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| 1637745052
| 9781637745052
| 1637745052
| 4.60
| 5
| unknown
| May 28, 2024
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it was amazing
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2024 book reviews, #36. I’m 55 this year, which means I’ve begun developing “old people problems” for the first time in my life; specifically, I’m sta
2024 book reviews, #36. I’m 55 this year, which means I’ve begun developing “old people problems” for the first time in my life; specifically, I’m starting to develop arthritis, and the pain that this causes is starting to put a major crimp in my life as an urban-dwelling heavy pedestrian, something I find quite alarming. So when this book popped up in the “newly acquired” list at the Chicago Public Library, I went ahead and put it on reserve right away, and just got done reading it today. It’s well worth your time, although I will say that it essentially only repeats information I’m reading in all the other wellness books I’ve been reading these days, confirming yet again what the latest research in modern medicine has been seemingly saying over and over in the last ten years -- that conditions we used to think of as naturally occurring ones in old age that nothing can be done about, from arthritis to high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s to Parkinson’s, can in fact be largely prevented by a change in lifestyle, as well as focusing on a few specific new things once you get over the age of 50. To her credit, though, author Meredith Warner (a veteran orthopedic surgeon and professor at Louisiana State University) describes this well-known advice using an acronym I’ve never heard before, the easily remembered MEDS which stands for Mindset, Exercise, Diet and Sleep. Or in other words, if you adopt the mindset that you really can change your health for the better through your own actions; reduce stress through meditation; get the government’s recommended weekly amount of moderate exercise, including resistance training; follow the Mediterranean eating plan, plus add a few supplements to your life (most importantly omega-3); plan your meals to always take place at certain times, and go at least 12 hours a day without eating anything at all (i.e. no late-night snacking); and get a good solid seven hours or more of sleep each night (including going to bed at the same time each night), you can largely eliminate the pain that comes with orthopedic conditions such as arthritis, as well as lower your chances of getting degenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s to almost zero. It’s welcome news, even if Warner isn’t saying anything particularly new or radical here; in fact, you could say that the news is even better precisely because it’s not radical new information, but merely a confirmation of what health book after health book after health book in the 21st century is now saying about how to live a life that keeps you healthy far into old age without the need for medications or surgeries at all. Warner calls the MEDS protocol “lifestyle medicine,” which I think is a very smart term for it; so I’ll be calling it that myself from now, and considering it a legitimate form of mainstream medicine that all of us oldies should be adhering to on a daily basis. The book comes strongly recommended in this spirit, that you won’t be learning anything new here that you can’t read in dozens of other books on the subject, but that Warner puts it all together in a smart and easy-to-understand way in this particular version. ...more |
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Jul 2024
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| 1638931089
| 9781638931089
| 1638931089
| 3.22
| 620
| May 21, 2024
| May 21, 2024
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2024 reads, #35. DID NOT FINISH. I wanted very badly to like this book; for one thing, just that title and cover art alone is the entire reason I pick
2024 reads, #35. DID NOT FINISH. I wanted very badly to like this book; for one thing, just that title and cover art alone is the entire reason I picked up the book in the first place, once again proving the old adage, “You can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can decide what to read next by one.” Then after it arriving from the Chicago Public Library, I learned that it’s the latest title by a new imprint of the small press Zando, in which they asked the delightfully dark and weird Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) to hand-pick a series of unknown experimental female authors who deserve more attention, which is an admirable project and one that deserves our support. Then there’s the engaging story concept itself, a subversive coming-of-age tale about a ten-year-old girl who has recently discovered cursing as her new religion, as she develops a fascination for a twenty-something juvenile delinquent who’s been forced by the courts to move into the sort-of co-op, sort-of halfway home where our hero Molly (the “Kittentits” of the book’s title) lives with her zany dad and even zanier housemates, the whole thing set in Chicago where I live, which is always a nice bonus. And if this wasn’t enough, there’s a bit of a slipstream alternative history going on here too; in the world of Kittentits, Chicago is about to host a World’s Fair in 1992 to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the famous one that first put them on the global cultural map, while no such fair took place here in our version of the multiverse. But alas, there were just too many problems in this book for me to be able to get into it in any other way than a purely intellectual, stroking my chin while murmuring, “Hmm, that was clever” way, which perhaps reflects the fact that author Holly Wilson is a professional academe with a PhD in creative writing, which as we were just discussing a few weeks ago tends to be the death knell for the ability to write really engaging fiction anymore. The main problem is that Wilson has written this entire thing in an extremely experimental style, one that omits all quotation marks, is always dropping words you would normally find in real conversations, and really playing up the slang, in order to present this highly stylized prose that’s simply difficult to follow along with; then she marries it to the kind of “quirky unto infinity” milieu that became so big in the popular culture in the early 2000s (think Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, etc.; and let’s not even get started on those fucking Skittles commercials). That’s not bad unto itself, but unfortunately for Wilson, that endlessly quirky style really got played out among audiences by the end of that decade, meaning that she’s not far enough away from those years to present this as a retro-quirky novel but not close enough to those years for readers to be able to enjoy it unironically. Or I suppose I should say “enjoy it in an ironic way unironically,” which is a big part of why this style burned itself out; by the time Postmodernism wheezed out its last gasps before its death, right around Obama’s first Presidential win in 2008 which birthed our current Wokeism artistic movement, it had become so masturbatory and deadpan and self-referential, it was impossible to enjoy it anymore in any kind of simple, unironic way. So, while I applaud Wilson for doing an excellent job at late-period Postmodernism, I have to confess that I simply don’t want to read even a single new book in that style ever again, which made me lose interest in this book quickly despite it actually being well-written (or at least as “well-written” as you can say about a book that’s deliberately trying to challenge readers to put it back down again, one of the biggest problematic side-effects of devoting your entire life to academic scholarly study of creative writing, that the obsessive desire to “out-fancy” your peers results in books that practically scream, “I DARE you to make it to the last page of this novel!”). That doesn’t necessarily mean that you should avoid it, but certainly you deserve to know what you’re getting yourself into before you pick it up. ...more |
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not set
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Jun 15, 2024
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Jun 15, 2024
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| 0316289361
| 9780316289368
| 0316289361
| 4.32
| 8,240
| 1938
| 1999
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it was amazing
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2024 reads, #34. It’s summer, which means I’m back to my usual summer reads, a series of easy-to-digest genre novels (also sometimes known as “airport and beach reads”) being done to honor 10-year-old Jason, who used to read the kid’s version of these each year for his public library’s summer reading program. CS Forester’s “Horatio Hornblower” books are a recent addition to my summer completist list, and fall under a category that I call “Grandpa Lit,” which I just recently aged into myself (I’m 55 this year), called this mostly because the books in this category are ones I remember my own grandfathers reading back in the 1970s when I was a kid, and seem like the kinds of books that only grandpas can fully get into (including not only these but old-style Westerns by people like Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour, military technothrillers along the lines of Tom Clancy, and more). Like with the first one I read last summer, 1937’s Beat to Quarters (my review), I’m tempted to say that you actually need to know a lot less in advance about the intricacies of tall sail ships to enjoy these than you might expect at first (for those who don’t know, these all take place within the British Navy of the late 1700s and early 1800s, as they fight France in the romantically historic Napoleonic Wars); but upon reflection, perhaps it’s more that here in late middle age, I’ve finally picked up enough general information about sailing here and there over the years and decades to be able to follow along with these books in a way a younger person can’t, thus helping to explain even more why these might only appeal to grandfathers and others who have lived long enough a life to actually be able to figure out what’s going on here in these jargon-filled books full of references to “quarterdecks” and “tops’ls” and the like. And for sure, another reason grandpas gravitate towards these kinds of books is that they’re unabashedly and unapologetically old-fashioned in their morals and culture, which is