Underworld by Don DeLillo
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I listened to the audiobook version of this book, narrated by the same guy who narrates the Jack Reacher series, by Lee Child, incidentally. He does a good job reading this book, which I’d been meaning to read for a long time, ever since I saw ads for it back on the subway in New York back in 1997/1998, Don Delillo being one of the great white giants of literature.
While I liked White Noise, which I read a long time ago, I couldn’t help but feel a great portion of this book was like an author’s exercise in onanism — adjectives spurting out needlessly, constantly, extravagantly; the almost verbatim transcript of a Lenny Bruce act was painful, drawn out; mansplaining before mansplaining was even a thing.
Thanks to the miracle of audiobooks, I was able to speed it up to try and get through it, and I’m sort of glad I did — the ending was a good little gut punch, but I have to wonder if it was worth the slog through the rest.

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Hockey Tough 2nd Edition by Saul Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received an copy of this book from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.
I’m not a hockey player (anymore). I’m not going to make the NHL, but damn, did I start to have creeping thoughts of entering the 2017 draft.
If this book had been around when I was a young hockey player, I would have devoured every single bit of it, dreaming of skating with Cam Neely and Adam Oates. I would have practiced my breathing, focused on my goals, and had a more level-headed approach to playing the game.
There is a fair amount of repetition of the core concepts that Saul Miller preaches, but I think that’s because (as he says up front) he intends for you to skip around the book a bit, pick up a few chapters here and there, do the homework he assigns, and then come back to chapters as need be. The real life anecdotes from players help inspire kids and give them a target.
As a volleyball coach (and former player), I think he’s got a lot of great stuff in here to mine for athletes of all stripes — it doesn’t have to just be hockey tough, though the sport certainly has more of a rep for toughness than, say, volleyball.
The only two issues I have with the book is 1) a minor one, but my first impulse, warranted or not, is to chuckle a little at a book with Sidney Crosby on the cover labeled Hockey Tough. Now, I know they guy is tougher than I am, but as a non-Pittsburgh fan our impression of Sid is not exactly tough. Unfair, I know. The second, more major issue, is that Matt Cooke is in the “Checking Tough” chapter. His on-ice behavior and the way he carries himself is no model for younger players and that type of dirty, over the edge play shouldn’t be rewarded with any kind of spotlight.
But that was my only issue, and it came late in the book. Overall this was an excellent primer on an oft-neglected side of training for any kind of sport.

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The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I think this book may have been more relevant in its time, so I don’t think there’s much point picking at any threads that bothered me about this book. It’s just that a lot of them did, and I think it was the author’s voice that bugged me, most of all. He comes across as arrogant and flailing.
I couldn’t help thinking he should have applied user-centered design to his outline to maybe tighten things up a bit, as he tended to go on, flogging a dead horse and the reader long after he could have stopped; setting up a number of straw men to knock down again and again and again. The software development process is far from perfect and Cooper has some good ideas that have taken hold that sort of help (though those ideas are also abused and susceptible to bad interaction designers, of which there are many, just like there are good and bad programmers).

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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well, she can spin a yarn, can’t she? This was a great, fun story to talk about with the kids — foreshadowing, twists and turns, adventure, it kind of had it all. The kids had to put the book down when the demeanors arrived on the train, but we took a little break, and came back and worked them past that. Not much more to say about the global phenomenon, other than I’m glad we’re finally getting around to it, as a family and individually.

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The Last Four Days of Paddy Buckley by Jeremy Massey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Loved the voice of this book and the wacky antics of Paddy Buckley, funeral home worker about town, and man oh man does he ever get around town.
This is a great way to spend a few hours, it’s a fun story, and I had been hoping, since this is pitched as a black comedy, that it would be a little darker than the way it all wraps up, but not a bad book, by any means.

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Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t: Why That Is And What You Can Do About It by Steven Pressfield
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pretty good stuff, as usual, from Steven Pressfield. It pretty much does pick up where The War of Art leaves off and provides that little bit of a kick in the pants you might need to get going and write… it’ll help you if you’re wandering a bit aimlessly, like a cloud, and suddenly you’ll have your villain, the sun, and your Inciting Incident, maybe a stiff breeze off the Atlantic, shuffle it all into three acts and you’ll have your story.
He’s got a great, no nonsense voice and the years of experience to back it up. And whether you cut his book up and post it all over your writing room wall and adhere to his principles or if you just absorb a bit of it through osmosis it’s certainly not going to hurt your craft too much (other than the fact that you’re reading about writing rather than just getting out there and doing it — but we all need breaks sometimes).

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The Secret Place by Tana French
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My two favorites of Tana French’s books are Faithful Place and Broken Harbor… the writing is consistently great across her books, but the story really sparkles in those two books. The Secret Place isn’t quite as good as those two, though, as I’ve mentioned before, she just writes so well that it’s a pleasure to get back to the little (in this case nearly claustrophobic, but for the scenes at the Court) world of her stories.
The Secret Place is confined to St. Kilda’s, a boarding school outside Dublin, and two cliques of girls particularly, who may or may not have murdered a student from the companion boys’ school. There are a few moments, where, again, as in other books, my willing suspension of disbelief valve wavers and is about to blow, but I can forgive the odd detour into the magical (are the girls practicing real magic? Is it all a mass hallucination? Ms. French kind of addresses it in one neat sentence towards the end of the book) and the (very) occasional trip up by the detectives hunting down the resolution to the crime, because they’re otherwise on the ball and sharp and play well off each other. The book rides a theme of belonging very hard and it touches everything and everyone, not just the teenage girls. Overall, a good read from Tana French, as usual, though maybe not her best.

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The Invoice by Jonas Karlsson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I got a copy of this book through the LibraryThing early reviewer program.
I really enjoyed this book. I liked Jonas Karlsson’s short and quick The Room, but this one was sweeter, funnier, just really well done.
I thought the premise was great — that you might get an invoice for all the things you typically enjoy in life — and the narrator’s handling of his own invoice and the seemingly simple life he’s led to this point was cute. It’s not a break-neck set of plot twists, in fact, you might guess how his attempts to resolve his invoice with the company issuing go, but it’s a very cute, funny story.

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This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It by David Wong
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a fun enough listen and it grew on me the longer I listened. Or perhaps it got over its juvenile obsession with all things scatalogical (or did I?) and settled into just telling the story with the odd detour and penis joke.
The humor is a little like a blunt hammer and there’s very little subtlety in the book, but, then, I don’t think that’s what you’re looking for from it. As a quick read (listen) that boils along, has some zombies, magical portals around town, haunted quarantine hospitals, this one is all of that.

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The Man from Primrose Lane by James Renner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a fun read. It’s not quite as polished as his next novel, The Great Forgetting, but it’s a fun, twisty read.
You can tell the true crime reporter angle is near and dear to his heart, and he uses it well enough to get the story moving along again, from the point at which David Neff, our intrepid hero, seems to be stagnating in the wake of his wife’s death, the pressures of infamy as the author of a lurid, hit true crime book, and raising a kid on his own.
Like I said, a little clunkier than his second book, but he manages the complications in the book really well and has some fun with the conceit around which he’s wrapped his book.
I won’t say any more, to avoid spoiling anything, but I picked the book up because I knew it covered topics and scenarios that were near and dear to my heart and in my own book, so I wanted to have a look at how Renner dealt with them and it made for a really good time.

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