Shawn Towner
Fantastic book. It perfectly captures the voice of a confused five-year old who's just had his world turned inside out. The chapter ‘Dying' was so good I had to stop reading the book for the night, as I knew there would be nothing that could top it.
Better than the first book in the series. The romance side of things is a little heavy-handed, and the action is still somewhat predictable, but I found the action sequences much more enjoyable than in Half a King. The first book did a great job with character development, but I thought it fell apart during the action-heavy parts of the book. Half the World has a better balance to it. And I like the way the book doesn't really try to rehash the events of the first book. There are little reminders here and there, but the author doesn't try to hold the hand of readers who haven't read the first book. I appreciate this lack of mercy for the misguided fools who try to start a series in the middle.
Much, much better than the movie of the same name, although considering how awful the movie is, that doesn't really give a good idea of the quality of Matheson's novella. The movie is about goofy looking CGI monsters that roar at the Fresh Prince. The novella is about vampires and the efforts of the last man on Earth (thankfully not the Fresh Prince) to stop them. While the movie focuses on the conflict between the Fresh Prince and scary things that jump out of nowhere and roar, the novella focuses more with the internal conflicts that plague the last man on Earth. The main character has to deal with feelings of boredom, depression, hopelessness, and a passionate zeal for “solving” the vampire problem. The movie wants you to be scared of what's outside the house trying to get in, whereas the novella makes it clear that the real terror is the isolation of being the last man on Earth, which makes the novella infinitely more interesting and enjoyable than the movie.
Are you like me? Have you struggled to find the motivation to read during the pandemic? You'd think a lockdown would be the perfect environment to make a dent in your TBR pile, but maybe it's been school changes and stress, changing jobs, moving across the country, changing jobs again, or maybe it's just the fear that your life is falling apart and will never get back to the way it was. Whatever the reason, maybe you've lacked a desire to read, instead choosing to rewatch old favorites like 30 Rock and Bob's Burgers and Guy's Grocery Games over and over again. Maybe you've tried to start a couple of books but you haven't made any progress in them. Maybe you're looking for a book to break you out of your reading funk. If so, Piranesi might be the book for you. It's fairly short, chunked into manageable chapters, and eminently readable. It's a great mix of metaphysical fantasy and mystery, without any exposition-heavy world-building to slow things down. A perfect book for reading while half-watching the baseball playoff games you're interested in but don't really care about. And, hopefully, a perfect book for reinvigorating the reader within you.
A lot of uninteresting, profanity-laced dialogue between uninteresting characters who can't seem to get a grip on their uninteresting, dysfunctional lives. I can't believe this book got positive blurbs from Nick Hornby, William Gibson, and the creators of the Gilmore Girls.
I attended one of the author's sessions at NCTE and went out and immediately bought the book.
The good:
1. Equal appeal and applicability for classroom teachers, teacher educators, and researchers. Geared towards English educators, but social studies/civics people could learn something from it as well.
2. Mirra does a fantastic job of mixing research/theory/philosophy and her personal experiences as a teacher, debate coach, and researcher.
3. The chapter discussion questions are perfect for self-reflection and could serve as a solid center for PD/book club work.
4. Useful and practical appendices.
The not necessarily bad, but what prevents me from giving a 5-star rating:
1. Too short. The chapters feel like they should be their own books. In the YPAR chapter, Mirra acknowledges that there's too much to cover in one chapter and cites other relevant sources to extend coverage of the topic and I feel like that caveat could apply to three of the five chapters. I'd love to see an Extended Director's Edition of this book with like 100 pages more in the YPAR, debate, and connected learning chapters. Now I'm going to have to add everything she cites to my to-read folder in Paperpile.
A quick, enjoyable read, but the last quarter of the book doesn't live up to the potential of the earlier portions of the book. Abercrombie does a fantastic job of crafting the character Yarvi's journey from a neglected weakling to a cunning champion-of-sorts, but when the novel turns to more traditional, blood-and-steel fantasy storytelling, that intriguing character is lost in the shuffle of predictable deaths and Scooby Doo plot twists.
It might be cliche to call a book a “modern classic,” but this is a modern classic. “Friday Black”, “The Finklestein 5”, and “Zimmer Land” should all become staples of short fiction curriculum and anthologies.