something important for younger people to understand before picking one up; in the world of the Hornblower novels, men are men, women are mostly pregnant and silent, God has chosen the rich to be the natural masters over the poor (and He has given them happy permission to beat the poor with knotted ropes anytime they put up a fuss about it), and people of color largely just don’t exist at all, with most of the storylines so far revolving one way or another around the idea of the people of southern Europe, in countries like Spain and Italy, being shiftless, lazy ne’er-do-wells, constantly causing trouble for the “True Gentlemen” of northern Europe who are always having to come down with their big impressive warboats and save their incompetent asses yet again. That said, if you can embrace a milieu such as this, the Hornblower books are undeniably thrilling adventures, giving us a sweeping look at a planet quickly being corralled and mapped by the newest generation of these tech-forward, highly proficient tall ships, a world in which navies are all-powerful because water is the one and only way humans have in these years to move large amounts of goods quickly, meaning that even the largest army in the world is quickly in trouble if their navy can’t get food and ammunition to them regularly. Forester very deliberately packs in just about everything that could possibly happen to one of these naval ships into each one of these books, deliberately to crank up the drama and stakes to a ridiculously high level, where it’s a matter of life or death pretty much every week of their sometimes year-long voyages; in the first book this all happened over on the west coast of Central America, as Hornblower and company help a Nicaraguan general who has declared his independence against invading French forces, while this second book is set in the much more expected area of France’s southern coast and Spain’s eastern coast, with his ship being just one of half a dozen traveling together (the “line” of the book’s title), and whose mission is this time the much more general “try to screw things up for France in as many ways as you possibly can.” This leads us to all kinds of adventures, including lots of daring raids on occupied Spanish forts in the middle of the night (not to mention a little retconned contemporary social commentary from Forester, writing this in the late 1930s, and having Hornblower think about how the Spanish are fated to have a country-destroying civil war in the future if they don’t get their act together), all while he takes an equal amount of time to simply describe what daily life was like on these ships, a harsh martial life where it’s just taken for granted that some humans are naturally the masters over others simply because God made it that way, and where the tiniest infractions can often lead to public beatings while the offender’s crewmates are forced to stand silently and watch. That’s the main reason to read these, because they describe in exacting detail a world that not only doesn’t exist anymore but that never really existed in the first place, taking the events that might happen to half a dozen ships over their course of their entire lives back then and squeezing them all into just one ship over the course of a single year here, then making everything work out great for the British people in charge of things just from their natural can-do spirit and God-given smarts above the rest of those other, lesser European states that surround them. (Not for nothing were these novels written while in the middle of England being bombed back into the Stone Age by an all-powerful Germany at the beginning of World War Two, an attempt by Forester to nostalgically remember the “good ol’ days” when the sun never set on an unstoppable British Empire.) They should be read with this mindset; but brother, if you do, you’ll get a thrilling experience unlike any other in modern literature, and they come recommended in this highly specific, highly grandpa-friendly spirit. CS Forester "Horatio Hornblower" books being reviewed in this series: Beat to Quarters (1937) | Ship of the Line (1938) | Flying Colours (1939) | Commodore Hornblower (1945) | Lord Hornblower (1946) | Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (1950) | Lieutenant Hornblower (1952) | Hornblower and the Atropos (1953) | Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies (1958) | Hornblower and the Hotspur (1962) | Hornblower During the Crisis (1967) ...more |
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Jun 13, 2024
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Jun 13, 2024
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| B08RRTT6YL
| 4.14
| 525
| Jan 07, 2021
| Jan 07, 2021
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it was ok
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2024 reads, #33. I picked up this book in my ongoing attempts to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kin
2024 reads, #33. I picked up this book in my ongoing attempts to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, in order to stay on top of the latest trends so to better help my freelance clients who publish under the same circumstances. In this case you can think of the story as being essentially half-and-half a romance novel and a cozy mystery novel, about a young woman who accidentally reconnects with a man from her childhood who used to brutally bully her (it’s okay -- it was actually his pushy girlfriend at the time who forced him to do it), but who then discovers halfway through the book that her estranged father who she’s never met is actually a serial killer, and is back in town to make her life a living hell. To its credit, this book has the opposite problem from most quickie Kindle Unlimited reads -- it’s not way too short but rather way too long -- but that nonetheless results in a problematic reading experience, with lots of scenes that should’ve been just summed up in a single sentence (“like Bob had mentioned, the blood test down at the hospital only took ten minutes”) but that instead go in excruciating detail for pages upon pages (“We arrived at the hospital. Bob opened the door. I walked through the door. We asked the receptionist where room 116 was. She told us to go down the hall and take a right. We went down the hall and took a right”...). Combined with a plot that’s pretty easy to guess, and a writing style that’s fairly pedestrian (be prepared for every character to be the ur-archetype of whatever kind of person they represent -- the gay guy’s the gayest gay who’s ever gayed, the villain is the most villainous villain who’s ever villained), that results in a book that was just barely mediocre in this case, which is why it’s getting 2 stars out of 5 when usually I give so-so Kindle Unlimited novels 4 stars so to embrace the lowered expectations of this form of publishing. Go into it, if at all, with this warning in mind. ...more |
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not set
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Jun 12, 2024
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Jun 12, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 0142002054
| 9780142002056
| 0142002054
| 3.64
| 22,536
| Mar 26, 1956
| 2003
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it was amazing
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2024 reads, #32. It’s summer again here in Chicago, which means it’s time for me to delve back into my usual summer reads, fairly easy-to-read genre titles (often also called “airport and beach reads”) being read to honor ten-year-old Jason, who used to read such books in kid’s form for his public library’s summer reading program every year. Ian Fleming’s original 14 James Bond novels from the 1950s and ‘60s are a great series to add to this, because as we’ve discussed in previous reviews, they turn out to be almost nothing like the bombastic, overly melodramatic movie adaptations that are even more famous by now, but rather are tight little thrillers set much more in the real world than you might expect from this name now so closely associated with expensive action setpieces, futuristic secret weapons, and the gigantic boobs of that year’s Playboy Playmate of the Year (or at least if you came of age during the ‘70s Roger Moore era of the Bond films, like I did). And indeed, this fourth book in the series, originally published in 1956, continues that trend, with Bond this time doing a police-style investigation into a black market ring that has risen up among the African diamond industry, and with not a single gadget from Q in sight besides a hidden compartment in Bond’s luggage to hide a gun’s silencer. This time the action is mainly set in the US, and it’s easy to see why so many people consider this book to be the very first time in the series that everything really clicks in a satisfying way; fresh off an excursion to America himself, Fleming gets his across-the-pond setting very, very right here, and also finally balances Bond himself out from the cruel sociopath territory he’s dipped far too much into in the previous books. To remind you, Fleming started the Bond novels in the first place not because he necessarily wanted to write secret agent stories, but rather that he wanted to write stories about gambling, a favorite pastime of his in his personal life (back when gambling was still largely illegal in the UK, part of what made it so thrilling for Fleming), and made the main gambling character a secret agent simply because he thought it’d be more interesting than writing a book about a dentist gambler or a truck-driver gambler. That led to a first book, 1953’s Casino Royale (my review), that got all the details about casinos and the game baccarat exactly right, but gave us a 007 who was unnecessarily mean, openly misogynistic, and who could barely function in normal society. After all, as Fleming explicitly states in that first book, the main reason various members of MI-6 were handpicked to become “00” agents was because they were people no one else at the agency could stand, and so were put in a special division where they basically stayed out in the field 365 days a year so that no one else back at the home office ever had to deal with them. After finding much bigger success with the books than he was expecting, though, Fleming started toning down and rounding out the character in subsequent titles, until we have a Bond here who’s now a regular habituate of the Special Service office in London, with a healthier if not still sexist attitude towards women (in this book he has the closest thing he’s had yet to an actual romantic