This is an archive of my shorter book reviews and notes, which historically have been posted over at the 50 Book Challenge on LiveJournal, but which I’m starting to move over here. I’m posting them with altered date-stamps, but they might show up in my LiveJournal cross-post anyway. Bear with me, please.
Note: Many of these books also have full reviews available in the book review podcast (RSS).
#26:
Lovely political fantasy.
#27:
Jennifer Government, by Max Barry
I bought this as part of my “political satire” research, but it turns out to be more of a near-future dystopian sci fi novel, but without any real speculative elements in it. In any case, the big hangup for me was the names. Everyone is named after their employer, like “John Nike” who works for Nike, and “John Nike” who also works for Nike. Despite this being a novel about consumerism and the class war, there were no minorities in it, and the only foreigners were a French man and a Japanese businessman– I guess it’s safer to talk about the class war when everyone has nice WASPish names to work with.
#28
Surreal, magical realism, though I would argue that instead of magic, it has at its core metaphor– all magical elements are in fact metaphors for cultural changes of the time. So perhaps metaphorical realism would be more appropriate.
#29:
This is a book that is supposedly about the creatures of the Permian extinction and how they died out. And, in fact, there is quite a bit of that, though very little of it actually gets into describing any of the creatures whose bones Ward digs up (I got more description out of the Smithsonian Field Guide to Dinosaurs). But mostly it is about the process of travel and paleontology, and less about the science of it all. More like a memoir, less like a non-fiction science book. Ward’s claims when it comes to his description of fossil discovery in the South African Karoo desert are…. shall we say implausible? By his account, one can literally sit down to lunch on top of a major fossil find, and every day will result in finding fossilized bones 250 million years old. Now, I have never been to the Karoo desert, so I don’t know if this is true– certainly, it may be so. But doesn’t Ward suspect that his friend Roger Smith, who is a very impatient paleontologist if I ever heard of one, might be playing a less-than-level game, in that every *day* he finds tons of fossils and bones and is always successful, no matter what? I’m just saying… it seems unlikely, especially given how bloody *long* it takes to unearth fossils in every other part of the planet.
#30:
Things getting closer, Susannah’s time, birth of her hideous monster gets nearer, etc., etc., etc.
I originally had a rule that I would listen to at least one other book in between each Dark Tower book, but I could not imagine any human coming to the end of Susannah and not reaching immediately for the next. I have serious sympathy for those who read these as they came out. You are made of stronger stuff than I, and that’s the truth.
#31:
*sob* Okay, so listening to Bad Things Happening to my favorite characters is, well, not so great. I felt almost cheated by the ending until the Coda, and even then, it was…. light? I don’t know. Perhaps it felt more like the sound of a finger lifting from a piano key, rather than the amazing climactic crescendo at the end of a piece of music. Whatever it was, this whole series spoke to me and got to me– a lot. Patrick’s magic (which is the same as Susannah’s magic, and the same as Eddie’s magic, and possibly the Breakers’ magic) was beautiful and Just Right, there at the end of all things. Also: Patrick=Nick, and I love Nick.
#32:
Good book, better than book 5, a nice summer read.
#33:
A bit like Vernon God Little in the over-emphasis on voice. I’ve noticed a lot that many writers confuse “voice” with “dialect” and “fragmented.” It is perfectly legitimate to have a strong voice that does not sound like (a) Gabriel Garcia Marquez on a bad day, or (b) a precocious but otherwise illiterate four year old. Just my thoughts. This novel could have been so much better, if Foer had stuck to the basics of the novelist’s craft: telling a story. It did, however, bring tears to my eyes (though not, probably, at the point when I was supposed to have them– the masculinity of the novel also perturbed me, and I found it very hard to identify with all but one of the protagonists). Even before I finished it, however, I was thinking “overuse and obviousness of archetypes…” Perhaps I needed to release my critical brain more before reading this one, but since it was shelves with mainstream/literary, all bets are off.
#34:
This is an interesting non-fiction book about the fateful 1918 World Series, which the Chicago White Sox lost to Cincinatti, due in large part to their seven best players throwing the game. Interesting look at corruption, baseball, public image, and newspaper media. Good summertime reading.
#35:
Here’s the review I wrote for amazon.com about this book: [3 stars]
It’s not that I’m not a badass, or that I don’t “get” it. It’s that this book on poker was about 2 chapters of actual content, most of which was bare-bones mechanics of playing, and not that useful to actually calculating odds and winning the game. The rest was about how to attract a man at the poker table, how to dress for poker, basically, how to play into every tired stereotype of “a badass girl.” When I read the gratuitous lists of suggested movies and songs, I knew I was reading a book in which the author had really been stretching to find something to say. Ms. Bochan: Doyle Brunsen can go on for a thousand pages about poker. If you have to come up with unimaginative song lists and interviews (interesting, but not especially helpful to learning how to “beat the boys”), you’re not quite ready to write a book.