The introduction and conclusion should be required reading for any teacher, not just those who teach in urban schools. The chapters based around the “Seven C's” of reality pedagogy didn't feel as revelatory to me. There are good ideas for teachers, even teachers like me who don't teach in diverse/urban schools, but what I want to see from a book like this is how to change not just classroom instruction but the values education is built upon. Some ideas (like the cogen/cypher) I could see teachers easily make use of in the classroom, but many teachers don't work in an environment that allows for a great deal of pedagogical freedom. Like many educational books, a lot of this book seems directed toward the reflective teacher that wants to improve and is willing to “close the door” and teach. After having read a great many teaching books, I want educational books that focus on revolutionary change in education. How do we reach the teachers that are stuck in their ways? How do we change the culture of a school and not just a classroom? The intro and conclusion clearly establish that Emdin wants this sort of revolutionary change, but the chapters in between didn't fire me up in the same way.
I generally don't like memoirs, especially not memoirs of the heart-wrenching tragedy Oprah fodder variety, but I literally couldn't put this book down. It reads not so much as a memoir or journal of events, but a collection of occasionally disconnected thoughts and remembrances. It doesn't take the reader through the chronological events of the tragedy as much as it invites us into the author's mind as he tries, for the first time, to document his history and feelings surrounding the event.
McSweeney's 36th issue, like issues 19 and 17, is a collection of stuff issue. Unlike the disappointing issues 17 (junk mail that doesn't fit on a book shelf properly) and 19 (cigar box that fits okay on a book shelf), issue 36 is an interesting collection of stuff. The stuff comes in a box shaped like a sweaty head. Well, maybe not shaped like a sweaty head. It's actually shaped like a box, but the box has drawings that make it look like a sweaty head. Inside the head box is is collection of stories, plays, screenplays, abridged novels, and artwork that, like most of McSweeney's quarterly outputs, range in quality from brilliant to space-wasting. I figure I'll just go through the box piece by piece.
The Domestic Crusaders
A play about a Pakistani-American family. In the introduction by Ishmael Reed, he writes something about the play not just being about Pakistani-Americans, but about all families. I suppose that's true, but that doesn't make The Domestic Crusaders any more interesting. And it certainly doesn't make it comparable to Eugene O'Neill or Arthur Miller, as Reed tries to claim. The Domestic Crusaders, if you'll pardon my sounding like local newspaper movie review, is rather domestic.
Fountain City
A fragment of an abandoned novel by Michael Chabon, with facing annotations and commentary. This is something that any aspiring or struggling writer could find solace in. Although some of his commentary is mundane (former names of airports, which friends of his mother's his characters are named after, etc.) Chabon gives rare insight into the working process of a novelist. He points out ideas that started to work well, those that didn't, and tries to explain how a novelist creates and how a novelist fails to create. It's super-interesting, but I suppose only for those who are interested in writing.
Ma Su Mon
A booklet from a forthcoming Voice of Witness series about life in Burma. It tells the story of Ma Su Mon, a college student imprisoned for a year and eventually forced to leave her family in Burma because of her association with opposition party organizations. The booklet provides an informative look into the life of the Burmese people, although it's very blandly written, which makes some sense considering the book is a collection of narrativized interviews. There's been so much good creative nonfiction coming out the last couple of years, that this journalistic approach seems trite and borderline uninteresting.
Jungle Geronimo in Gay Paree
The title pretty much nails exactly what this book is about: a low-rent Tarzan knockoff in Paris. The story reads like a Dinosaur Comic where every character is T-Rex. If that's your sort of thing, you'll probably be a fan of Jungle Geronimo.
Bicycle Built for Two
A screenplay about old-timey baseball and tandem bicycles, written for Mike Myers and Dana Carvey. It's not nearly as funny as The Love Guru.
The Instructions
I've written about Adam Levin's The Instructions before and the 40-page sample included in McSweeney's 36 is a perfect example of everything I found great about the novel and everything that frustrated me about the book. Great dialogue, including a tour-de-force recreation of a post-fight middle school locker room cacophony, but the sample also displays the violently unlikeable aspects of the characters that exasperated me over course of the novel's 1000 pages. Still, a good addition for those who might not be entirely sold on a such a massive undertaking of a novel.