relationship, making it clearer here that it’s not that he hates women in general, but that he only likes particularly complicated women who happen to come from dark, interesting backgrounds). I mean, sure, he’s still haughty and arrogant (he basically spends the entire book dismissing both the CIA and the American mafia as worthless soft pansies), and he engages in the same casual racism as pretty much every other white male did in the 1950s (get read to hear Bond use the n-word a number of times here, to which his exasperated CIA buddy admonishes him, “Now, James, you can’t use that word in the US anymore -- in fact, you’re no longer even allowed to order a jigger of liquor in a bar, but must call it a ‘jigro,’ ha ha”); but when all is said and done, this is a more enlightened and certainly a more vulnerable Bond than we’ve seen in the previous three books, much to the series’ benefit. What really sells this book over the previous ones, though, is that Fleming picks such interesting milieus in which to set his story, and then writes out these milieus in such exacting, memorable ways, based mostly on him having just finished visiting these places himself in real life a year before writing this. So after first flying in to New York on the brand-new “jumbo jets” of the age, he’s then off to Saratoga Springs for the first major plot point, which Fleming fascinatingly describes as still basically a backwoods village whose one and only thing going for it is its famous racetrack (and if you’ve ever wanted to see James Bond drink Miller High Lifes while having a country-fried steak at a highway-exit diner, then brother, you’ve picked the right book); then he’s off to a pre-gentrified Las Vegas, which as Fleming interestingly reminds us, New York didn’t even have direct flights to in the 1950s, visitors basically having to fly to Los Angeles first and then take a rickety propeller plane from there to Sin City; and then eventually he heads back to England on the RMS Queen Elizabeth, the same luxury ocean liner Fleming himself took during his own trip home from America, where we have basically the most exciting action scene of the entire novel, one that involves Bond climbing around the vertical outer skin of the ship using nothing but a makeshift ladder made out of his cabin’s bedsheets. That’s really what saves these novels, is that the action itself is much more of the realistic Jason Bourne type, versus the “jumping out of helicopters while wearing skis” nonsense of the Hollywood movies; and that combined with the more well-rounded, easier to injure, and easier to root for Bond makes this fourth novel of the series easily the best one yet, and definitely the place to start if you’re going to be only a casual fan of this series and not a completist like me. (That said, get ready for yet more ridiculous descriptions of what British people considered “fine dining” in the 1950s; there is not one but two separate times here, for example, when characters say with a lot of admiration that their dinner beef “was boiled for so long, it can be cut with a fork,” which I guess is something people found pleasurable about red meat in the ‘50s?) Today it becomes the first Bond book of the series to get a full five stars from me, and I’m now eagerly looking forward to the next title, 1957’s From Russia, With Love, come this time next summer. I hope you’ll have a chance to join me here again for that one. Ian Fleming books being reviewed in this series: Casino Royale (1953) | Live and Let Die (1954) | Moonraker (1955) | Diamonds Are Forever (1956) | From Russia, With Love (1957) | Dr. No (1958) | Goldfinger (1959) | For Your Eyes Only (1960) | Thunderball (1961) | The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) | On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963) | You Only Live Twice (1964) | The Man With the Golden Gun (1965) | Octopussy and the Living Daylights (1966) ...more |
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Jun 11, 2024
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Jun 11, 2024
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| B0C5JTPV5H
| 4.41
| 80
| unknown
| Jul 01, 2023
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really liked it
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2024 reads, #31. I picked up this book in my ongoing attempts to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kin
2024 reads, #31. I picked up this book in my ongoing attempts to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, in order to stay on top of the latest trends so to better help my freelance clients who publish under the same circumstances, in this case a paranormal cozy mystery novel instead of the romance titles that usually make up my KU bread and butter. As far as that’s concerned, this is a perfectly fine one; but brother, author Cielle Kenner leans hard and heavy on the “cozy” part of “cozy mystery” here, the kind of book where someone doesn’t just run a cupcake store but literally the greatest cupcake store in all of human history, and where someone doesn’t just own a B&B but literally the most delightful B&B that’s ever existed, and the villains are not just normal baddies but literally the most cartoonishly evil, mustache-twirling animals you’ll ever meet in your life. This particular style of Mary-Sueism (i.e. Mary Sue as an entire geographical location, not just one person) runs rampant in the cozy mystery genre, I’m coming to realize as I read more and more of these kinds of books, where the small town that makes it “cozy” is not just any ol’ regular small town but the Platonian ur-example of the ultimate most absolute perfect small town that has ever existed on planet Earth and that ever will exist until the end of time. That’s just fine as far as meeting the expectations of what many fans of this genre are looking for, which is why for this book I would normally give 3 and a half stars to, I’m rounding up instead to 4 stars; but it’s nonetheless going to grate on the nerves of those who prefer a more realistic and natural tone to their small-town mystery stories, which is why I can’t in good conscience give it any higher of a score than this. If the idea of ghost kittens delights you, by all means pick this up; but if you’re already finding that concept alone to be too treacly for your tastes, then you should probably skip this book altogether, because it starts with ghost kittens in Chapter 1 and just gets more and more sugary sweet the farther it goes.
...more
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1
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not set
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May 26, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 1915383129
| 9781915383129
| B07YF4BDHJ
| 4.08
| 399
| Oct 11, 2019
| Oct 11, 2019
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liked it
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2024 reads, #30. This was my latest attempt to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, in
2024 reads, #30. This was my latest attempt to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, in order to stay on top of the latest developments and help out my freelance clients who write and publish under the same circumstances. I would consider this book a textbook example of what I typically expect from such novels, by which I mean it’s aggressively mediocre, the kind of book that deliberately chooses to not expend even one ounce more of energy than absolutely needed to qualify as A Book That Exists And That I Suppose You Can Read In A Single Day If You’re Super Bored Without Necessarily Becoming Infuriated At The Author. As such, it of course features cardboard-cutout characters, an easily guessed plot, the absolute minimum amount of pages needed to count as a “novel” while ironically featuring a storyline that’s much too slow, and a prose style that maddeningly adds a new paragraph break after every single freaking sentence in the entire book, which makes me want to go to the author’s house and give her a high-school tutorial on “How to Write Narrative Prose When It’s Not a Twitter Update, Sheesh, Enough Already.” I mean, I suppose all this is acceptable, which is why it’s getting three stars from me -- Lord knows, Kindle Unlimited is now filled with millions of these kinds of lowest-common-denominator books, and they’re apparently delivering just enough to keep their always-grinding readers satiated through their book-a-day habits; it’s just always disappointing to me to see authors who don’t even try to be even a little bit better than the absolute minimum required of them to break even with their latest title and thus afford to live another day. I always try to push my clients to be better than this, and books like today’s are a good reminder of why that’s so important for anyone who aspires to something more than “eh, I guess this will do.” Inhale it on your next bored Tuesday with this warning in mind. ...more |
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May 18, 2024
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May 18, 2024
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| 1557091498
| 9781557091499
| 1557091498
| 3.90
| 5,305
| 1928
| Nov 01, 1997
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really liked it
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2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks,
