Category: Reviews

Harvest by Jim Crace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Novels set in tiny rural villages are quiet, contemplative, maybe even gentle. Not this one. There’s a quietness and a contemplativeness, but there’s no gentleness; this is a violent, frustrating, challenging little novel.

Crace is an expert at setting a tone and a mood, almost immediately. We’re made intimate observers of the action, via his narrator, who himself is 12 years in the commonwealth but still not completely accepted by its people. In this way we’re explained what needs to be explained, but not over much so. Details like names and dates are left out, adding to the intimacy, making this less a chronicle and more a memory. All within a rich, almost-but-not-quite inscrutable vocabulary peculiar to the setting.

We’re tugged along by the narrator’s urges, in a place where humans are little better than animals. His libido colors some of his wonderings, leading him astray in though if not in deed. But there’s a poignancy there too, witnessing the kind of injustice that only humans can invent, and the fatal consequences of that invention.

Every year I try to read as many books from the Booker long list as possible, with mixed results. A few bad ones (in my opinion) a few good ones, a few great ones. Last year it was Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies; this year’s it’s Jim Crace’s Harvest. I’m looking forward to going back and reading his other award-winning writing.

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Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m trying to decide if I should review this title as a stand-alone novel, or the entire series as one. Or both? How about both. Okay, both.

Begin with a man coming out of a coma, with no memory. A clean slate for the reader, a way to get some action started without requiring a lot of set-up. Toss in conflict– someone wants him to stay asleep. Add some texture– his “recovery” is borderline miraculous. At this point, the writer is free to make it up as he goes along.

And the reader may even suspect as much. But this is just the shadow of truth, and as the main character rediscovers himself, the reader discovers the wonderfully detailed universe the writer has in store.

The reader, appetite whetted, becomes ravenous. In the reader’s hand, a feast! But is it more than he can chew? 10 volumes? But he must. The reading is too good. The adventures too rich, the impulse for justice to strong.

This is the the first book in the Amber Chronicles. And as stories go, it even stands alone, if you want it to– the hero doesn’t exactly win, but he perseveres. Zelazny manages to balance the ending just right– the reader can stop where the hero escapes… or plunge into the next book, explore the deep potential of the world Zelazny has created, lock arms with the hero and pledge to stay by his side until he triumphs or dies trying.

This reader can’t wait to continue.

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Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Yeah, I saw the Fox interview, etc etc.

Lots of controversy around this book, lots of jibber-jabbing. And if that sounds irreverent, that’s just how this subject is always treated, this Jesus person; so entrenched is Western civilization in the Christian myth, any book would be controversial and by many measures irreverent. We’ve reached a point where you’re either offended that a person would question the truth of Christ’s sacrifice or you’re offended that a person would pay any heed to such poppy-cock.

Enter Reza Aslan. No matter what he says in the book, he’s wrong. Right? Like a pop star who’s entertainment value is her off-stage antics moreso than her songs, more words will be written about Dr. Aslan than he wrote in the book itself. Questions about his authority, his motivations, his sources, the over-all impact his book will have. Well, here it is. This is his impact.

This is the impact religion has, anymore, on anyone. We’re no longer a nation of believers, skipped right past being a nation of questioners; we’re nothing but a nation of commentators. This internet age, this media age, is an age of viewing, judging, passing on.

And who am I to do otherwise? I was more interested to learn that Aslan has a degree in creative writing. If his scholarship adds nothing all that new to the historical Jesus story, his writing ability certainly does. Aslan weaves a compelling history, and doesn’t damn with faint praise—while he may brush up against irreverence, that’s only in the eye of the beholder, and in my opinion his treatment of the life and times of Jesus is more respectful than anything else.

It’s a book worth reading, not because it will be a good weapon against those froth-mouthed Christers, and not because it buoys allegiance to scripture, but because it’s a helluva story, written well. Enough said.

