A Hoarse Half-human Cheer by X.J. Kennedy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Hoarse, Half-Human Cheer was a real hoot. You may find yourself speaking like this after emerging from the book, blinking in the modern light, expecting, perhaps, a sepia tinge to the air.

I got A Hoarse, Half-Human Cheer for free through NetGalley.

X.J. Kennedy’s got this great sense of the voice of the fifties, or at least the voice of the fifties as passed down to us through the generations, just soaked throughout the entire novel. And accompanying the voice is a fun little caper story involving the mob, basketball, wise-cracking secretaries, karate-kicking priests (reminded me of the Dead Alive scene with the priest shouting, “I kick ass for the Lord!”), army surplus, and a dame with a lot of moxie. There are clear villains and good guys, there is some good, old fashioned violence. There is a really, really funny scene where a renegade priest has gone off his rocker and blessed a warehouse full of Ritz crackers which, as their Catholic duty, the priests and nuns of the Catholic college at the heart of the story, the college staff have to eat in one evening, lest the body of Christ be profaned. “Surely you wouldn’t smear jelly on the Body of Our Lord?”

Well worth your time.



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The Room by Jonas Karlsson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a good, entertaining read. I think I expected it to be more funny, but for a story from Sweden, where the stories I’ve read tend toward the depressing, it was a gut buster.
It was the perfect length — any longer and the narrator may have gotten tedious — and the story clipped along really well.



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Double Feature by Owen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Owen King’s pacing, the back and forth of the story between episodes that formed the narrator’s directorial career, his father’s own somewhat more successful career, I thoroughly enjoyed all of it.

When it begins to dawn on Sam that his film has been destroyed by Brooks I felt the visceral tug at the guts and as the stakes ratcheted up, even though you *knew* what was going to happen (and you do, now, now that you’ve read this… spoiler!), you knew it wasn’t going to end well. But, like a socket wrench, the magnitude of the problem, the sheer loss Sam’s going to experience, and you with him, it gets worse, then a little worse, then worse still until something breaks and we get catapulted to 1969 and Booth’s nascent career.

It’s a pretty full book, full of characters, some of whom echo a little more realistically, some of whom (like Booth at his most bombastic, but fully in keeping with his character, or the Internet listicle celeb roommate of Sam’s) don’t. Like I said, I really enjoyed the pacing and the shifting gears between one story and the next, one perspective and the next, particularly Sam’s mother, Allie’s story. While the early section is fraught with tension regarding the ultimate fate of Sam’s film, the remaining sections, the long weekend sections, still roil with their own little sub-dramas and I had a good time riding out the rest of the story with these folks.



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Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

While this isn’t the quirky trip that many Murakami books are, it’s a pretty good book about a guy growing into his own, dealing with loss in his formative years, and having a lot of sex.



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Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was my first foray into Sarah Vowell’s stuff and, from the blurbs on the back of the book and the jacket description, it sounded like a great time.
I enjoyed the first dozen or so asides, but found myself wishing she’d just get on with the story a few times. I’d never really thought about the history of Hawai’i all that much before — I’d seen the Hawaiian independence folks before when we visited a few years ago, visited a few pre-missionary sites on the Big Island that we really enjoyed, the site when Captain Cook arrived, but didn’t know much else of the recent history of the island.
The book gave an interesting insight into where the tensions between the white missionaries (and their tourist ancestors/brethren) and the locals have arisen. But I found myself rushing through the book just to get it over with, at a certain point — I think I just found asides like “a vessel so crappy it made the Mayflower look like the QE2″ tedious, rather than amusing after a while, they broke up the flow of the story so many times that it became distracting.



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Dorothy Parker Drank Here by Ellen Meister

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received an advance copy of this, though the advance copy was *supposed* to be for Tim Dowling’s “How to be a Husband.”
Not being picky, I read what I was given, and man, was it a fun read. I really liked the premise, the Dorothy Parker character, which made me want to read more into her life (and I’m pretty sure the short bios I’ve read about her are *very* slim on details about the time she’s spent as a ghost, haunting the Algonquin Hotel).
I was very glad to get this by accident.



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A Player to be Maimed Later by John Billheimer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a fun, quick read about a couple of ball players, forever linked though their polar opposite fortunes in the big leagues — one destined for the Hall of Fame, the other for the skids — and the shady incident that kept them bound from their days being called up to the big club.
I’m a sucker for a good baseball story, of course, whether it’s reading or writing them, from Matt Christopher to Sidd Finch to Michael Joyce’s “Going the Distance” to Fenway Fiction in all its incarnations.
I found the wardrobe inventory a little tedious, at times (“George wore a yellow shirt with green buttons, a pink tie, purple slacks, dress shoes in black and a rakish orange cap” type of stuff.) and some of the explication was a little heavy-handed, but, like I said, I had fun reading this one and can’t complain that I spent a few hours with this story.