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks, which exists to take the sometimes clunkily laid out files of Project Gutenberg and instead present a clean, modern, beautiful, Kindle-style design and layout. (See my review of the first three novels to learn more about who exactly the Hardy Boys are, and why they’re so important to American popular culture.) I found these latest three to be just like the first three -- that is, fun for a lark, but not particularly great novels, and certainly not the kinds of books you would hand to a contemporary teen and expect them to get a contemporary sense of enjoyment out of them -- although I will say that book #5, Hunting for Hidden Gold, officially begins the tradition of the Hardy Boys having exotic adventures in foreign lands, even if in this case it means an abandoned gold mine in rural Montana, and that you can clearly see that ghostwriter Leslie McFarland (who notoriously hated writing these books, only doing so in order to pay his family’s bills) actually enjoyed himself this time, which is likely what led to more and more of these kinds of adventures in the series as the years and then decades wore on. (Plus, of course, as this series’ critics have pointed out, you can only have so many major crimes committed in the Hardy Boys’ small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport before the whole thing starts becoming ridiculous; here in just the first six books, for example, we’ve had five different rings of fugitive criminals who just happened to randomly choose Bayport as their location for hiding out from the manhunt trying to find them.) To be honest, what’s the far most interesting detail of these books now in the 2020s is simply the reminder of how amazing and science-fiction-like the entire subject of internal combustion engines still was in the 1920s when these were originally published, with the Hardy brothers along with their various “chums” absolutely obsessed with the brand-new “motorbikes” and “motorboats” that had just started getting released to the general public in these years. (Also amazing, the fact that average teens could easily afford motorcycles and speedboats in these years, yet another aspect of popular culture we’ve entirely lost in the 21st century.) Unlike the Tom Swift books from these same years, though, the Hardy Boys largely didn’t rely on technological gadgets for actually solving the crimes they always seemed to accidentally stumble into; so apart from their constant chases by boat and motorcycle, the stories primarily revolve around good old-fashioned procedural police work, greatly helped by their father supposedly being a nationally famous private investigator who to the chagrin of his wife is always quietly egging his boys on into such a life themselves. (Also interesting -- it’s this second batch of books that first make it clear that the 1970s children’s cartoon Scooby-Doo nakedly stole its most famous line from the Hardy Boys: “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for these meddling kids!��) These books are fun but inessential, and should be read this way, with the understanding that the crime solving is laughably clunky and basic, the stories themselves full of outdated slang (“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch!”) and formerly innocuous words that have now taken on saucy meanings in modern times (“‘Thanks for saving me!’ Frank ejaculated”). They come recommended in this warm but limited spirit. ...more |
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May 17, 2024
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May 17, 2024
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 044808905X
| 9780448089058
| 044808905X
| 3.93
| 6,507
| 1928
| Jun 2003
|
really liked it
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2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks,
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks, which exists to take the sometimes clunkily laid out files of Project Gutenberg and instead present a clean, modern, beautiful, Kindle-style design and layout. (See my review of the first three novels to learn more about who exactly the Hardy Boys are, and why they’re so important to American popular culture.) I found these latest three to be just like the first three -- that is, fun for a lark, but not particularly great novels, and certainly not the kinds of books you would hand to a contemporary teen and expect them to get a contemporary sense of enjoyment out of them -- although I will say that book #5, Hunting for Hidden Gold, officially begins the tradition of the Hardy Boys having exotic adventures in foreign lands, even if in this case it means an abandoned gold mine in rural Montana, and that you can clearly see that ghostwriter Leslie McFarland (who notoriously hated writing these books, only doing so in order to pay his family’s bills) actually enjoyed himself this time, which is likely what led to more and more of these kinds of adventures in the series as the years and then decades wore on. (Plus, of course, as this series’ critics have pointed out, you can only have so many major crimes committed in the Hardy Boys’ small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport before the whole thing starts becoming ridiculous; here in just the first six books, for example, we’ve had five different rings of fugitive criminals who just happened to randomly choose Bayport as their location for hiding out from the manhunt trying to find them.) To be honest, what’s the far most interesting detail of these books now in the 2020s is simply the reminder of how amazing and science-fiction-like the entire subject of internal combustion engines still was in the 1920s when these were originally published, with the Hardy brothers along with their various “chums” absolutely obsessed with the brand-new “motorbikes” and “motorboats” that had just started getting released to the general public in these years. (Also amazing, the fact that average teens could easily afford motorcycles and speedboats in these years, yet another aspect of popular culture we’ve entirely lost in the 21st century.) Unlike the Tom Swift books from these same years, though, the Hardy Boys largely didn’t rely on technological gadgets for actually solving the crimes they always seemed to accidentally stumble into; so apart from their constant chases by boat and motorcycle, the stories primarily revolve around good old-fashioned procedural police work, greatly helped by their father supposedly being a nationally famous private investigator who to the chagrin of his wife is always quietly egging his boys on into such a life themselves. (Also interesting -- it’s this second batch of books that first make it clear that the 1970s children’s cartoon Scooby-Doo nakedly stole its most famous line from the Hardy Boys: “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for these meddling kids!”) These books are fun but inessential, and should be read this way, with the understanding that the crime solving is laughably clunky and basic, the stories themselves full of outdated slang (“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch!”) and formerly innocuous words that have now taken on saucy meanings in modern times (“‘Thanks for saving me!’ Frank ejaculated”). They come recommended in this warm but limited spirit. ...more |
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May 17, 2024
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May 17, 2024
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0448089041
| 9780448089041
| 0448089041
| 3.92
| 7,454
| 1928
| Mar 28, 1962
|
really liked it
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2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks,
2024 reads, #27-29. These are the latest Hardy Boys books in the public domain to be released by the excellent nonprofit organization Standard Ebooks, which exists to take the sometimes clunkily laid out files of Project Gutenberg and instead present a clean, modern, beautiful, Kindle-style design and layout. (See my review of the first three novels to learn more about who exactly the Hardy Boys are, and why they’re so important to American popular culture.) I found these latest three to be just like the first three -- that is, fun for a lark, but not particularly great novels, and certainly not the kinds of books you would hand to a contemporary teen and expect them to get a contemporary sense of enjoyment out of them -- although I will say that book #5, Hunting for Hidden Gold, officially begins the tradition of the Hardy Boys having exotic adventures in foreign lands, even if in this case it means an abandoned gold mine in rural Montana, and that you can clearly see that ghostwriter Leslie McFarland (who notoriously hated writing these books, only doing so in order to pay his family’s bills) actually enjoyed himself this time, which is likely what led to more and more of these kinds of adventures in the series as the years and then decades wore on. (Plus, of course, as this series’ critics have pointed out, you can only have so many major crimes committed in the Hardy Boys’ small Atlantic Seaboard town of Bayport before the whole thing starts becoming ridiculous; here in just the first six books, for example, we’ve had five different rings of fugitive criminals who just happened to randomly choose Bayport as their location for hiding out from the manhunt trying to find them.) To be honest, what’s the far most interesting detail of these books now in the 2020s is simply the reminder of how amazing and science-fiction-like the entire subject of internal combustion engines still was in the 1920s when these were originally published, with the Hardy brothers along with their various “chums” absolutely obsessed with the brand-new “motorbikes” and “motorboats” that had just started getting released to the general public in these years. (Also amazing, the fact that average teens could easily afford motorcycles and speedboats in these years, yet another aspect of popular culture we’ve entirely lost in the 21st century.) Unlike the Tom Swift books from these same years, though, the Hardy Boys largely didn’t rely on technological gadgets for actually solving the crimes they always seemed to accidentally stumble into; so apart from their constant chases by boat and motorcycle, the stories primarily revolve around good old-fashioned procedural police work, greatly helped by their father supposedly being a nationally famous private investigator who to the chagrin of his wife is always quietly egging his boys on into such a life themselves. (Also interesting -- it’s this second batch of books that first make it clear that the 1970s children’s cartoon Scooby-Doo nakedly stole its most famous line from the Hardy Boys: “And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for these meddling kids!”) These books are fun but inessential, and should be read this way, with the understanding that the crime solving is laughably clunky and basic, the stories themselves full of outdated slang (“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch!”) and formerly innocuous words that have now taken on saucy meanings in modern times (“‘Thanks for saving me!’ Frank ejaculated”). They come recommended in this warm but limited spirit. ...more |
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| 3.85
| 746
| Jul 29, 2013
| Aug 07, 2015
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #26. I picked this up as part of my ongoing efforts to read deeply and widely within the world of quick genre novels published through Kin