Stories and Letters
A good batch of letters this time around, especially those by Steve Delahoyde. Most of the collection is taken up by Colm Toibin's longer story, continuing what seems to be a trend in the recent quarterlies of including a longer, generally disappointing story. Two of the other three stories, however, really shine. John Brandon continues to be one of my favourite authors, as it seems like everything he writes is gold. And Imet Prcic's “At the National Theater” was a story so wonderfully strange that I had to immediately read it a second time.
Final Thoughts
When McSweeney's sticks to its guns–literary storytelling–is still puts out tremendous writing by talented authors. When it tries to be hard to be clever and churns out the wink-wink-nudge-nudge so-bad-it's good silliness (which is better suited for the Internet Tendency than the Quarterly Concern) it still has a tendency to fall flat. The quality of McSweeney's 36 lies in two stories and the sweaty head box.
The most telling aspect of this book is that there is no map at the beginning. This means that the book, a history of Westeros with constant references to cities and geography, is intended entirely for nerds. If you enjoy the characters and intrigue and suspense of the Game of Thrones TV show, this book is not for you. If you love the narrative perspectives and storytelling of the A Song of Ice and Fire book series, this book is not for you. If you post derogatory comments on Reddit about how a fan drawing of Daenerys doesn't properly represent the purple eyes and silver hair of the Targaryen lineage, then you'll probably like this book.
I realize that two is a somewhat small sample size, but both of the published novels by the recipients of McSweeney's Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award (Jessica Anthony's [b:The Convalescent 6169217 The Convalescent Jessica Anthony http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1246390480s/6169217.jpg 6348626] and Hannah Pittard's [b:The Fates Will Find Their Way: A Novel 8437766 The Fates Will Find Their Way A Novel Hannah Pittard http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1278431888s/8437766.jpg 13301352]) have been quite good. I don't think Fates is as good as The Convalescent (which is one of my favourite books of the last few years), but it's a thoroughly engrossing read. The problem with Fates is that it's basically a novel built on hearsay and rumours. The narration is first-person plural, drawing the reader in as a participant in the novel. Although this narration makes us a part of the story, by doing so it also means that many of the characters who gather to tell stories are undeveloped or one-dimensional, defined only by their marital status. In a novel that features multiple generations of multiple families (which is an impressive feat, considering that Fates is just over 200 pages long), we only get to know one character very well. And what we learn about that character, Nora, might not even be true.But a great thing about Fates is that these undeveloped characters, in a way, actually help the novel. The novel is about a group of boys who, throughout there lives, think back to a mystery from their childhood (the disappearance of the aforementioned Nora), constantly refining and revising their version of the event and its aftermath as new perspectives are gained. By never fully introducing us to the cast of storytellers she uses, Pittard is contributing to the mystery of the novel. Because we don't know the characters all that well, it makes it difficult for us to fully evaluate their tales. How much is true and how much is conjecture and fantasy? I guess we'll have to wait for the sequel (The Fates Will Find Their Way II: This Time It's a Straightforward and Reliable Narrator) to find out.
I finished Mr. Peanut on the same day I watch Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience; an interesting coincidence considering both works feature a disjointed narrative structure. But where Soderbergh's film is a pretentious pastiche of bland dialogue spoken by equally bland characters, with the non-linear structure a necessary distraction (there's no way the story or characters (and I use those terms very loosely) could hold a viewer's attention for a straightforward 75 minutes), the structure of Adam Ross' novel adds new levels of meaning and suspense to the story.
Mr. Peanut tells the story of a man writing a novel and being investigated for murdering his wife. The narration moves between the man, the two detectives investigating him, and the novel he is writing. The narration moves so effortlessly between these points of view that you truly don't know the entirety of what's going on until the last few pages. It is a mystery novel without an easily guessed ending and without the out-of-nowhere twist ending. The novel's one flaw is that it lingers too long on the story of one of the detectives and his marital history. But other than that, all the back cover blurbs (“Riveting...”, “a diabolically intricate novel...”, “an intellectual noir novel...”) are 100% accurate.