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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I didn’t know what to expect from David Mitchell’s “Thousand Autumns” except that it would be different than the others I’d read (“Cloud Atlas” and “The Bone Clocks” this year), but that it would contain some familiar faces from the other books.
So reading this one became a little bit of a Where’s Waldo game of spotting characters which would show up in later (or earlier) works. Thankfully, he gets Marinus, the main recurring character, on stage quickly, though, because I got sucked into the story after orienting myself around some of the other characters assembling in the Dutch East India Company’s little island outpost in Japan.
I love the way the novel pivots from Jacob’s arrival to his interest in the burned, odd figure of Miss Aiba-gawa in Marinus’s collection of medical students, to her removal to the mysterious mountain monastery, an attempted rescue by her former lover Uzaemon, and the abandonment of the Dutch outpost and its caretaker residents, and then their eventual uprising, when the English arrive on the scene, and Jacob’s dismantling of the monastery and ‘rescue’ of Aiba-gawa by somewhat diplomatic means. More than the heady leaps and bounds of a Cloud Atlas or Bone Clocks these pivots are like the tacking of a majestic ship. And within the sections Mitchell steers his beautiful, masterful prose. He has a small tic, in this book, of breaking up dialogue with narrative description, mid-sentence, so that the language has an odd, halting rhythm of someone in a foreign land, submersed in foreign culture, trying to reconcile their own language with that of their hosts. At a certain stage of the book he used the trick so much that it became a little distracting, but, like I said, it made me think of someone stuck out in a foreign outpost in which he was learning the native language from his translators.

I haven’t felt quite the sense of loss I had when I had to give this book back to the library. What a great read.



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The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this time travel story, which seemed to be a theme for 2014 for me, breaking a logjam I’d held up for some time. I can’t remember exactly why I downloaded this iBook, but it was certainly to do with the idea that there was a group straddling the boundaries of time, shepherding inadvertent time travelers about their (new) daily lives.
Because I didn’t want the ideas or implementations and rules of Bee Ridgway’s version of time travel creeping into the final stages of editing Butterfly, my own time travel-ish novel, I held off actually reading the thing until this autumn.
But it sat there on my iBookShelf, taunting me, the original cover, the blue and white tree branches, it looked like, wrapped up in the scroll of a title beckoning me. By the time I got around to reading the book the cover had changed to the more period romance-looking one on the book store now, which does a better job of setting expectations for the content, I believe.
Because it feels more like a period romance book than… whatever I expected. I’m not sure what that was, maybe more of a thriller, or a mystery. Maybe something like Claire North’s amazing “The Fifteen First Lives of Harry August.” So this book wasn’t something I’d normally pick up on a browse through the book seller.
But I thought the writing was good, the story was fun and engrossing. There are a few instances where things get explained in a fairly clunky way, but overall Ms. Ridgway kept me turning pages and dashing towards the end.



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The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was my second David Mitchell novel, after the pyrotechnics of Cloud Atlas, so I went in with high expectations. Like my Joseph O’Connor experience, I saw him read from this book first. (There were no Bigfoots sighted at the reading, something I’m sure I’ll get around to writing about in the near future.)
Mitchell hits the ground running in a much more linearly straight-forward book than Cloud Atlas with Holly back in 1984, running away from home and a cheating boyfriend. She’s made a fascinating, special character in a way that other books I’ve recently read (WTF, in particular) fails to make its characters (or one, in particular) interesting and viable. I loved the little cracks that began to appear in the story in the (brief) appearance of Dr. Marinus, Esther Little down on the jetty, and her otherworldly brother, Jacko.
We skip to 1991 in Switzerland where we run into Holly again, a more hardened Holly, though she’s not the main focus. And again in 2004 as the partner of war reporter Ed Brubeck (Mr. Mitchell read from this section during his appearance; brilliantly timed, and he even got a cold, to better give the reading in the voice of a jet lagged and possibly hungover Ed). We skip to Holly as a successful author, again, in the background, in 2015, in a very entertaining section in which the author, Crispin Hershey, gets a vocal critic of his locked in a prison in South America and then attempts, on the sly, to get him released and becomes his greatest advocate.
In the following section, the “An Horologist’s Labyrinth” section the latent magic beneath it all soars to the surface, and I found it a little less engaging than the stories Mitchell had told about Holly, Crispin, Ed, Hugo Lamb (from 1991). The heavy mystical/magical nature of the section requires Mitchell to explain quite a bit more about certain objects and rites, which is where it sometimes bogs down, but I still really enjoyed it.
The ending, out at Sheep’s Head, at the end of the seeming world, is brilliant. [2043 is not going to be fun, for the record.] We’ve seen Holly from nearly birth (and certainly birth of her own independent self, fleeing her parents’ house) to her ripe old age. I love that the narrative sinks back into Holly’s point of view, after all, and we get to fade to black with her.



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