2024 reads, #26. I picked this up as part of my ongoing efforts to read deeply and widely within the world of quick genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, as a way of helping out my freelance clients who write and publish under the same circumstances, in this case actually a cozy mystery novel instead of the romance novels that usually take up my time with KU titles. I actually got halfway through this the first time I read it, then got distracted by several other books that came up in my library reserve list, then had to go back and read this one again all the way from the beginning, because I had totally forgotten the storyline by then; but this should be interpreted as a big compliment, because normally I wouldn’t go to nearly this much trouble for one of these disposable KU books I download for free from those KU promotional websites (I think Bookspry in this particular case). That’s entirely because of our delightfully trainwrecky, highly rootable protagonist at the center of our story, the perpetually unemployed and underloved actress Madison Cruz, whose self-sabotaging misadventures in her Seattle hometown are a true delight. That’s a real key to enjoying these kinds of stories, I’ve discovered as I read more and more of them; so many Kindle Unlimited authors use these kinds of main characters as basically Mary Sue stand-ins for themselves, presenting perfectly perfect heroes who never do anything wrong and never have a hair out of place, always saving the day with one hand while serving up another plate of yummy homemade scones with the other; but author Lucy Carol understands that these kinds of protagonists are much more interesting when they mess up big and often, which Madison certainly does, taking two hilarious steps back for every step forward she makes in her debut adventure here when it comes to the men competing for her attention, her strained relationship with her mother, and the constant humiliating situations she finds herself in as an actress who can only find work doing singing telegrams and kids’ parties and the like. It’s within such a milieu, then, that Madison stumbles across an honest-to-God international conspiracy involving missing babies, crooked FBI agents and former Soviet dissidents, the details of which are best left a surprise; what I can tell you without fears of spoilers, however, is that somehow Carol actually makes this an organic part of what’s otherwise a cozy domestic story about a bunch of city-going single twentysomethings, and rather than forcing the international intrigue onto a situation that can’t naturally fit it in, comes up with an extremely clever way to make it seem like such developments are the most natural thing in the world to happen in Madison’s plucky life. (Of course, both her mom and her uncle are FBI agents, so this helps quite a lot.) I have to confess, I was a little in love with Madison myself by the time I finished this extremely engaging story, and if I was someone who actually had a Kindle Unlimited account, I would launch right away into the other half-dozen titles that have now been written in this series. If you’re a KU person, I strongly encourage you to do so yourself, or at the very least read this funny, warm, witty start to it all, which can be found for free at multiple promotional websites for these kinds of books. ...more |
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May 09, 2024
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May 09, 2024
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Paperback
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| 0743448383
| 9780743448383
| 0743448383
| 3.76
| 823
| Jan 2003
| Jan 2003
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really liked it
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2024 reads, #25. It occurred to me the other day that it’s been almost a year since I last read one of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine “Relaunch” novel
2024 reads, #25. It occurred to me the other day that it’s been almost a year since I last read one of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine “Relaunch” novels (see this page for the full list of books I’ve already reviewed), so I threw the latest in the series on my Kindle and just finished it up today. To remind you, this is a series of around a hundred novels that were published between 2000 and 2020 which, unlike is usual with non-canon franchise novels, actually follows its own persistent storyline that is basically supposed to start the day after the final episode of the TV show, which allows the books to make major decisions that then have repercussions in later books, introduce new characters who keep showing up over and over, growing and changing like the characters from the original television iteration, and basically provide all the serialized goodness that made us DS9 fans such admirers of the original show to begin with. When last we left this Relaunch series, Ben Sisko’s son Jake had stolen a shuttlecraft and plunged himself into the wormhole, in an attempt to track down his messiah-like father, who famously ended the TV series by saving humanity and then getting sucked into the wormhole by the “Prophets,” a mysterious alien race who live outside of normal 3D time and space, and who the nearby citizens of Bajor worship like gods; and page one of this latest book opens with Jake getting spit out the other side of the wormhole by said Prophets without achieving his goal, his spaceship now non-functioning and with it looking pretty clear that he’s going to die. Lucky for him, then, that a ragtag group of salvagers in the Gamma Quadrant just happen to come across his craft right when he’s about to run out of oxygen, and end up taking him in and recruiting him as the newest member of their team. This was an extremely clever thing for author SD Perry (an admired Star Trek novelization veteran) to do, because it gives us an excuse to step away from the usual characters and plot developments of this series altogether, to instead spend an enjoyable 300 pages with this entirely new group of people and other sentient creatures, as they traipse across their area of space in pursuit of a Glowy McGuffin that basically serves as an excuse for character development and a lot of casual hanging out. That’s essentially a bit of a breath of fresh air for this series, which like the TV show usually hews closely to an ever-expanding mythos which requires more and more background knowledge with each new title in order to adequately follow, which as fans of serialized franchises can tell you can be both a blessing and a curse sometimes, especially those times when all you want to do is go through a fun little adventure without having to keep track of 50 different characters and the latest developments with all of them. That said, this book does provide a pretty major new development to the main mythos, as Jake and company stumble across a character who literally hasn’t been seen since season 1 of the original TV series and had never shown up in the novels before now; I’ll let the details remain a surprise, but she essentially plays a major role in bringing an end to the “avatar” prediction that’s been a running theme since the very start of these Relaunch books (but for more, see the literal book Avatar that kicked off this entire series, again written by Perry). I found this enjoyable, because as fans of heavily serialized fiction know, there’s nothing quite as frustrating as having a major new development introduced and then have it just linger on and on in the background while everyone slowly forgets about it, so it looks like from what we’re seeing at the end of this book that the ancient prophecy about Ben Sisko’s child becoming a fabled “chosen one” is finally going to be resolved in the next several books (or at least we’ll see). Meanwhile, though, Perry does her usual excellent world-building here, giving us such fun new Gamma Quadrant species as an artificially intelligent creature who lives inside the circuit boards of spaceships, five rocks that can join together into a creature through a hive-mind network (and that happens to be psychic when it does), and what can best be described as a sentient puppy, which is exactly as adorable as that description makes it sound. That said, also as usual, Perry’s prose is just a bit too tedious for me to give a full five stars; in particular I found myself really frustrated with Jake’s endless journal entries in this novel, which seem to serve no other purpose than to recap developments we had just read only a chapter or two previous. All in all, though, I found this to be a really satisfying read, just like all the rest of the Relaunch novels I’ve now gotten through, and I’m looking forward to tackling the next soon, the Klingon-focused The Left Hand of Destiny. I’ll be reading that right away, so to avoid the long delay that happened last time, so I hope you’ll have a chance to join me again soon for that. ...more |
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May 02, 2024
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May 02, 2024
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Mass Market Paperback
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| unknown
| 3.98
| 66
| unknown
| Dec 12, 2020
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liked it
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2024 reads, #24. I picked this up as part of my ongoing efforts to read deeply and widely within the world of quick genre novels published through Kin
2024 reads, #24. I picked this up as part of my ongoing efforts to read deeply and widely within the world of quick genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, as a way of helping out my freelance clients who write and publish under the same circumstances. It’s a short erotic bisexual MMF story, about a couple who own a restaurant and have a night of naughty fun with their new sous chef. (Hint: the name of the series this is a part of, “Swords Will Cross,” tells you a lot about what you can expect.) It’s...you know, it’s fine, although one thing I’ve noticed about most quickie erotica published through Kindle Unlimited (especially when being shelved in the “romance” category like this one is) is that, no matter how kinky the subject matter, the actual sex scenes all tend to be just plain ol’ boring middle-class suburban vanilla intercourse, even when that’s two men and a woman having boring suburban vanilla intercourse, two lesbians having boring suburban vanilla intercourse, a master and a slave having boring suburban vanilla intercourse, etc. That’s the same case here, which is why it’s getting a thorough and solid “meh” from me, three stars to reflect its “eh, I suppose this is fine for a boring Wednesday afternoon” nature. It should be read, if at all, with these low expectations in mind.
