This wasn’t a crisp read. It wasn’t a symphony. There were a lot of discordant notes, a lot of extraneous material that tripped me up when I just wanted to hang on to Nevin’s subject: Bill Watterson and his brilliant strip.

His subject is what kept me reading. It was a pleasant trip back to consider that special magic that Calvin and Hobbes held. Sure, that trip’s lens was smudged with Nevin’s own perspective, perhaps too much, sometimes, but that’s his prerogative, because it’s his book. Did I get to write the story of Bill Watterson? No, Nevin did. And, if for nothing else, it was worth the time spent reflecting on the career and talents Mr. Watterson for a few hours. Thanks, Nevin, for getting us up off the couch for the jog down memory lane.

The last two books I’ve read by Christopher Moore (“Sacré Bleu” and “Fool” — actually, make that three, I have it on reasonable authority that I read “Lamb” prior to those two and that was another fantastic book) have blown me away.

He’s been going so deep on his books, immersing you into the world in which it takes place so efficiently that you hold these fictional versions of historical periods dearer than the originals. Or are they the same as the original? He’s done such a fun job of realizing the world that you don’t really much care, though you feel, if you were the sort, that you could go research and verify all the incidents in the story more or less.

Not as good as Black Maps, which is one of my all-time favorites, but still an okay read.

It was only after I’d begun reading it that I saw the blurb from Ken Bruen on the back, which should have given me a clue as to the writing style in this one. If Ken Bruen likes it, with his long, tedious navel-gazing protagonists, the same might have slipped in here.

The narrator, John March, gets a little more overly descriptive in this book, and seems… duller, somehow, in this book than the first one. Duller as if his colors were different, not in a boring sort of way.

Thankfully you can skim most of the wardrobe inventory, though the mystery is a pretty lukewarm one that you may have guessed whodunit pretty early on.

Death’s Little Helper isn’t enough to have soured me on Peter Spiegelman, but it’s definitely not my favorite book of his. We’ll see how the next in the series goes.

The main problem I had with this book was the wholly unlikeable main character. No, not “you,” but Russell. He’s condescending (to the reader, to the people with whom he works), vapid, and I found his own personal journey, which never really goes anywhere all that interesting, boring.

In fact, perhaps two-thirds of the slog through this book you get a confession from one of the other characters that they never trusted Russell in the first place, and still don’t trust him, now that he’s flown back into their world of game design geekery, that he won’t finish the job of designing this latest game and then fly off to the cool kids again.

The narrative switches perspective a few times — it’s mostly written in the first person, but occasionally will go deep into another character’s thoughts and motivations, a sort of first person omniscient, but since the narrator has held himself at arm’s length from the other characters it’s an unrealistic expectation that the reader would buy he’s able to speak for his fellow characters. Plus, as I’ve said, I just didn’t like the character, so it was tough to swallow an entire, galumphing journey through an imaginary games company’s back catalog told from his perspective.

The journey through the back catalog and into the actual games is wildly boring, as well, the language enraptured by being immersed in a whole other world, the sights, the smells, the emotions of the characters! But, wait, the smells? The feelings of the characters? I get where the author is trying to go with this treatment of video games… but it’s way over the top and the game stories don’t seem particularly compelling and he goes into far too much detail about the backstory that just kills the things flat for me. We’re supposed to be fascinated by how rich and full these games are even if it’s just ampersands and characters running around a maze of periods!!!!!! But you’ve either played these games and know how you can get sucked in or you haven’t and the painfully dry and long-winded explanations are just not going to convince you otherwise.

I kept plugging on to see if the story got any better, or maybe I was hoping to see the narrator get killed as the Alewife T station collapsed, spewing concrete rubble everywhere, but here’s the spoiler: it really didn’t.

I started this book after reading an excerpt in Boston Noir 2 and grabbed it from our local library.

I enjoyed the story, the characters were well-ish drawn in a familiar hard-boiled kind of style so that you felt you knew these characters from a Donald Westlake, an Elmore Leonard, an Adrian McKinty novel.

Not bad at all.

This was a good-ish book. It’s very original, and it skates by on that for a good while. It gets bogged down a little in the middle, and fans of the scatalogical will love it (foes of the scatalogical will not, though you then have the honor of being known as a “Foe of the Scatalogical”).

It was a very pleasant way to pass an evening or two, at any rate.

This book was fine. The writing was fine. Most of the characters were well-drawn in some manner or another. I just thought, based on all the advance praise, that there would be something more there. Instead, what were separate vignettes of different key components of this international English language newspaper remained so, for me.

