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.

I’ve long had a bias against John Steinbeck. I don’t know why, it’s just been there, like a gargoyle you thought was a good idea when you saw it at a fairgrounds and you bought it and the damn thing turned out to be of real stone, not styrofoam, like you thought, and now you’ve got this stone, heavy bastard of a thing in your living room, staring down at you while you sip a cup of tea in front of the TV and try to focus on whatever’s on.

But we were down in Monterey a weekend or two ago, sleeping overnight in the aquarium down there, and I figured, “hell, you know, why don’t I try reading Cannery Row, what harm could it do?”

So I started it. And wouldn’t you know it, like throwing out the gargoyle, it was a good idea. I really enjoyed this book. It was short, sweet, a beautiful picture of some misadventures and some great characters and scenes. And it’s all done in good humor. There’s no malicious undercurrent running through this group of miscreants it chronicles, nor is there any in the grocer who abides them. And there’s certainly none in the Doc or the girls from the whorehouse. It’s a picture of humanity that paints it in a very positive light, even when a guy heads off to get a replacement part for a broken down Model T Ford and winds up in prison or the gang meet a man all on his lonesome, take advantage of him in the politest way possible, even steal from him, sort of, leaving him with a destroyed home and surely no little anger at how he’s been misused.

And even when things get ugly, and they do, it’s not so ugly that the redeeming qualities of these people don’t shine through.

I picked this one up because it’s Joseph O’Connor, and he can do no wrong, nearly. I wouldn’t list this as one of his best books. It never hits the highs of “Inishowen” or “Star of the Sea” or “Redemption Falls,” but it’s good.

I found the story dragged a little bit, and while I get that it was the old woman, wandering across London, her memories of her time with Synge resurfacing, Joseph sparkled when telling of young Molly and her early sizzling affair with the playwright. And threatened to, when hinting at the strained relationship between Molly and her daughter, living up north, inaccessible to Molly of her own doing, it seems.

When I say ‘drag’ I mean more like the pull of the sea. The story surges forward, gently, though, and then lulls for a little bit as Molly lurches forward and hatches a plan to survive in London on what she has left. By the end I was knee deep in the sea, surrounded by it, and does Mr. O’Connor ever write well, immersing you in his characters’ lives.

So while it’s not my favorite Joseph O’Connor book, not by a long shot, it’s very worth your while spending a few afternoons or evenings with it, he’ll tell you a good story.

Tana French writes the kind of books people claim Ken Bruen has written. Only better. Frank Mackey is an excellent, scorching character, the dialogue sparkles, and the picture she paints is something you can easily get lost in for a few days or hours.

SPOILER (ISH): The only place I’ve ever seen better writing, from Bruen, is in the ending. It ended well enough, but it didn’t knock the breath out of me the way the ending of The Dramatist did. But this was a really, really great read.

I feel like George and I got off on the wrong foot. I’d been seeing his name everywhere lately and thus far hadn’t read a thing by him. So I figured I’d dip my toe in the George Saunders water. Was this the wrong story to start on? Is all of his stuff like this?

I’m genuinely curious. Again, like Big Man with a Shovel, I probably would have lapped this stuff up, were I still studying for my English degree… but I’m not. And the only lapping was frantic, trying to get to the end, just to put i down.

Again, more than willing to accept that I simply picked the wrong book to kick off my George Saunders relationship with and would love to hear opinions.