...more
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May 01, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 0802123457
| 9780802123459
| 0802123457
| 4.01
| 119,186
| Apr 02, 2015
| Apr 07, 2015
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2024 reads, #23. DID NOT FINISH. I picked up this hugely popular 2015 novel in preparation for watching the streaming adaptation that just came out of
2024 reads, #23. DID NOT FINISH. I picked up this hugely popular 2015 novel in preparation for watching the streaming adaptation that just came out of it. Although technically his debut novel, there are a lot of things about author Viet Thanh Nguyen that make it easier to understand why it had such a phenomenal amount of success for a first book (including winning that year’s Pulitzer Prize); for one thing, he actually has a PhD in creative writing and was already a popular and famous professor at the University of Southern California (and a guest professor at Harvard) before writing this, and had also already been writing short nonfiction pieces regularly for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, mostly on cultural and political issues related to him being a Vietnamese immigrant whose family fled the country during the civil war there in the 1960s and ‘70s, which also doubled as a Cold War proxy battle between the US (who supported and sunk billions of dollars into the southern army) and the Soviet Union (who did the same thing with the northern army, which famously ended up winning the war). That’s what this novel is about as well, interestingly told not through the filter of any American soldiers (the viewpoint of almost 100% of every other book and movie ever made in the US about the war), but instead using a double-agent who ends up emigrating to California after the fall of Saigon to take a sweeping look at how the Vietnamese themselves dealt with the massive, complicated after-effects of the war, including over a decade of brutal Maoist-style re-education camps for the southerners who lost but couldn’t get out of the country in time. That’s all very interesting, and unlike most books I give up on, I actually made it halfway through The Sympathizer (or close to 250 pages) before finally stopping; but Nguyen’s PhD bona fides just finally did me in, and his habit of (to paraphrase “The Simpsons”) taking forever to say nothing, until I had finally had just one too many page-long run-on paragraphs of tedium and gave up in frustration. However, I did at least achieve my goal, which was to get a sense of the book and its writing before watching the television series based on it; and that for sure I’ll be doing, because this is a really fascinating story, told from a unique perspective that most of us Americans have never really gotten to see regarding this infamous black stain in America’s history, essentially the first military conflict the US ever lost in its entire history, beginning a downward spiral that many argue we’re just now finally seeing bottom out into the collapse of our country fifty years later. If you can take the hoity-toity prose style, it’s well worth your time; or you can just be like me and watch the streaming adaptation instead. ...more |
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May 2024
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May 01, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0385549970
| 9780385549974
| 0385549970
| 3.96
| 1,612
| Mar 12, 2024
| Mar 12, 2024
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #22. I’ll admit, the initial reason I picked up Andrew Boryga’s stunning debut novel, the just released Victim, was because I was so entra
2024 reads, #22. I’ll admit, the initial reason I picked up Andrew Boryga’s stunning debut novel, the just released Victim, was because I was so entranced by the bitter cynicism behind the book’s concept; it’s a character-heavy drama about one of those people who have been popping up in the news semi-regularly in the last decade, a person of color who gets famous by writing gritty essays about the systemic racism and oppression he’s been experiencing his whole life, but who is eventually proven to have been lying the entire time and just making up the stories he’s been presenting as “true” to a fawning audience of guilty white liberals, his reputation destroyed while ironically accomplishing nothing except handing yet more ammunition to the far right, who use the now disgraced journalist’s fabrications as yet more evidence that “the Wokes” are a bunch of hypocritical, lying snowflakes. And indeed, that’s what a huge portion of this book is legitimately about, and there’s no way of getting around the fact that Boryga (a Latino academic writer, just like his fictional stand-in Javier here) means for this to be a scathing indictment of the Woke Age we currently live in, whether he’s taking down the noble yet deeply flawed middle-class people of color who embrace angry polemic politics as a means of hiding their own gentrification aspirations (as best seen here in Javier’s college girlfriend, a fiery far-left liberal with unresolved daddy issues from being raised by a cop in a pleasant suburb of Albany, but who after graduation insists on moving to a nice section of Brooklyn where they have community gardens and organic vegan restaurants, instead of Javier’s insistence on moving back to his crappy childhood neighborhood in the Bronx, insisting that she can’t be a gentrifier because “she’s not white”); the misguided white academics who mean well but ironically are the ground-level disguised racists who create these situations in the first place (such as Javier’s high-school guidance counselor, who pushes him to apply for a full-ride scholarship to a thinly disguised Oberlin University by “playing up” his background as a fatherless Latino from the Bronx, but then bristles and literally tries to cover his tracks when Javier interprets his thoughts too literally and replies, “So I should write an essay about how I’m brown and poor, then?”); or the sociopathic marketing bros who are very happy to swoop in and skim off the top of these Woke times for easy profit, ethics be damned (such as the new young editor of a thinly disguised Village Voice, Javier’s post-college employer, who has been nationally praised for saving one of the last leftist weekly newspapers still left in the US, but has done so by basically turning the entire publication into a clickbait farm). All of those things are true about this book, and Boryga very deliberately means for these people in real life to be offended by his novel, and that’s something important for you to know before picking it up, if you happen to be one of these people yourself. But what really blew me away here is that the book turns out to be about a lot more than this, and tells a more complicated and nuanced story than the easy headlines it’s been recently generating make it seem. First and foremost, for example, it’s ultimately the story of one particular person, the complex and multifaceted Javier at the heart of the controversy, a Puerto-Rican American who Boryga deliberately shows as coming from a long line of paternal con artists, and who is raised by his drug-dealing father (at least, before the drug-dealing father gets shot one day after an argument at a neighborhood picnic with one of his clients) to always be hustling, to always look out for himself, and to always understand that the picture you present of yourself to others will always be more important than the picture you have of yourself on the inside. That immensely helps this book from turning into a parade of cliches, because we understand that this is ultimately the story of one unique person and not just an indictment of the entire system (although it’s that as well). And more importantly, it makes it a much more engaging and entertaining read than if these had all been cartoon characters going through their 2D, cardboard-cutout motions. And then there’s the thorny issue at the heart of these kinds of incidents, of how much of a person of color’s actions can be chalked up to the environment around them, and how much of their actions should be laid squarely at the feet of the person themselves, and the things they deliberately choose to do in life when they in fact didn’t need to do those particular things if they hadn’t wanted to. And Boryga does this in a very clever way, by simultaneously following the fate of Javier’s childhood best friend Gio, who is raised in a very similar way but with just a few changed details (both of Gio’s parents are dead instead of just his father, for example; he’s a little more embarrassed than Javier about his love for reading; he’s a little less afraid of the neighborhood gangsters, even while having the same exact ambition for money and fame that Javier does). As Gio heads to prison at the same time Javier heads to university, and then both of them reunite again in their late twenties, we can watch the complex and difficult-to-pinpoint ways their lives and attitudes both intertwine and intersect, Boryga doing so to hammer home the fact that all of us are simultaneously capable of great good and great evil all the time, and that the way we behave can’t just be broken down into simplistic statistics like education and background. Plus there’s the fact that Boryga very purposely points out that there are very real and valid things to come out of our Woke Age too, as best seen in the way Javier legitimately now sees his old Bronx neighborhood in a different light once he graduates college and moves back, noticing for the first time how few grocery stores with decent produce there are there, how many fast-food places there are and how few healthy restaurants, how many cops there eternally are on their streets and how exactly those cops behave, versus the gingerly and always respectful actions of the police back on his university campus when dealing with the mostly upper-class, mostly lily-white populace of the school. That’s perhaps the one element here that most saves this from being a disappointing screed; for while Boryga absolutely has damning things to say about far-left liberals and the almost unsolvable mess they’ve created in the 21st century, he’s also careful to point out that there are valid reasons why it’s all become such a mess in the first place, and that there are very legitimate issues being brought up in this community that shouldn’t be ignored or shrugged away. But what was the saving grace for me in particular -- and longtime friends will immediately understand why I loved this aspect of the book so much -- is that it’s a classic “anti-villain” story along the lines of Breaking Bad; so in other words, if the more well-known “anti-hero” in literature is someone who at first seems like they’re going to be the baddie, but then ends up being the protagonist of the story, an anti-villain is the exact opposite, someone who seems like a decent person