John Kelly
Entirely flat and forgettable. A huge shame, because it's a waste of a great premise.
The literary equivalent of a ‘found footage' horror film (like The Blair Witch project or Cannibal Holocaust), House of Leaves is spooky and inventive and probably my favourite book I've read all year. Its experiments in formalism are clever and complement the story perfectly, helping you engage with the story in a unique way.
I can't recommend it enough. Just terrific.
This is my first Clive Cussler book (although I've loved the films of Sahara and Raise the Titanic). And all throughout, I kept thinking: is this what it's like to read a Chuck Tingle book? Like, every time Dirk Pitt arrived on the page, Cussler would go into such intense details about his rugged good looks, his cold, opal eyes, and his masculine prowess that I actually started to feel uncomfortable. Do you need me to leave the room, Clive?
Also, we can add this to the list of books that use black coffee as a shorthand for telling us how incredibly manly the hero is.
Bedtime is for two things:
1. Reading a nice book
2. Getting hit by waves of existential anxiety stoking your fears of death, mortality and oblivion until you feel like you're suffocating, you feel like you're in a too-hot bath so you have to get up except this isn't a too-hot bath you can jump out of. It's a hot bath you can't ever jump out of, so even as this wave of anxiety subsides, you know there's another one coming for you.
If this sounds like your idea of a good evening then, boy, is this the book for you.
Lincoln in the Bardo a beautiful book. It's witty and unexpected and there are passages (whole characters, actually) that absolutely took my breath away. Each character had their own story, their own voice, and the moment when they form a connection (staying vague because of spoilers), I was reading through floods of tears. At the same time, it took me almost a month to finish because it's also one of the most difficult things I've read (for reasons, see above), so I would approach it every night and ask myself was I mentally ready – was I emotionally ready – for this book tonight? Most nights, the answer was ‘no'. But when I was ready, I was consuming the book in huge gulps, because it was all so lovely.
Jenny Lawson is a funny lady. She's just my kind of sassy, neurotic and rude. When this book works, it's because she's writing with her own voice, the same voice you hear on her blog. When this book doesn't work – which is, unfortunately, most of the time – it's because someone took that same voice and tried to hit it with the literary stick. What you get is a dull hybrid that falls too flat to be any way engaging. It's a shame. Although I'd say this is almost certainly first-time jitters and her next book will be something special.
Like Show Your Work, Steal Like an Artist is a lovely, super-short collection of aphorisms and quotes about creativity and inspiration that never quite crosses the line of ‘cloying'. Some great practical advice. I can see myself hitting this up for a quick dose of inspiration when I'm feeling creatively flat.
As faddish throwaway young-adult fiction goes, this was surprisingly robust. Yes, it borrows very heavily from Battle Royale, but once it gets going, it's genuinely very entertaining and a nice little palate-cleanser. Looking forward to the two sequels now.
The second chapter of this book is written from the perspective of a divorced middle aged British man in the 80s. And he's less a character than a collection of disdainful cliches of what you expect divorced middle aged British man in the 80s to be like. Red flag.
The third chapter is written from the perspective of a college girl struggling with her weight. And as someone who has had his own weight-related struggles, it was actually kind of distressing to read David Mitchell's terrible writing with this character. Again, she's just a litany of disdainful fat-person cliches. I realise not all weight issues are the same and that I don't expect that my experience is universal but this was very plainly written by someone with an inability to properly empathise with a character beyond a bunch of superficial tropes.
Disappointing.
This is a short but lovely story of a relationship, a child and a marriage, as told by that girl on Livejournal you had a massive crush on when you were 17.
Despite a great premise, this whole book feels awkward and undercommitted. Emma Donoghue's Room and Will Self's The Book of Dave had the courage to fully commit to telling their stories in a broken English style, but this applied it so inconsistently as to make it jarring as fuck. And then the whole thing abruptly ends just as soon as it starts to get interesting. I had to check to see if my Kindle edition was missing a final couple of chapters (it's not). In media res is a great place to start a story. Unfortunately for Dark Eden, it's not such a great place to finish.
Is this some experiment in allowing a first-time writer to publish a book without ever sending it through the traditional editing process? A blisteringly entertaining opening gives way to a glacial middle third, and then the book just fizzles to a close without any sense of any sort of through-line or cohesion. I guess the through-line and cohesion would appear if you read the follow-up, but honestly, after slogging my way through this, I don't think I'll return for seconds, thanks.
Austin Kleon does a pretty great job of straddling the line between anecdotal motivational bullshit and practical advice for people who are nervous about letting their work be seen by the wider world. It's inspirational in all the right ways.
A mixed bag of previously-published Jon Ronson articles and short stories. He's a charming writer with a distinct voice, but the overall quality of this collection was pretty uneven.
An unusual, zippy detective story written with a light touch. Ordinarily, it would be enough for me to give it four stars. But this is Warren Ellis we're talking about. I'm not reading it for a “light touch”. I want something with his fingerprints all over it. Good, but not as good as I'd hoped it would be.
On the one hand, this book is a huge disappointment. Publishers are clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to David Foster Wallace. They know that certain people (like me) will buy pretty much anything with his name on it, so they're searching for anything that could possibly be slapped between two covers and called a ‘book'. So now we've got Both Flesh and Not which includes publicly-accessible pieces he wrote for newspapers and magazines, as well as weak 500-word nothing-pieces like “Just Asking”. These aren't his best works and, what's more, every essay in this collection represents a step closer to the moment when there is no more DFW left to publish in book form.
But on the other hand, even the worst DFW is better than almost all of the rest of the shit on my bookshelf. So there's that.
Have you ever read a Cory Doctorow book and thought “I like the way this guy is all enthusiastic about technology and how it's changing our lives in a million tiny ways, but holy fuck, I wish he wrote more interesting stories”? Then Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is for you! I finished it in two sittings. The last time I did that with a book, it was Phillip Pullman's The Northern Lights. Can't recommend this enough.
The author has a beautiful way with words and at some points, the language was so wonderfully modern, all wry and sardonic and self-aware. But the plotting was awful, with a dozen or so characters not so much introduced but rather vomited onto the page over a couple of paragraphs so I spent half the book going “now which one is this?” For example, there are two characters, a Mr and a Mrs Wilde, and yet while the two are in conversation, the author would refer to one of them as “Wilde”, as in “”Wilde said...”.
This was my first Inspector Alleyn book, but based on this outing, I don't know if I'll make the effort with the rest.
The problem with alternate reality stories – especially ones that try to ‘mirror' reality – is that it can be too easy to get ‘cute' with your ideas. The Mirage is a solid example of this. An abundance of tricksy bullshit almost derails what is otherwise a terrific central idea.
