2010/08/25

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

One Good TurnOne Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Atkinson uses the same story telling technique that worked so well in Case Histories - several mysteries unravel at the same time with characters slowing crossing from one to other until it's all brought together in the end. However, in Case Histories, each mystery stood on its own merit. In this book, I felt like the characters were supposed to be the story, and the crimes that brought them together were padding. Excessive, smothering, too heavy padding that would have been okay on an episode of "Midsommer Murders" (which Atkinson dares to mock, along with every other cliché about writers and fans of writers, apparently not seeing that she's one of them), but is cumbersome in a book with this many twists. As for the characters, there was not one character arc in this book that I'd didn't figure out by the middle of the book. Yes, there was some development, but it wasn't surprising in the least bit. The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is a great setting for this kind of story, though, and that along with Jackson Brody's negative attitude about just about everything is what kept me reading this book.



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2010/08/23

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and NightfallNocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Finished this less than 24 hours ago and the only thing that is sticking to my mind is that the singer in the first story looked and sounded like a character James Gandolfini would play. The plots are nothing new (non existent in Malvern Hills, and the dialog is labored to the point breaking at some point in each story. By the end, I felt like I was reading something Ishiguro thrown away rather than something ready to be published. To his credit, however, even garbage Ishiguro is readable if you want something fast and easy.



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2010/08/22

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games (Hunger Games, #1)The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Somehow, despite the popularity of this book, I managed to escape ever having read a review or a detailed description. All I knew was that it was about a girl who has to survive a "The Most Dangerous Game" type of situation. Pretty strong stuff for YA fiction, and it turns out that the author didn't pull back from the dark side of such a plot. People must die, even good people. (No, I'm not marking this as a spoiler. Katniss, our heroine, makes that clear very early in the book.) Within the confines of the world Collins has built for the actual Hunger Games, life is not fair. The line between the haves and the have-not is drawn by proximity to the Capitol district of a post civil war North America, with those living the farthest away geographically also living the farthest away economically. That carries through to the participants in the Games, something invented supposedly to remind the various districts the repercussions of fighting against....and there is where the story starts to fall apart for me. There's no solid back story for the how and why North America remains a totalitarian state. What happened that obliterated that basic primal instinct of protecting the young? Why would people continue to have children in the outlying districts? Sure, there will always be people who go along to get along, but there will always also be people, people who don't even have children, who would stand up and say, "No, not the children". How did the citizens of Panem come to the point that they not only allowed their children to be killed year after year, but it becomes a popular entertainment if your child isn't included? Also, it doesn't make sense for a government to allow the second and third strongest competitors to be killed. In a society so interested in strength and beauty, wouldn't they be saved for breeding? I can imagine there are ways this could happen, but I want to know why they happened in this story.



I'm going to keep going with the series, partially because Collins has invented an intriguing character with Kstniss, but all because I want to see where she goes with a society that can't last the way it's been portrayed so far.



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2010/08/21

Mentor by Tom Grimes

MentorMentor by Tom Grimes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This a memoir about that awful, wonderful, scary, magical journey that every author wants to take, the one that puts them in a place that when someone says "What do you do?" they can answer, "I'm a writer" without any fear of a followup question. Tom Grimes put in the hours, he did the revisions, he wrote and wrote and wrote. But still, it was a combination of good timing and talent that got him published. That's not great to hear if you're trying to make it as a published author, but at least Grimes is honest. Frank Conroy liked Grimes' work and was in a position to make things happen for him. Grimes never asks himself the question, "What if Frank had never saw my application?", something that could have happened very easily given the process to get into the Iowa Writer's Workshop. This is not a story about failure, so why look at what might have been? It's the story of more than getting by with a little help from a friend, it's about about one friend helping anouther's dreams come true.



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2010/08/17

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

A Reliable WifeA Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Really good historical, pretty good fiction. The blurbs on the back promised more than was delivered (I know, I should know better than to believe those), but there was a gothic tone to most of the story that made up for the weak tension. The predictable love triangle was saved by all of the characters being deliciously flawed.

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The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

The Particular Sadness of Lemon CakeThe Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I really enjoyed the first third of this book, it had all the makings of a "I couldn't put it down". Unfortunately, the first third is the book, it doesn't expand on what it a fascinating plot device. What if someone could taste the emotions of the people who made their food? What if that person was a child? How would it change how that child sees not only their family, but the world around them? There would be good and bad consequences, right? In Bender's book, however, there seem to be no good consequences, and heidn't change her one bit. Her ability became nothing more than a contrivance to explore an unhappy family. What a waste of a good idea!