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End Zone by Don DeLillo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another DeLillo novel, another book I probably didn’t get. What do you call someone who reads a lot of the same thing—an aficionado, an expert, a scholar? I want to get the right word; you see, I know this guy’s who’s read a lot of DeLillo, and he’s already a scholar, as he’s a professor, but I don’t think he teaches DeLillo specifically. But this guy I know, he’s really really smart. And so I read these book and I don’t get it and I must be such a disappointment.

Actually, I’m sure he doesn’t care. And look, I am not taking pride in this ignorance of mine, but then I’m not really ashamed, either. Pages of details on a table-top war-game scenario. Long paragraphs of self-indulgent psychophilosophizing. Is this hypermodern writing, is that what this is? And all I wanted was the football scenes.

Which were pretty good. So let me do this, let me rail against the back-cover copy of the edition I read, which says “Among some of the players, the terminologies of football and nuclear war—the language of end zones—become interchangeable, and their meaning deteriorates as the collegiate year runs its course.” Bullshit!

I know some folks like to point out how football and war have the same vocabulary. But that’s a convenience, barely worth writing a whole book about, and certainly an insult to soldiers and players alike. And in as much as I claim I didn’t “get it,” I can assure you, the terminologies of football and nuclear war do NOT become interchangeable, and the title has nothing to do with either.

Read Don DeLillo, if you like Don DeLillo. Read End Zone if you like that aspect of football, the grit and the silliness, the earnestness of its most dedicated losers. But don’t give me any crap, whether you do or don’t get it, like me, about its language. Words are just words.

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The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m not sure how many times I’ve read The Westing Game now. Half a dozen or so. Probably read it a half-dozen times or more again, eventually. This time around I was reminded of it by a TV show. My wife was watching the summer-running reality show “Whodunnit.” I was reluctant to join in, but was eventually hooked. It’s cheesy, over produced, over edited, and not quality television at all. But it was fun, and it reminded me of the excellent novel by Raskin, so I’m not going to knock it too much.

The great thing about The Westing Game is, of course, it’s re-readability, which is really saying something for a mystery novel based on a very specific sort of puzzle. It’s the minor characters I always forget about. Like Doctor Deere, who turns out to be a decent guy. And Mrs Hoo, supplying the necessary red-herring moments.

This is a novel to give to someone who you like a lot, a young person from whom you expect great things. Someone curious. Not just a reader—a re-reader. Someone with whom you want to share the joys of mystery and discovery. Me, as soon as I got hooked on “Whodunnit,” I knew I wanted my wife to read this book. I’ll let you know what she thinks.

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Fludd by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I, like other reviewers, read Mantel’s Booker-prize winning novels, and was awed by their genius. When browsing my local library, espying a thin tome by Mantel, plucking it up was done automatically. And I was not in the least disappointed. That same mastery of language. That same reverence, disguised as irreverence. Deeply serious, but funny, the way only deeply serious things can be.

As to Fludd himself, the character, well. There’s overt references to angels in the novel, and so I guess we’re supposed to make out that he’s some sort of super natural creature. You know, a very human kind of super natural creature. But I kept seeing demon, not angel. That’s hard to justify, given the way events in the novel play out. So I’ll try to do so in this way: religion is man-made, is a folly of fear, and so, angels and demons are not real. A demon, then, isn’t necessarily the evil being that a religion would have us believe.

Neither would an angel be. But in so far as a religion is not real, it nevertheless is structured by very real emotions in our hearts (and spleens). Angels are messengers, demons are seducers. And there it is, Fludd the seducer, the facilitator of emancipation from the outright silliness of religion.

Specifically, Catholicism. Every time I read a book with Catholics in it, it’s either reverential, and has almost no information, or it’s caustically critical, and rife with absurdity. I find it hard to believe that intelligent human beings actually believe this stuff. But they do, and they let it rule their souls, and mire them in misery, and any angel sent to free someone from such misery must, by the rules of the structures of that fake religion, come formed as a demon.

So that’s what I got from Fludd. But you can probably tell I’m anti-church as it is. Fludd preaching to the choir, then.