The Kenyan stories were a little meh, but the rest of the issue is solid. German girls who want to be eaten by lions, bored yuppies, empathetic mind-reading rabbits, women turning into birds, Irish beat-downs during the Troubles–there's a little something for everyone. Probably the best McSweeney's since the Panorama issue.
Like most short fiction collections, and McSweeney's in particular, this is a hit or miss affair. I thought the first half dozen or so stories were really interesting and engaging, but the quality fell off after that.
A decent collection of stories, with two standouts: “Afterworld” by Anthony Doerr and “The Wreck of the Beverley B.” by T.C. Boyle. But the real prize of McSweeney's 34 is Nick McDonell's account of the Iraq war, “The End of Major Combat Operations.” It deals with many of the same topics as “The Good Soldiers” (both books even quote the same material from the Army's counter-insurgency manual) but “The End of Major Combat Operations” does so in a much more engaging fashion. It's clear from reading both books that McDonnell is an author working as a reporter, while David Finkel is “just” a reporter. “The End of Major Combat Operations” is a much more interesting read that “The Good Soldiers” and I think it has the potential to be one of the best books written about the day-to-day operations of the Iraq war.
Many of the reviews I've read of this book have compared it to Catcher in the Rye, which I don't think is an apt comparison. The protagonist of Bowl of Cherries isn't nearly as insufferable as Holden Caufield and the novel is actually an enjoyable, poop-pun-filled romp through lovelorn adolescence.
A fascinating read, but my political views seem to align with those of the authors. I'd be interested in hearing what more Conservative or Libertarian-minded readers think about the book. I found it to be an easy to read look at US history, political science and economics. It's well-sourced and academic, but unburdened by the opaque jargon commonly found in academic texts. I especially enjoyed the way the authors described the many ways we can take steps towards moving back towards a stronger mixed economy. They vilify the people who deserve to be vilified (worthless, do-nothing politicians and their sponsors) without ever bordering on scaremongering or witch-hunting. And I loved the way they emphasize the idea that this is not a simple fix. It will take a number of hard-working, dedicated people (not just one political savior) working over an extended period of time to make substantial changes.
John Green writes books about young people dealing with not fitting in, loss, and other challenges of growing up. If you look up John Green's books on Google Books, they are categorized under the subject “Young Adult Fiction / Social Themes / Dating and Sex.”
Jesse Ball's How to Start a Fire and Why is a book about a young person dealing with not fitting in, loss, and other challenges of growing up. If you look up Ball's novel on Google books, it is categorized under the subject “Fiction / Literary.” What's the deal with that?
The simple answer is that a Ball is a better, more literary writer than Green. But what makes a writer more literary? Is it that Ball has an MFA and writes poetry while Green has a Tumblr and makes YouTube vlogs?
Or it could be because the Young Adult literature category is more of a marketing tag than a content tag, and that the Pantheon imprint (publishers of Mark Danielewski and books about literary arguments) isn't interested in marketing books towards the young adult reader.
Regardless of the classification rationale, marking How to Start a Fire and Why as literary fiction does a disservice to both the novel and to potential readers. How to Start a Fire and Why is a young adult novel, and it's a great young adult novel.
Lucia, the protagonist of the novel, struggles to fit into the social and academic systems at school and eventually becomes fascinated with arson. Like many of John Green's characters, Lucia is literate and brilliant beyond her teenage years, quoting Rumi and reading books about the Russian peasant class. And there are other familiar characters from the young adult world: the overbearing school admin, the weird outcast with a crush on the protagonist, the lone compassionate and supportive teacher. But there are also characters who break the typical YA mold, like creepy older men who Lucia often views with suspicion. It's these more mature views of the world that make it so essential for a book like How to Start a Fire and Why to be classified as young adult literature.
I'll admit, I haven't been a huge advocate for young adult literature. In fact, I thought I hated YA lit for a very long time. Eventually, I realized that I don't hate YA lit, I hate literature that deals with relationships, which a lot of YA books do. It was reading Rick Yancey's The 5th Wave that opened me up to young adult literature. (Although I hated all the love triangle stuff; just kill the damn aliens!) A book like How to Start a Fire and Why could help to eliminate the stigma against young adult literature (and genre fiction in general).