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2010/08/13

The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier

The Lady and the UnicornThe Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


The setting and the historical aspect were interesting and informative. Perhaps a little too informative? There were no obvious information dumps, but there were times, especially when the story shifts to the weaver's portion of the story, that I felt I was reading a book entitled "Guilds in the Medieval Village" and not the fictionalized story of how a very famous tapestry came to be. As the the characters, when the're really all quite superficial and each only has one purpose in the story. What you learn about them at their introduction is all you'll ever need to know about them. My last quibble is the epilogue. If most of the characters are fictional, why tell their "what happened to" story in that way? Either it's a part of this story, or write another book.

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2010/08/10

Juneteenth: A Novel by Ralph Ellison

Juneteenth: A NovelJuneteenth: A Novel by Ralph Ellison

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


How do you judge a book that was unfinished at the time it was taken over by the editor? A book that was 40 years in the making, likely to have been published as three books if the author had finished it before he passed away? Do you judge it as a work in progress, a sketch book piece from the creaters of one of Western Literatures masterpieces? After all, Elisson never handed this book to his publisher and said "It is done". It seems unfair to judge it as a finished work bearing Ellison's name, but on the other hand, he's dead and probably doesn't care. The book IS published, it is promoted as a completed novel by the people who are making money from it (Ellison's estate as well as the publisher), so it should be held up to whatever standards the reader uses to judge other, more traditionally published books. In that case, I say that Juneteenth: A Novel, while no where near the glory of Invisible Man, is not a bad book. As character driven stories go, it's got the makings of something truly fascinating. Sen. Adam Sundraider's orgin story as Bliss, a boy raised to be a white preacher in the southern Black tradition by the charismatic Reverend Hickman, is not only a lesson in a history that could have been, it's good reading. However, as Bliss/Sunraider grows older, his trauma induced memories grow weaker. It's not that he stop remembering, he just doesn't remember things is a form that makes for good reading. Hickman disappears from the narrative for two long to explain why he was so important in the beginning. You can definitely spot that there where two books plotted at the time Ellison died, and Callahan's editing can't fill the holes between them.

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2010/08/06

Love and Summer by William Trevor

Love and SummerLove and Summer by William Trevor

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


At the beginning of this book, you will feel like you're on a time travel vacation back to a beautiful, peaceful, isolated 1950's rural Irish town. The setting is just that perfect. And then....you begin to see what goes on inside the townspeople, the scars that the past has left on them, the dreams that hold them in limbo, and you'll almost wish you'd been happy with observing the landscape and left the people alone.

This is a very good, but very sad story. It's southern gothic set in Ireland.

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2010/08/05

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, narrated by Simon Vance

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium, #1)The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


An amazingly good mystery that takes the time to wrap up ALL the loose ends. My only quibble is that the clue that breaks the leading mystery could have been discovered sooner if not for a very obvious question that the investigator should have asked much earlier in the investigation. Larsson knows what to tell, what to show, and what to leave out, making for a story that moves along quickly, despite so much ground being covered. His characters are interesting and realistic, despite the heavy objectification of the females.

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2010/08/03

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

Parrot and Olivier in AmericaParrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I wanted to like this more. I know I'm supposed to like this more. However, clever does not equal funny, in my opinion, and you can see this book trying to be clever. Sure, the characters have some great lines, but in a story, should you be able to see those lines coming and groan when they arrive? As a historical fiction, it's good on the history side. The idea of two men running away from the French Revolution to post Revolution America is a good set up for comparing cultures and politics. That the two men come from two different backgrounds adds some depth. But the characters are so contrived to show off those backgrounds that I couldn't see them with any sense of realism. They're farcical in a realistic setting, and that's not a good read.

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2010/08/02

The Secret Miracle, edited by Daniel Alarcon

The Secret MiracleThe Secret Miracle by Daniel Alarcón

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This is as much a book for fans of writing as it is a book for aspiring authors. A series of questions are posed to a large (unwieldy if you don't recognize most of the names) of published authors and their answers are are given. Either some of the authors didn't answer all the questions or their answers didn't make the cut, because every author doesn't answer every question. That must be were the editing came in, I guess. This is a book about the personal habits and opinions of some writers - that's it. They all have different approaches to their craft, so in the end, this is a book that reassures that there is more than one way to finish a book.
As a reader, I found it interesting to learn a little something about authors whose work I have admired and those I haven't. Strangely enough, there were no surprises. Chabon is an arrogant word slinger and Colm Tóibín is a man who works for a living.

If you're looking for a book about the grind of writing, I'd recommend Steven King's "On Writing". King is in this book, but his nuts and bolts "put your butt in the chair" method is lost among all the artistic self-hype.

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