The Ghost of Plenty by Gerald McCormack
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Loved this story — very funny alternating diary entries from the perspective of the well-meaning but bumbling English landlord of an Irish estate and the well-meaning but bumbling Irish lad named Redmond O’Leary returning from four years of education abroad in England.
I thought the voice was excellent for both diaries and the story zipped along as the two protagonists’ paths crossed and crossed again under the unrest and wilds of Galway in 1855.
It reminded me of a Flann O’Brian book, replete with footnote asides and meanderings

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The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a fun little fairy tale of a romp, if your romps involve you getting locked up in the basement of a library and being forced to read a book about the Ottoman Empire tax collecting.
Instead of a moral at the end we get a bit of a gut punch in the final note. But it’s not like it’s a long story that’ll take you ages to get there.

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Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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The Fixer by Joseph Finder
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I got a copy of this through First to Read, Penguin’s advance copy program. I was super excited because Joseph Finder seems like a really nice guy and I really liked his Paranoia, I felt like it captured the telecom/tech industry really well. So maybe I didn’t enjoy The Fixer as much because I didn’t work in the magazine industry, but there felt like there was something a little flatter in this book. There was a lot of description, and it’s obvious that Mr. Finder loves his adopted home of Boston, but I felt a lot of of felt clunky, vague, as if afraid to commit.
Around page 76, in the BlueFire Reader edition, there’s a scene in which Rick, the main character, finds himself in a situation that might be a bit disorienting, but in the span of one paragraph we hear the voice he hears are Irish, *maybe*, that the thing he tastes is *maybe* burlap, something he jams his foot into isn’t steel, it’s *probably* human. The other, most egregious example of the reader being beaten over the head with something was later on in the book, page 173, where Rick understands something, but “Dr. Girona went on as if Rick hadn’t replied,” and we’re treated to the definition of a stroke.
The story was a promising one, but I struggled to find Rick all that interesting (he loses the riches and fame of a lifestyle you’re not quite sure he’s earned, and then re-earns the riches, sort of, and becomes a d**khead again for a short while) and I found the extensive wardrobe descriptions a little tedious after a while.
I’d go back to Finder again in the future, because he’s got a great history of fun, ripping reads, and this would make a good beach read where you can skim the description a little bit more when you have to squint because the sun has come out from behind the clouds again. But this one wasn’t his best.

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Eeny Meeny by M.J. Arlidge
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I got this book as an advance reader copy through NetGalley.

Eeny Meeny is a a pretty great, fast-paced read. The suspense and tension is built really well and the writing is sharp and clear. Helen Grace is a hard-boiled, tough nut, with a lot of complexities written in.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. The final few scenes felt like a little bit of a let-down, including one crucial piece of evidence that I’m not quite sure is actual evidence (I can imagine my former policeman father throwing the book down in disgust), but I think I’d give Helen Grace another shot (this is Helen Grace #1, after all).

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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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