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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The Thrill of it All by Joseph O’Connor

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So this is the difference. For a Joseph O’Connor book, this wasn’t his best, but it was still so so good.
In Listowel this spring (2014 – http://wombatsdigit.com/w/2014/09/meeting-joseph-oconnor-and-anne-enright/) he talked at length about how he composes his books, how long it takes him to compose his books, how he speaks each sentence out loud to see if the cadence sounds right. *This* effort is what made the first… third of the book, where we get introduced to the players and their young selves and the author’s love of music of the seventies bearable. I would go so far as to say enjoyable, even, because of that level of care paid to the sentences that make up the book, though it does feel like a little indulgence on the part of O’Connor, pinwheeling down the lane. For example, the part that he read out at Listowel, in which a young Robbie Goulding comes home late and drunk and gets a bollocking by his dear old dad, was very musical and funny and finely tuned… except it was a little bit long.
When the band comes together and moves to London things get really moving along and it becomes vintage O’Connor and I just got swept along by the current, instead of appreciating the technical details but lamenting the slow pace of the story. The people, Robbie, Trez, Fran, and Seán become living and breathing three dimensional characters and the story coalesces around Robbie and the thrill he’s had of it all.

So if you’re up for a little slog in the beginning, maybe some beautiful sentences and paragraphs, you’ll pull through the other side into the kind of amazing stuff Joseph O’Connor regularly produces.

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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot by David Shafer
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I had a few people recommend this book to me, raving about it, but I’m not so sure I’d pass on the same way.

I liked that start well enough, Leila seemed to be written well and have an interesting story — a lady working for a nonprofit health organization struggling to get a foothold in Burma seemed ripe with possibilities. But when the reader is thrust into the fairly shallow and scattered straits of Leo’s head on a bike ride into his job at a day care I ran aground.
The first paragraph of Leo’s story, the first sentence, just slopped out, for me. “Turning his head to look at the Fremont Bridge sparkling in the sharp light of the November morning, Leo felt his chin rasp across the collars of his two woolen shirts and his canvas work coat.” I just think I’m not a big fan of third person subjective, especially when it seems like we get only one (fairly boring) dimension of a character.
When I emerged into the Mark Deveraux chapter I felt like I could breath again and the narrative jolted to life a little for me, the prose seemed to flow a little better, but I did worry that a third of the book would be spent with a character I just didn’t believe.

The conspiracy at the heart of the book coalesces, it doesn’t race, and that’s kind of enjoyable. But I just found myself getting frustrated by some clunky dialogue and lengthy descriptions and the fact that much of the story hinged on Leo just didn’t work for me.

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Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This book has a great title.
The cover also glowed, which was cool.
The plot seemed like an interesting one, all breakneck pace and secret societies and books. I had seen this book and its title for so long and thought, “Oh man, this is going to be right up my alley.”
But it wasn’t. It really wasn’t.
The narrator, a dopey web designer in his early thirties? Late twenties? I can’t remember, if it was mentioned at all. Anyway, he’s a smarmy, fairly thick character. He, himself, does little, and exists largely to spit out little bon mots with very little bon in the mot. I feel like his sarcasm is unearned — I never saw anything spectacular in this laid-off web designer to make his ironic descriptions of “the mustachioed master of the secret library”** seem like he’d earned the right.
The conversations he has with his girlfriend from Google (and her slavish, freakish dedication to making the Top 100* who decide Google’s future direction) are painfully dull and make out the geeks to be some sort of uber-cult, capable of finding the hidden structure, the hidden meaning to Life, itself. That the plot revolves around Google and Amazon and their magical devices and computing power unraveling this great mystery doesn’t help make it any more exciting. When the narrative devolves into a parallel of a Dungeons & Dragons session I very nearly put the book down and just gave up. But I kept hope that his great reveal at the end would make it all worth it… but, at the same time, felt that it was going to be really tough to re-lift the Hindenburg of a novel.
This is the second-ish book of this sort I’ve read (Austin Grossman’s awful “You” was another and Rolf Potts, the author of the travelogue “Marco Polo Didn’t Go There” is a similar sort of character) where I’ve just found the narrator insufferable. I’m trying to put my finger on it, but it’s slippery. They seem to be entitled, fatuous, but they think, and perhaps their authors think, that they’re actually quite clever. But you know what? I don’t want to figure it out any more, because I don’t want to waste any more time thinking or reading about these characters.

* Special Note: I’m getting a few facts wrong, here. They’re nearly right. I could have gone back and looked them up again, but I really can’t, the thought of re-entering this book frankly bores me and I don’t want to annoy myself again by slogging through it to find the facts.
** Oh God, see? I went back and looked up that passage, had it earmarked, and the book’s annoyed me all over again. Ugh.

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