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The Restoration Game by Ken MacLeod
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately—a lot, like binging. 22 books this month alone. I don’t know if I’m addicted, feeding some beast, just bored, curious about something, or avoiding something else. The point, though, is that I’m almost where I’ll read any-old-thing. Once that happens, if it does, I won’t bother with the library, as my own home has plenty of books in it to last me the rest of the year, or until this habit dies off (isn’t there a World of Warcraft patch coming out soon?).

But until I reach the critical-mass of any-old-thing, I’m trying to keep up my momentum by sampling the genres. I was in the mood for sci-fi, so I browsed the shelves at my local bookstore, and found The Restoration Game. The cover looked intriguing, the opening page looked compelling, and so I took it. Started reading it yesterday afternoon.

The Restoration Game is not sci-fi.

But then, I mean, I don’t know what else it is. A spy novel, more or less, a thriller, a political thriller maybe. There’s the first few pages, which are very sci-fi, and the last few. And a speculation on page 136, and the big “reveal” on page 211. But that hardly makes up for the fact that 97 percent of this book is not sci-fi.

I mean, it’s a fine story, I guess. Gets really bogged down in the history and politics of the former and present Soviet states, especially Georgia and South Ossettia. I have no education in this area whatsoever, and reading those portions was more or less impenetrable. That’s all backdrop for a story about this girl who comes from a lineage of spooks and who is recruited to do some spooking of her own for nefarious, mysterious reasons.

But it’s just so unsatisfying. The “big reveal” is handled almost flippantly. The main character takes it all in stride, comes up with an on-the-spot and shrug-worthy idea to exploit what she finds, and the end result is, well, nothing. Life goes on.

I wanted to read a sci-fi novel, not a novel that had a sci-fi book-ends placed on it and was tweaked in a few places to make the book-ends fit. Who knows, maybe this is a whole sub-genre of sci-fi that I’m not aware of. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of the philosophy that comes with a sci-fi novel, lots of manifesto-filling commentary on the world’s political systems. But I expected… well, I guess it’s my own fault, I wanted something stupid and fun.

You know, to keep up my momentum, which is born on a compulsion the root of which I don’t really understand right now.

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Inferno by Dan Brown
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Dan Brown’s Inferno is not the worst book I’ve ever read, nor do I want Dan Brown to stop writing. He can go on putting “words” on “pages” and get paid millions, that’s fine. I’ll probably even read them. I can’t help myself. It’s like eating food I don’t like when I’m already full—some kind of deep self-loathing compels me.

So take this review with a grain of salt, for I, like so many others, went into Inferno expecting it to be bad. Wish fulfilled. Nevertheless, this time I decided to “admit” that for all of his poor sentence craft, flat characters, and documentary-style over-explaining, at least he writes a mean plot. Right? Nope, not even that, this time.

If you’ve read his other novels, there’s nothing new here. This is Angels and Demons set in Florence. This is The DaVinci Code about Dante. This is The Lost Symbol for The Overpopulation Problem. Same old same old: short time span, bewildered geniuses solving “puzzles” in the nick of time, disfigured villains, architecture-packed backdrops. I guess that’s good news for people who love Dan Brown’s stuff.

Although, this time, there’s really no point it. The “puzzles” are arbitrary, ham-handed. The plot “twists” are so contrived I was wincing and laughing out loud at the same time. The characters spend a few days running around Keystone-cops style, and in the end (VAGUE SPOILER ALERT) it’s for nothing. Nothing at all. Time utterly wasted.

Maybe that’s Dan Brown’s genius. Readers, too, will spend a few days getting to the end and will have wasted their time. Then again, you could say that about any novel, even good ones, right? The angst of the idle class, wasting our time reading books when there’s a world out there to explore. You know, the one Dan Brown gushes over in pandering detail, all those paintings and sculptures and churches he describes.

So go ahead, read Inferno, give Dan Brown more money. He doesn’t need it, but then if we didn’t pay, the publishers would stop giving is more. So it’s our own fault. Brown’s not the problem—it his readers, people like me, who are the problem. Oh well. I wonder what’s on TV tonight?

Just joking. I know exactly what’s on TV tonight.

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