A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Richard Matthews read the audiobook version I listened to and man, oh man. In the words of one of my kids, “he sounds so smart, this man. But he’s probably just reading it all out of a book.”
It’s a fascinating book, you feel like a rock skipping across a very shallow but full pond of astounding facts, figures, and anecdotes. The introduction to large figures and ideas in the history of science is really enjoyable, sort of like a different take on Arthur Koestler’s “The Sleepwalkers.”
At a certain point large number fatigue sets in, where you feel like it’s one unimaginably large number after another preposterously large number, and I think he even acknowledges that fairly early on. But it was a great, engaging listen.

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Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I grabbed this book after reading Emily St. John Mandel’s amazing “Station Eleven,” wanting to read anything and everything she ever wrote.
This wasn’t “Station Eleven,” but, then, this was also her first book. Her writing was really polished, even in this book, and the different narrative threads were handled well. I didn’t particularly believe Eli’s suddenly urgent need to go to Montreal when he just didn’t show that impulse in any of the other things we know about him. He didn’t even seem all that close, early in the book, to Lilia, that her departure would warrant him leaving Brooklyn for Montreal to get her back or check on her or whatever it was he was doing. His lengthy stay in Montreal, being stalled by Michaela, the daughter of the private eye who goes off the deep end and dedicates his life to searching for Lilia, the abandoning of the daughter by the former circus performer private eye, all of this just didn’t ring true for me, I didn’t buy it. I kept questioning the motives of the people acting, as if they were being forced to do the things they were doing by some unseen hand (the author’s).
I’m still looking forward to her next book, but my expectations, which were sky high after Station Eleven, are a little more tempered now.

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number9dream by David Mitchell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Man oh man. This book started a little slow — it’s about the dream world, to an extent, and begins there, which lends it an early hallucinatory tone. Not exactly ideal bedtime reading, especially as it’s very slippery for someone to get ahold of as they’re listening to you read it in a sort of fever-haze.
But once it gets going I had to pinch myself, repeatedly (and metaphorically, don’t worry, I’m not a scabby, mottled mess because of this book), and check that this wasn’t a Murakami novel.
It’s a beautifully done, wild romp through Tokyo and its underbelly. It puts David Mitchell’s “Slade House, which I enjoyed, in a different light, though. The writing in this book was far more elevated, the story more finely wrought than Mitchell’s latest book, and it hits you just how damn *good* he is. He writes the young Eiji Miyake convincingly, and the supernatural-ish rears its head only a little bit later in the book, hitting some familiar Mitchell obsessions that we’ve all come to know and love.

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I Hear the Sirens in the Street by Adrian McKinty
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoy Sean Duffy, the main character of Adrian McKinty’s latest series of books (a Douglas Adams-style trilogy, the Troubles trilogy has now got five books, I believe).
The story and action are well-paced with more 80s references than could choke a horse (this mild cruelty to horses and other things prone to choking on too many musical references is the only complaint I have about the book). It’s what I always imagined Ken Bruen would be like.
Actually, I lied, I have one more complaint. Duffy’s side trip to Massachusetts involves, of course, a trip to Dunkin Donuts, where he characterizes the coffee as having “been percolated through a tube previously used for stealing petrol from parked cars.” Shame on you, Mr. McKinty, shame. He should have ordered a regular.

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Security by Gina Wohlsdorf
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I received an advance reader copy from NetGalley for this title and was really excited about it, since the blurb compared it to “A Visit from the Goon Squad.”
I don’t know if it was the copy I received, but the formatting was all off. Sure, there was the quirky way the book was narrated, flipping from story to story the way a security camera might, but there were also glaring incongruences like sentences finishing with the ending of lines a few lines down so you get sentences like this:
“The Killer puts Delores is apologizing to Tessa — this is
Delores’s favored greeting to Tessa– before the main elevator’s doors have fully opened.”
Or this one:
“The Thinker solitaire, and the Killer is — again — sitting on the is — still– playing
bed in Room 717.”
Even the acknowledgements get squeezed to resemble some sort of William Carlos Williams homage.
So I don’t think that was the intention, but I think it contributed to me feeling less than charitable towards the book.
We follow (ostensibly through the security cameras) Tessa and other hotel workers as they shuttle up and down the slow-moving elevator (past the distinct lack of a thirteenth floor, we’re told again and again and again), up and down the stairs, and begin preparations for the big grand opening. By the end of the book I felt like if I were ever to forget what it would be like to walk up and down 15-20 floors of a hotel and maybe take the elevator, too, to relieve the monotony, I could re-read this book and be 100% satisfied.
The story line in which a Killer (or Killers) is killing everyone in the hotel is a little bit suspenseful, but it’s paired with an odd, flatly described burgeoning romance between two foster siblings that I just didn’t get. Perhaps that was the point, because of who the narrator was, but it made for very dull, labored reading (“Her hips move like a clock’s third hand.”). For example:
“Her eyes were depthless when she stared past a straining neck, palmed a contorting shoulder blade, ran another hand down perfect vertebrae to a strong ass, and cupped. Stared at the ceiling, where she was seeing someone she wished were with her instead.”
It feels like a second-by-second blow. I get that maybe this was a deliberate choice based on the way the book was narrated, but it just didn’t work for me.