at first, but whose behavior becomes more and more disgusting the further the story continues. And while I’ll let the end of this book remain spoiler-free, I can tell you that by the end of this novel, Javier’s actions are fucking reprehensible, the behavior of a person who has decided to insult and alienate every person who’s ever been important in his life, merely for his unquenchable chase for likes and retweets on social media, and the easy fame and glory that comes right after it. To me, that’s what really saves this book from being easy fodder for the alt-right; for by the end, Javier has stopped being a stand-in for his entire community and has instead become his own unique brand of monster, making it impossible to extrapolate his actions into a damnation of every far-left liberal who’s ever existed, even as Boryga has legitimately damning things to say about the “cancel culture” that has built up around these far-left liberals over the last twenty years. It’s a mesmerizing book, told in a mesmerizing way, and that’s why today Victim becomes my second read of 2024 to eventually show up in my annual “best books of the year” list, coming later this December during the holidays. It will make many of my leftist friends mad, that’s undeniable; but the point Boryga so deftly makes here is that maybe you should be mad, for all of us creating a situation in the US so that there are no other choices anymore than to be either a communist or a fascist, foretelling an inevitable coming violent civil war that will be happening starting this November precisely because of it. Boryga argues here that maybe it’s time to step back and take a more complex, nuanced view of these subjects, and to stop letting our society be run through easy outrage and the cheeseburgers that are easily sold by exploiting this kneejerk anger. As a political centrist who’s been consistently told over the last twenty years that I should shut up and keep such opinions to myself, this book is a welcome breath of fresh air that particularly needs to exist in this specific time and place, and I encourage all of you to read it with this attitude in mind. ...more |
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Apr 20, 2024
not set
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Apr 20, 2024
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| B0CXGKF85P
| 4.81
| 21
| unknown
| Apr 14, 2024
|
it was amazing
|
2024 reads, #21. As always with these kinds of books, let me mention first that I was its editor, and was paid to work on it and make it better, so yo
2024 reads, #21. As always with these kinds of books, let me mention first that I was its editor, and was paid to work on it and make it better, so you should read my thoughts here based on that context, and understand that I'm presenting far from an objective, removed opinion in today's writeup. That said, I really enjoyed this romance novel just as a regular reader! The main strength of Banks here is that she does "small town romance" right, concentrating not on all the capitalist opportunities inherent in such a small town (no mentions of adorable B&Bs or delightful cupcake stores here), but rather understanding that it's the quiet solitude and tight-knit community that makes these kinds of books enjoyable to read, really putting an emphasis here on the ways the citizens of this fictional small town (supposedly on the rural outskirts of Nashville) interact with each other. I also thought she got the balance between plot and sex almost exactly right here, sacrificing neither of these elements for the sake of the other; and she has a nicely unique plot going on here as well, telling a "second chance" story about a woman who leaves their small community to become a chef, just to come back to start her own restaurant and have it burn down on opening night (comprising the first chapter of this book), to discover that her rescuer is none other than her former flighty ex-boyfriend, who in the ensuing years since their youthful breakup has finally gotten his act together (mostly because of getting his next girlfriend after her accidentally pregnant, and finding that fatherhood agrees with him), now the widely admired chief of the town's fire department and sole central station (where she ends up accepting a job as the station's new cook, which is what brings them together again). A story with a really nice undercurrent of conflict, as the two renegotiate their relationship now as mature and more world-weary middle-agers, I found myself deeply rooting for the FLC and MLC to get together, even knowing that it's a romance novel so of course they'll eventually have a Happily Ever After; and that to me is a great sign of a well-done romance, when you know the inevitable ending but get caught up in the "will-they-won't-they" drama anyway. Strongly recommended for fans of small-town romance and second-chance stories. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 16, 2024
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Apr 16, 2024
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 1982153083
| 9781982153083
| 1982153083
| 3.68
| 81,468
| Feb 07, 2023
| Feb 07, 2023
|
it was amazing
|
2024 reads, #20. I know I give most MFA novels a lot of shit here at Goodreads, but there’s a good reason for that, which is that most MFA novels dese
2024 reads, #20. I know I give most MFA novels a lot of shit here at Goodreads, but there’s a good reason for that, which is that most MFA novels deserve to receive a lot of shit, for being guilty of one of two major problems: either the writer in question got too brainwashed by their professors and now write nothing but that special breed of tedious, precious, go-nowhere character dramas that are the bread and butter of academic writing programs, the ones so focused on illuminating characterization that they forget to add any kind of interesting plot or compelling stakes whatsoever; or the writer (almost always a man in the second case) goes in the totally opposite direction, and tries to rebel against this style by instead creating the literary equivalent of conceptual art, turning in a head-scratcher so obtuse and abstract that no one besides doctoral students can even get through it in the first place, and certainly not even those doctoral students are actually enjoying it. When I was a kid in the ‘70s, gazing at the bookshelves of my friends’ parents and glancing through their Steinbecks and Roths and Atwoods and Irvings, I looked forward to a middle age when I too would spend most of my time reading books that instead got the balance between character and plot exactly right; but now that I’m in my fifties myself, I’ve discovered that those kinds of books have largely disappeared, taken over by an obsession over ivory-tower echo-chamber novels in which the same whiny suburban middle-classers keep going through the same whiny middle-class self-made genteel crises, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I’ve recently found myself drawn more and more to such genre novels as crime, romance and science-fiction, where in the 2020s you now have the best chance of coming across books that both present compelling characters and have compelling things happen to these characters. So it’s always a delight to come across an MFA book that really does things right, this week for example with Jen Beagin’s newest novel, the un-put-downable portrait of a fuck-up in crisis, Big Swiss. I’ve been a fan of Beagin’s since her 2015 debut, the mesmerizingly weird Pretend I’m Dead (my review), came out at a point when my small press was still open and I was reviewing books professionally; but she’s really outdone herself here, taking all the themes of that book and ratcheting them up to eleven in this one, even while retaining the sly black humor and sneaky roundabout way of talking about trauma that marked that first book. The story of burned-out middle-aged hipster Greta, who moves to the upstate town of Hudson, New York (which according to the book is where all the burned-out hipsters move once they can no longer stand Brooklyn), the story is ostensibly about her taking a low-wage job transcribing session recordings for a costume-wearing sex therapist who seems to have only transitioned to that career so that he can get paid to be a mansplainer, as Greta develops a crush on a female Swiss-American patient of his who seems capable of giving the what-for to this therapist in a way Greta can only dream of saying to people in her own life. Of course, this being Beagin, that’s only the tip of the iceberg; with Hudson being as small as it is, naturally Greta and “Big Swiss” (as Greta thinks of the woman in her head) end up accidentally meeting, at which point Greta begins manipulating their conversations by subtly using the information she’s gleaned through the woman’s confidential therapy sessions, so that before long they’re in a lesbian relationship even though neither of them really consider themselves lesbians. So in this, Greta is a great example of what I like to call an “anti-villain,” by which I mean that if an anti-hero is someone who traditionally seems like a baddie at the beginning of a novel but then ends up being the noble hero by the end, an anti-villain is the opposite, someone who seems harmless enough at the beginning of the story but then keeps doing more and more reprehensible things as the story continues (but for more, see Breaking Bad, which is now easily the most famous anti-villain story that exists). As our hapless but rootable loser protagonist just keeps digging her own grave deeper and deeper with each passing chapter, we can’t help but to cover our eyes in cringing embarrassment over the looming disaster all of us (including Greta herself) can see on the horizon, even as we continue peeking through our fingers because we’re just too interested in knowing what comes next. What’s perhaps the most remarkable thing about this book, though, is that although Beagin fills it with the kinds of delightfully quirky random details we expect in any indie-lit novel, the kind of stuff that’s usually thrown in randomly just to try to make the book as interesting as it can be -- for one good example, that Greta deliberately chooses to live in a Colonial-era farmhouse on the edge of town that hasn’t been renovated since the 1700s, which she literally must heat with a wood stove and with a kitchen that has a literal beehive in the ceiling that she refuses to eradicate -- right in the last 50 pages of the book, when her boss forces her to go through some therapy sessions herself as a form of atoning for the confidentiality-breaking crimes she’s committed (which isn’t exactly a spoiler -- pretty much everyone in this book besides Big Swiss herself understands that Greta’s self-destructive actions are fated to end in disaster), suddenly all these quirky, supposedly random details all come together, and magically begin demonstrating exactly the past moment of trauma Greta herself went through in her own childhood, and which she has been in such deep denial over that it’s all instead been coming out in these symbolic forms. That’s amazing, that Beagin can both give us our cake and let us eat it too, giving us a story whose first 75 percent is this neurotic laugh-out-loud comedy in the style of something like Kristen Wiig’s Bridesmaids, but then pull out the rug from under us in the last 25 percent and show that the entire thing was actually a clever, secret setup for what’s actually a deeply sad and intense level of pain running as an undercurrent through it all without us even realizing it. That’s exactly what I love, novels that can both entertain and move me, that give me complex and nuanced characters but then put them in situations I can’t get enough of, with stakes that eventually become so big that they’re literally a matter of life or death. That’s how you write an MFA novel, people, and that’s why Big Swiss today officially becomes my first read of 2024 to eventually make my “Favorite Reads of the Year” list coming later this December during the holidays. Creative writing students, take note -- this is the kind of story you should be shooting for, no matter how many times your gently miserable philandering middle-aged professor insists that you should be writing novels about gently miserable philandering middle-aged professors. For those like me who like their artistic projects thoughtful, entertaining, and intense enough to stick in your head for weeks afterwards, you’ll want to pick this up as soon as possible. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 15, 2024