I want people (and especially young people) to read good books. I want them to read books that aren't all movie tie-ins or blatant ripoffs intended to capitalize on the popularity of books that are movie tie-ins (like the entire cottage industry of Gone Girl imitators). If books like How to Start a Fire and Why are shelved with Jonathan Franzen instead of John Green, it reduces the likelihood of that happening.
How to Start a Fire and Why is a great book. There are a couple of parts where Ball focuses on Lucia's writings that interrupted the momentum of the book, but it's otherwise a great combination of story, character, and thought. It's the type of book that's short enough and engaging enough to serve as a sort of gateway read that can encourage readers to diversify their reading habits and explore lesser known authors who publish with smaller presses. Not that there's anything wrong with reading John Green and Stephen King and the like, but there are so many authors and publishers to explore, and How to Start a Fire and Why is a prime example of why we need to seek out and support those authors and publishers.
In a book that features squid-worshippers, talking tattoos, thugs with fists instead of heads, and even a tribble, you would think that all this ridiculousness might run wild, but that is not the case with Kraken. Even though the world of the novel is a version of London where multiple gods roam and many of the residents have some affinity for magic, the novel never fully descends into outright absurdity. The villains of the story–a Dickensian pair of personified malevolence, one of whom speaks entirely in a hodgepodge of mixed metaphors, awful analogies, and Cockney nonsense–ground the narrative in a violent reality. Even though the characters have magic at their disposal, the villains have powers far greater and far more sinister, so there is actual drama and conflict, not merely a series of events ending in someone pulling a rabbit out of the hat and then watching as the rabbit saves the day.
The main flaw with Kraken is that the author sometimes gets lost in creating his alternate London. Like Neal Stephenson's Anathem, much of the narration of Kraken is explaining how the world works, and the histories of its bizarre denizens. These explanations come whether they are needed or not. Explaining the squid cult that is at the center of the novel, or the backstory between London's warring factions is all well and good. But is it really necessary to devote time to explain Chaos Nazis? They're Nazis who love chaos; it's pretty self-explanatory. There are also a couple of sub-plots that, although they join up with the main plot in the end, go into more detail than is actually needed. And there's one potentially interesting sub-plot, involving a kidnapped girl who might be a cross between a human and a djinn, that doesn't get nearly enough attention. But wayward plots are what come with the territory when mixing genres like Kraken does. The novel has elements of horror, Sci-Fi (speculative fiction, if you're nasty), fantasy, and mystery, blending all these genres in a seamless fashion.
The opening of Gutshot Straight worried me. An ex-con just released from prison picks up a job driving a car from LA to Vegas, only to find that there's a sexy young lady in the trunk of his car. This worried me because I am always worried by novels that steal their plot from The Transporter. Even the combined genius of a Dicken-Joyce-Nabokov hybrid couldn't craft prose capable of competing the action-packed adrenaline rush that is The Transporter.
Fortunately, Gutshot Straight doesn't make the foolhardy decision to rip off The Transporter. Instead it's a story of the aforementioned ex-con and a stripper who team up to try and sell authentic Biblical foreskins, while avoiding the Armenian mob and the violent strip club owner Dick Moby. There's also the requisite mainstream crime fiction addition of awesome, mind-blowing sex, because apparently everyone who reads mainstream crime fiction is a furtive masturbator. Mainstream crime fiction authors really don't give their audience enough credit. There are some readers out there who just want to spend a quiet Saturday night reading about a stripper trying to fence a case full of Philistine foreskins. I don't really need the whole Ross-and-Rachel subplot. although it's probably to be expected, considering the author is a TV/Film writer.
Tacked-on subplots aside, Gutshot Straight is a very enjoyable novel. The denouement, in particular, is magnificent. A Shakespearean in magnitude clash of violence, morality, plot threads, and foreskins. Good stuff, although the resolution to the story doesn't quite match up. In typical Hollywood fashion, the ending mixes trite romance and bad jokes, while leaving an obvious opening for a sequel. Because of Gutshot Straight, Lou Berney is now an author I'm going to add to my radar. And because of the denouement of Gutshot Straight, which, again, was brilliantly awesome, I'm going to hope that with his future works, he can ditch the hackneyed TV pilot nonsense, cast off the shackles of Hollywood screenwriters, and live up to the potential displayed in Gutshot Straight
