Simple and lazy writing, crap dialogue, headache and fury-inducing narrative, and neon-lit plot twist telegraphing. All of these and so much more tripe leaves this book undesserving of my typical three sentence review.
As I mentioned first in my review of Stardust, there’s a genre of fantasy where the reality is just a click off of the reality that we know. For the reader this means it’s not so much a suspension of disbelief that is required as a questioning of what we consider real. Katherine Dunn understates practically every shocking turn, making each that much more shocking.
(Google searches provide evidence that the idea of “geeks” or “geeking” as used in the book is actually true. Woah. Geeking is real.)
I don’t watch enough of the Cooking Channel, so except for having heard the name, I didn’t know anything about Mario Batali. In Heat Bill Buford goes to work in Batali’s kitchen (among other similar apprenticeships) and I don’t know how he survived. The food history parts were alternately boring and illustrative, but overall an inspiring read.
The thing about sports books, especially those from the recent past, is if you’re a fan of the team, you’re already going to know most of what’s in the book. Feeding the Monster reads like a long form magazine article, mostly interminable, except for the beginning documenting the sale of the Red Sox and the end about Theo Epstein leaving and then coming back. The 250 pages in the middle detail the 2003, 2004 and 2005 season, seemingly and unnecessarily game by game.
People with amazing lives must be somewhat gun shy after James Frey cornered the market on fantastical (and ultimately made up) memoirs a couple years ago (and let’s be honest, Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” really was just a drawn out and exaggerated “Oh my God, I was so wasted last night…” bar tale). Another Bullshit Night in Suck City doesn’t reach that level, though Nick Flynn doesn’t meet his father for real until the man walks into his life as a client at Boston’s Pine Street Inn. Just like I enjoy movies that look like where I live (and thus applaud Boston’s emergence as the new Toronto), I also enjoy books that sound like where I live.
I got about three-quarters of the way through this book before realizing it wasn’t about what I thought it was about. That made me want to start over from the beginning to see if I missed anything. The story jumps around confusingly, but probably purposely, so pay attention.
The Echo Maker, a National Book Award finalist, featured stretches of good and interesting writing laboring to advance a story that eventually settles (collapses would be too strong a word) clumsily under the weight of a too cute story. A book about a devastating neurological disorder shouldn’t feature flat, unsympathetic characters, but this one does. Maybe I didn’t get it.
China Mieville takes on young adult fiction, and turns out an environmental fable; I guess that’s not too surprising, actually. There are some great (and very Mieville-y) ideas in this book (the unbrellas, the Black Windows, Skool, the UnGun, the man with the head of a birdcage, etc) but ultimately I don’t think it was very well-written. And besides, if you’re looking for a fantasy about an alternative version of London, well, Neverwhere’s better.
(Many thanks, though, to Julie for the signed copy!)
The blurb on the back of this book really gives nothing away, so I feel honor-bound to be somewhat circumspect – suffice it to say this book is at all about what I thought it would be. Ishiguro does an excellent job of drawing you into the story and provides just enough hints to allow you to figure out what’s really going on at a satisfying pace. (An interesting topic for discussion might be: why didn’t Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth just run away?) As in The Remains of the Day, he gets a lot of mileage out of a restricted narrative voice, although the weirdly stilted (stylized?) dialogue was a little distracting at times.
This book seems to be an exemplar of the kind of book that the world admires, my friends love, and I sort of shrug at. Maybe it’s because I’m a man, maybe it’s because I’ve never read Mrs. DallowayThe Hours struck me as overwrought and somehow fake. There are some real insights here, and some genuinely beautiful prose, but everything about the book – the characters, the story, the message – comes across as a performance, looking for the audience’s reaction out of the corner of its eye.
Can I say “a ripping yarn” non-ironically? It’s an inventive alternative history, a proud homage to hard-boiled detective fiction, a love letter to the lost Yiddish culture, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of our (real life) leaders whose attitudes towards Israel and the Middle East are colored by their apocalyptic religious mania. And, for all that, it’s a hell of a story that seems to be set at once both firmly in our time and in every era of Jewish hardship.
Here’s a book that must have been as fun (if not more) to write as it was to read. Yes, the heroes and villains are transparent knock-offs of their DC and Marvel counterparts, but that doesn’t take away from the fun, and there’s a novel delight in the world-weary, cynical, and professional attitude the characters have towards their powers. It’s a surprisingly affecting view of the downsides and trials of superheroism (shades of Watchmen) and a sympathetic portrait of an evil genius (sorry — a sufferer of Malign Hypercognition Disorder).
My former employer, The MathWorks, distributes a copy of this book to every new employee; on my last day I had nothing to do and started to read it and decided that it was, for a “business book,” surprisingly readable. The authors’ analysis of what separates a “visionary” and lasting company from the rest seems intuitive and correct to me, and I think their insights probably apply just as well to non-commercial enterprises. The irony, I find, is that nearly all of the exceptional and visionary companies the authors profile (IBM, HP, GE, Ford, Merck, Disney) have had dramatic falls from grace in the time since the book was published; I’d be very interested to read a version with a new afterward entitled “Wha’ Happened?”