|
Apr 15, 2024
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0063310120
| 9780063310124
| 0063310120
| 4.27
| 912
| unknown
| Feb 27, 2024
|
2024 reads, #19. DID NOT FINISH. I’ve been a big fan of the psychotherapy process ever since starting my own sessions back in 2015, so much so that I’
2024 reads, #19. DID NOT FINISH. I’ve been a big fan of the psychotherapy process ever since starting my own sessions back in 2015, so much so that I’ve spent a lot of time vaguely thinking about what it would be like to become a therapist myself (which, to be clear, I’m not planning on doing, because I’m already in my mid-fifties and wouldn’t want to yet again start all over in my career like that). That’s had me reading and really enjoying a number of books over the years by therapists specifically about the therapy process, mostly by the brilliant Irvin Yalom (but for more, see my reviews of
Love’s Executioner
,
Creatures of a Day
, and
Staring at the Sun
), as well as that contemporary book that got so much traction several years ago, Lori Gottlieb’s
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
. That made me think that Joshua Fletcher’s brand-new And How Does That Make You Feel? would be right up my alley, a book that promises to be a similar behind-the-scenes look at what an actual therapist is going through in their own head as they go through the process of analyzing and helping their clients, which I had especially high hopes for because it took forever for my name to finally come to the top of the reserve list at the Chicago Public Library, and typically books that popular tend to be pretty good as well. But alas, this turned out to be almost worthless, because Fletcher doesn’t actually provide any insights whatsoever here, but instead presents his inner voice as a series of “little people who live inside him” -- yes, just like the Disney children’s movie -- then doesn’t give these little people anything more insightful to say than such facile, obvious, kneejerk reactions like, “I’m scared of this guy!”, “I’m proud of her!”, and “I really have to pee!” Jesus Christ, bro, are you telling me that a professional full-time therapist has absolutely nothing more interesting to share about their profession than childish little quips about his clients’ physical attributes and whether or not they stammer while they talk? Then again, I suppose this is partly my fault for not actually reading Fletcher’s bio before picking up the book, where I would’ve seen him proudly talking about his popular TikTok account; and that’s all a grown-up needs to hear to now know that they’re dealing with a glorified man-child and not an actual grown-up, which is exactly what this book feels like, like a little child trying to explain psychotherapy in ten-second snippets while doing his cutesy little cheerleader dance or whatever the hell those TikTok children are into these days. This is now the third contemporary book in a single week I’ve been forced to give up on before even making it 25 pages in, which makes me want to never pick up a book published after 2020 again the entire rest of my life; and while I know already that I won’t actually stick to that threat, certainly it’s just more evidence to me of how completely and totally contemporary literature has now permanently fallen into a disastrous pit of unreadable schlock, as we now all just become inured to a world where the marketing sociopaths are now the ones making all the book acquisition decisions anymore, and they aren’t greenlighting anyone who doesn’t have a TikTok account and writes at a third-grade level. Avoid, avoid, avoid; for the love of all that is holy, avoid. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
|
Mar 20, 2024
|
Mar 20, 2024
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 1250786215
| 9781250786210
| 1250786215
| 3.82
| 21,497
| Mar 05, 2024
| Mar 05, 2024
|
2024 reads, #18. DID NOT FINISH. Not for me, partly because I feel like I’m not allowed to explain why it’s not for me without facing a barrage of ang
2024 reads, #18. DID NOT FINISH. Not for me, partly because I feel like I’m not allowed to explain why it’s not for me without facing a barrage of angry comments. I’d tell you more, but...well, you know.
...more
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Mar 19, 2024
|
Mar 19, 2024
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0593316762
| 9780593316764
| 0593316762
| 3.62
| 413
| Feb 13, 2024
| Feb 13, 2024
|
2024 reads, #17. DID NOT FINISH. This book was just absolutely not for me in any way whatsoever, a Postmodernist fairytale from a former hipster indie
2024 reads, #17. DID NOT FINISH. This book was just absolutely not for me in any way whatsoever, a Postmodernist fairytale from a former hipster indie-rocker with a [rolls eyes] PhD in creative writing, in which he comments in a disappointedly on-the-nose way on the ugliness and darkness of modern life through the filter of a Netflix-style streaming series about plastic dolls come to life, full of cutesy little twee details like all of them talking in the truncated, deliberately silly style of doge memes (“Forget eat lunch. Big hungry. Chicken look wow wow”), and everything in their world having cutesy little twee generic names, like Nuclear Family for the name of this plastic society’s most popular television show. Then if this wasn’t enough hipster tweeness for you, he then tells the story itself not through a regular omniscient narrator but by literally describing every scene out loud, as if he’s watching the show on Netflix and we’re on the other end of a phone and he’s just literally telling us everything that’s happening on the screen as it’s happening. (“And then the next scene opens with the plastic girl driving her car, and then...”) Ugh, contemporary literature really is dead, isn’t it? Like always with books I give up on, I went ahead and read everyone else’s reviews before writing mine, just in case something happens later in the book that’s so compelling that it inspires me to pick the book back up again (which, you know, has happened before); but when I did this with Plastic, I was suddenly confronted over and over with what I consider the scourge of online artistic criticism these days, review after review that said, “This made me cry! FIVE STARS!” That’s not a fucking critical review, people; I could punch you in the face and make you cry too, but that doesn’t deserve five stars either. It’s books like these that make me glad I’m entirely out of the indie-lit game now myself, and it’s also books like these that make me realize why I’ve been gravitating more and more in the 21st century towards good solid genre novels like crime, science-fiction and romance; and that’s because the only contemporary human-interest novels that can seemingly even get published anymore is silly little gimmicky easily-marketed MFA/NPR nonsense like this, where the author not only has nothing but a facile and obvious point to make, but then beats you over the head with this facile and obvious point, seemingly all their sins washed away because they wrote it in a cutesy style that makes for good Facebook updates. (“This made me cry! FIVE STARS!!!!!!!1!!!”) If you’re a fellow grown-up who weeps for the lack of good, solid contemporary human-interest novels for grown-ups anymore, avoid this one like the plague. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Mar 18, 2024
|
Mar 18, 2024
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 4.60
|
it was amazing
|
Jul 2024
|
Jul 01, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.22
|
Jun 15, 2024
|
Jun 15, 2024
|
||||||
|
| 4.32
|
it was amazing
|
Jun 13, 2024
not set
|
Jun 13, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.14
|
it was ok
|
Jun 12, 2024
|
Jun 12, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.64
|
it was amazing
|
Jun 11, 2024
|
Jun 11, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.41
|
really liked it
|
not set
|
May 26, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.08
|
liked it
|
May 18, 2024
not set
|
May 18, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.90
|
really liked it
|
May 17, 2024
not set
|
May 17, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.93
|
really liked it
|
May 17, 2024
not set
|
May 17, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.92
|
really liked it
|
May 17, 2024
not set
|
May 17, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.85
|
it was amazing
|
May 09, 2024
not set
|
May 09, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.76
|
really liked it
|
May 02, 2024
|
May 02, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.98
|
liked it
|
May 2024
not set
|
May 01, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.01
|
May 2024
|
May 01, 2024
|
||||||
|
| 3.96
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 20, 2024
not set
|
Apr 20, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.81
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 16, 2024
|
Apr 16, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 3.68
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 15, 2024
|
Apr 15, 2024
|
|||||
|
| 4.27
|
Mar 20, 2024
|
Mar 20, 2024
|
||||||
|
| 3.82
|
Mar 19, 2024
|
Mar 19, 2024
|
||||||
|
| 3.62
|
Mar 18, 2024
|
Mar 18, 2024
|
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