The overall arch of the paper, which is what we follow throughout the book, isn’t terribly compelling. I thought the author was going to go deeper in certain areas or explode the story like a watermelon under Gallagher’s steady hand, but it never happened.

I gave him a lot of leeway, thanks to the source and volume of recommendations the book carried, but It just fizzled out at the end with a “this person started a beet farm, Joey began a newspaper in Uganda, Phillipa learned how to knit, Geraldo continued working at the paper until his untimely death covering a bull fight in the streets of Philadelphia”-type wrap-up.

Which is a shame. The trajectory of the newspaper describes the book, and I suppose we’re supposed to care what happens to the employees in the end, but I didn’t. And I didn’t because he would begin telling a little side story down each employee’s life, some of which were interesting and I would have liked to have heard more, but he drops each and every one with an unceremonious thud.

It seemed as if he didn’t care, particularly, about the character, papering in some salient details with cardboard cutouts (oh yeah, this one has divorced, he lives in London, kids involved, this other one, new job, blah blah blah).

In the end, due to the odd treatment of the characters, reading this book felt a little like eating a watermelon (I seem to be obsessed with watermelons today), only someone had burrowed in and sucked out all the meat, so all you’re left with is rind and a little tiny bit of pink stuff stuck stubbornly to the edges.

This was an awesome book. Wildly imaginative, touching, funny, and I just couldn’t wait to get back to it.

The book is told from the point of view of an imaginary friend, an old, in imaginary friend’s terms, imaginary friend who is wise, but who’s also a bit frightened by all the stuff he doesn’t know.

I was reminded of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” but I’m reluctant to say that because I don’t want to make it sound like it’s derivative of it (of course, I’ve gone and said it, so I couldn’t have been too reluctant). Budo, the narrator, and his imaginer friend Max are so well drawn, as are Max’s parents and teachers. The world Matthew Dicks covers is so different, and so well rendered that it separates itself from The Curious Incident as not just another book about some kid who is possibly on the autism spectrum. He captures details about the life and lifecycle of an imaginary friend that you find yourself agreeing, saying, “Well, sure, of course many imaginary friends don’t have eyebrows.”

And, like Budo, you find yourself playing a little bit of the part of imaginary friend, someone who will go away when you stop reading the story. You’re sad that the story will, necessarily, end at some point, and that you will not be there, to carry on with these characters to whom you’ve dedicated a few hours of your life. But what a great ride it was while you were along for it.

I was lucky enough to get an advance reader copy of this book. And then, because I’m a fair kind of guy, I waited until everyone else had a copy to read it.

I enjoyed Ann Leary’s style, I loved the setting, of course, and it made me slightly homesick, throughout. It’s set in a fictional town on the north shore of Massachusetts, God’s own country. While she did an excellent job giving an idea of the area and habits of inhabitants of areas like these, at times it felt a little heavy-handed. But perhaps that’s me. I know what a regular coffee is at a Dunks. I feel like this should be an ingrained part of every human soul on the planet, something that everyone understands intrinsically. But I could be wrong. She also leans a little hard (or is that ‘hahd’?) on the colloquial spellings for the locals, and I suppose it’s been a general national trend for the last few years to point out that, hee-eeeey, people from the Northeast and in and around Boston talk differently, sometimes. Hell, my own daughter, born down the road in a non-fictional north shore town, is obsessed with how daddy and his parents say things.

But I got past all that stuff and got sucked into this story of Hildy Good, the witch’s descendent with a penchant for reading people and selling houses. And drinking. When I wasn’t enjoying the story and getting sucked along like detritus from a 747 that was ripping apart at the seams an inconvenient distance from the ground, I often had thoughts that the Leary household must either be one gigantic alcoholic mess of a party, 24/7, or it must be 100% totally dry. Between “The Good House” and Ann’s husband’s show Rescue Me, about an alcoholic, recovering alcoholic, no, no, plain alcoholic fireman, I feel as if I could get a contact buzz off the sheer volume of liquor and wine being consumed between the two stories.

And why not? Ann certainly has plenty to celebrate with this pretty well wrought story about a fictional town in the loveliest place on earth.

I wanted to like this. I enjoy Steven Johnson — his Mind Wide Open was a great read, as was FEED, back in the day, and he usually has some interesting ideas. But this was not one of those books. He seems obsessed with coining the phrase and movement and politically minded group “peer progressives,” and if I ever read the words ‘Legrand Star’ again it’ll just be far too soon. The literary equivalent of banging in a nail with your hand. Over and over and over again.

Yes, networks are cool. Using tools in ways the creators never intended them is cool. But this could have been an article, rather than a book.

I don’t not finish many books, but this is one I just put down, two thirds of the way through.