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Near Enemy by Adam Sternbergh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Spademan is back for another adventure with his bleak outlook and black humor.
I love the character of Spademan, really enjoy his voice, and this time his clipped sentences and viewpoint seems to lengthen that little bit — maybe it’s the kid and her kid that he rescued from the last book that have mellowed him a little bit.
But while he’s more mellow it doesn’t mean that he’s any less cynical. When he arrives home to find a sort of competitor (since he, himself, is a hitman, a garbageman, as he coins it) nailed to his door “like a cheerful Christmas wreath” he takes it all in stride, his house crowded, not with carnage, but an almost domestic scene.
The book goes quick and you get the feeling that Adam Sternbergh had a great time writing it (I got a kick out of his use of Check-Off’s rental van towards the end, could imagine himself chuckling as he wrote that scene), which makes it a super enjoyable read.

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Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It was fine.
I listened to the audiobook edition, and it was fine.
The way in which the book was narrated — from hundreds of years in the future, by cooly rational (and very unemotional) ancestors of ours — made the book read more like the equivalent of watching someone set up a chess board than a thoroughly engaging story of love across the ages and the war of reason against faith.
The story had its moments and was an interesting premise (the ancestors of a jinnia and rationalist philosopher down the ages) but some of the magical element was lost, perhaps intentionally, by the dry, almost academic rendering from the future, in which dreams have even been expunged.
It’s also very hard to separate the global phenomenon that Rushdie is from his work. I couldn’t help but think he is directly addressing critics or ex-wives from his writing. Every caricature of the urbane older gent walking around New York City I can’t help but picture with Rushdie’s grinning face. I didn’t mind this so much, but it was just something that kept coming to mind as I listened to the book.

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The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book because my then nine year old son, stricken, asked me to read the book so that I might see the horrors (the murder, scheming!) he’d just witnessed. So I told him I would.
Time passed, I forgot, he recovered, slowly, eventually, probably. But as I was fishing in a pile of books to read, searching for my next one, he tapped me on the arm and reminded me, still with that haunted look, that I hadn’t read “The Bad Beginning.”

So I read it. It was cute. The language and sly nods from the narrator, hinting at some horror coming up are what set my kid on edge, are surely what sent my child off the deep end, but they were not much more grisly than a Roald Dahl story. The literary tics were part of the charm of the book and while I don’t know that I’ll be reading any more in the series, I think both my kids, the one who was permanently scarred and the other one, yet to be scarred, will enjoy more in the series. So I’ll now have to report to my son that maybe it wasn’t so bad, it was all in good, gruesome fun, and that I’ll do so as soon as I let him out of the cage we have him suspended in from our thirty foot tower.

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Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow.
This was an excellent book. I loved both paths of the story, one of which was multi-pronged, since we followed the fraying threads of Don Pedro Camacho’s serials about men in their fifties, the prime of their life, with their aquiline noses. The serials and the reactions of the public we see to them in Marito’s story as he tries to navigate his love affair with his newly divorced Aunt Julia are a ton of (gruesome) fun as Don Pedro begins his long, slow mental decline.
As the serials implode (almost literally) Mario and Julia’s story takes on the aspect of one of Don Pedro’s own creations and you almost forget that you’re in the real world chapters when things escalate with Mario’s parents towards the end.
Makes me want to run out and get more of Llosa’s stuff.

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Dexter in the Dark by Jeff Lindsay
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I didn’t mind the descent into the demoniacal as much as other people did, but it’s certainly different than the other Dexter books.
More than anything, I missed the presence of the Dark Passenger, who abandons Dexter in the presence of another Dark Passenger, older and stronger. Dexter is his same old goofy self, but I enjoyed the interludes with the Dark Passenger in previous books (and the TV show), I think Jeff Lindsay writes that voice really well and it was a shame to spend the bulk of the book without it.
Of course, the Dark Passenger returns, and how it returns feels like the punchline to a book length joke, the kind your doddering bachelor uncle might tell.
I think the way the kids are used in the books is interesting, and the story clips along at a good enough pace.
I’m not 100% sure, but I also believe the word of the day in the Miami newspapers around the time this book was being written *must* have been ‘sibilant’, because it shows up an inordinate number of times.

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