what I was going to get when I started it, and it's what I wanted. It would be more accurate to say that it's an examination of soccer culture from around the world, broken up into discrete chapters by region. I worry a little that that description gives it short shrift. It's not strictly about soccer, nor is it confined to the inside of soccer grounds. Rather, it investigates the bidirectional flow of local culture to and from its soccer teams.
Topics include right-wing Serbian nationalism with respect to Red Star Belgrade; Scottish sectarianism and the Old Firm, in Rangers and Celtic; Italian corruption in Juventus and AC Milan; cultural divisions in US soccer and American sport in general; and several others.
Foer is a devoted soccer fan, as am I. He's a huge Barcelona fan and I think he gets a little heavy in his praise for them. I should note that I also have strong biases – I pay little attention to Spanish football, but for example, I support Celtic and am going to have particular preexisting views on the Old Firm regardless of what Foer writes.
All this by way of saying that I think Foer mostly plays it straight, but you should consider your sources, both him and me. In his writeup of the Old Firm rivalry, for example, Celtic supporters come out looking far better than Rangers supporters, but not completely innocent. I personally think this is utterly fair, although the bulk of his time by far in that chapter is spent in the company of the Rangers-affiliated. If I were someone else, I wouldn't take my word for it either – but I'd take Foer's, as he doesn't seem to have a horse in that race. Similarly, I'd suggest taking his thoughts on Barcelona vs. Real Madrid with a grain of salt. Past his tendency to view Barca through rose-colored glasses, though, he's got his facts straight there as well – for example, I believe it's beyond question that Real were Franco's team of choice, but he doesn't attempt to claim that the club was complicit, which I've seen suggested before by others.
As an American soccer fan, while the chapter on American soccer wasn't my favorite to read, Foer's got his head on straight there as well. He's correctly identified soccer as a boutique sport in the US, versus its solidly working-class roots elsewhere in the world, and he doesn't attempt to let the pro-soccer side – that's both his side and mine, for those keeping track at home – off the hook for its cultural snobbery, even as he eviscerates know-nothing morons like Jim Rome on the other side.
This doesn't get all that much play in the book, but Foer mixes with some genuinely nasty characters in his research for the book. I'd note for posterity that he put himself in harm's way for the opportunity to talk to old-school hooligans and paramilitary types – Belgrade comes to mind.
Very much a worthwhile read for a soccer fan interested in cultural background, educational and entertaining. Note that this is an impressionistic, cultural whirlwind tour, not a by-the-numbers analysis.
I'm going to be including a bit of discussion about The Magicians, the predecessor to this book, during this review. I am assuming that anyone reading the sequel has read the first volume, such that that discussion will not constitute spoilers for anyone.
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Not sure I know what I think of this one. It's the followup to the widely acclaimed (but polarizing) The Magicians, which to me was an exercise in genre subversion. I thought the first book did a lot of interesting things, but I also found it depressing.
Before I go on, I should add that I probably don't have the appropriate literary grounding and my opinions should likely be disregarded. I am reliably informed that The Magician King is designed to directly parallel The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis' third Narnia book, which I haven't read as I didn't like the first one as a kid. So it's quite possible that I'm missing important allusions that would make it more akin to the first book.
The Magician King takes place some time after the end of The Magicians, with Quentin and his friends ruling over Fillory. It's split into two different perspectives: Quentin's, in the present, and Julia's, in a retelling of how she learned to do magic without attending Brakebills. Both have their high points; Julia's was the more interesting to me for much of the book.
Magicians seemed determined to hammer home the idea that life isn't a fairy tale and things aren't always fair and don't always work out well. Some of that tone is left in King, but a number of the sharp edges have been sanded off.
Immediately after reading it, I felt I “enjoyed” The Magician King more than its predecessor – I found The Magicians quite depressing – but that The Magicians was the book that did more interesting things. After sleeping on it, I'm not sure that's fair, as King still does plenty of heavy lifting; it's probably impossible for it to make as strong an impression as the first book, since its assault on the genre is already known.