The Thrill of it All by Joseph O’Connor

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So this is the difference. For a Joseph O’Connor book, this wasn’t his best, but it was still so so good.
In Listowel this spring (2014 – http://wombatsdigit.com/w/2014/09/meeting-joseph-oconnor-and-anne-enright/) he talked at length about how he composes his books, how long it takes him to compose his books, how he speaks each sentence out loud to see if the cadence sounds right. *This* effort is what made the first… third of the book, where we get introduced to the players and their young selves and the author’s love of music of the seventies bearable. I would go so far as to say enjoyable, even, because of that level of care paid to the sentences that make up the book, though it does feel like a little indulgence on the part of O’Connor, pinwheeling down the lane. For example, the part that he read out at Listowel, in which a young Robbie Goulding comes home late and drunk and gets a bollocking by his dear old dad, was very musical and funny and finely tuned… except it was a little bit long.
When the band comes together and moves to London things get really moving along and it becomes vintage O’Connor and I just got swept along by the current, instead of appreciating the technical details but lamenting the slow pace of the story. The people, Robbie, Trez, Fran, and Seán become living and breathing three dimensional characters and the story coalesces around Robbie and the thrill he’s had of it all.

So if you’re up for a little slog in the beginning, maybe some beautiful sentences and paragraphs, you’ll pull through the other side into the kind of amazing stuff Joseph O’Connor regularly produces.

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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot by David Shafer

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I had a few people recommend this book to me, raving about it, but I’m not so sure I’d pass on the same way.

I liked that start well enough, Leila seemed to be written well and have an interesting story — a lady working for a nonprofit health organization struggling to get a foothold in Burma seemed ripe with possibilities. But when the reader is thrust into the fairly shallow and scattered straits of Leo’s head on a bike ride into his job at a day care I ran aground.
The first paragraph of Leo’s story, the first sentence, just slopped out, for me. “Turning his head to look at the Fremont Bridge sparkling in the sharp light of the November morning, Leo felt his chin rasp across the collars of his two woolen shirts and his canvas work coat.” I just think I’m not a big fan of third person subjective, especially when it seems like we get only one (fairly boring) dimension of a character.
When I emerged into the Mark Deveraux chapter I felt like I could breath again and the narrative jolted to life a little for me, the prose seemed to flow a little better, but I did worry that a third of the book would be spent with a character I just didn’t believe.

The conspiracy at the heart of the book coalesces, it doesn’t race, and that’s kind of enjoyable. But I just found myself getting frustrated by some clunky dialogue and lengthy descriptions and the fact that much of the story hinged on Leo just didn’t work for me.



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Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This book has a great title.
The cover also glowed, which was cool.
The plot seemed like an interesting one, all breakneck pace and secret societies and books. I had seen this book and its title for so long and thought, “Oh man, this is going to be right up my alley.”
But it wasn’t. It really wasn’t.
The narrator, a dopey web designer in his early thirties? Late twenties? I can’t remember, if it was mentioned at all. Anyway, he’s a smarmy, fairly thick character. He, himself, does little, and exists largely to spit out little bon mots with very little bon in the mot. I feel like his sarcasm is unearned — I never saw anything spectacular in this laid-off web designer to make his ironic descriptions of “the mustachioed master of the secret library”** seem like he’d earned the right.
The conversations he has with his girlfriend from Google (and her slavish, freakish dedication to making the Top 100* who decide Google’s future direction) are painfully dull and make out the geeks to be some sort of uber-cult, capable of finding the hidden structure, the hidden meaning to Life, itself. That the plot revolves around Google and Amazon and their magical devices and computing power unraveling this great mystery doesn’t help make it any more exciting. When the narrative devolves into a parallel of a Dungeons & Dragons session I very nearly put the book down and just gave up. But I kept hope that his great reveal at the end would make it all worth it… but, at the same time, felt that it was going to be really tough to re-lift the Hindenburg of a novel.
This is the second-ish book of this sort I’ve read (Austin Grossman’s awful “You” was another and Rolf Potts, the author of the travelogue “Marco Polo Didn’t Go There” is a similar sort of character) where I’ve just found the narrator insufferable. I’m trying to put my finger on it, but it’s slippery. They seem to be entitled, fatuous, but they think, and perhaps their authors think, that they’re actually quite clever. But you know what? I don’t want to figure it out any more, because I don’t want to waste any more time thinking or reading about these characters.

* Special Note: I’m getting a few facts wrong, here. They’re nearly right. I could have gone back and looked them up again, but I really can’t, the thought of re-entering this book frankly bores me and I don’t want to annoy myself again by slogging through it to find the facts.
** Oh God, see? I went back and looked up that passage, had it earmarked, and the book’s annoyed me all over again. Ugh.



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The Death of Bees by Lisa O’Donnell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a great little story about parents getting murdered (just plain dying? Suicide?) and their two resilient girls burying them in the back garden, which is, apparently, pretty representative of what happens in Glasgow all the time. And their next door neighbor, who sorts of takes the girls in under his wing. Oh, and he was convicted of pedophilia (paedophilia for them Scots) for soliciting an underage male prostitute in the park.
I really enjoyed the interwoven narrative from each of the main characters — Marnie, the eldest daughter and Nelly, her preternaturally bright and aloof ward by default, and Lennie, the next door neighbor living out the last days of his life. Each one of them have something to hide — from each other, from themselves, from the outside world — and the book is a kind of cozy mystery where certain things get revealed and lit from different angles pretty masterfully, I thought. Like swimming in a murky local pond, with all of its organic material making the waters difficult to see through, until you see the shaft of light ahead, lighting up that boat that sank when you tried to float it years ago.
The characters were a great bunch with whom you could spend a bit of time, sharing their secrets and getting swept along in the book.



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The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I loved this book.
I’ve always loved this book.
Each and every lifetime in which I’ve read it.
In fact, I loved it so much that the next time through I visited Claire North (pseudonym) in 2005 — it took me a while to find her pseudonymous self — and handed her a partial outline of an idea for a book about a kalachakra, a person who lives their lifetime over and over again.
She told me she’d already gotten an idea like that and called her patent lawyers.

So in my next life I tracked her down more quickly, came prepared with better notes. Saw her in 1990. Dropped off my scribbled notes in her school bag on a fine Scottish morning. The sensation of a five year old publishing a book which such a fun, imaginative plot and ripe characters made ripples that probably caused some odd things to happen downstream through the ages, but at least I got to read it earlier.

In my next life I tried giving the same notes to her father, but nothing came of it. He didn’t care for the visceral descriptions of the tortures Harry August endures, yet endures with a type of detachment. The next after that I tried it out on her mother in 1981, but that, too, had no effect. The very next life I tried publishing the book myself, which is when the publisher pulled me aside, in the grimy halls of the printing room.
“You can’t publish this book.”
“Why not?” I may have stuttered a little.
He peered at me over the top of his glasses, which never seemed to sit well, as if the cloud of ink in which he seemed to walk prevented his glasses from adhering to his face.
I flapped the manuscript.
“Claire wants you to know that she knows.”
“But… but she hasn’t even been born yet.”
The publisher simply looked at me, his hand held out for the manuscript.
“Aw.”
“Is this the only extant copy?” He waggled his fingers at the manuscript I could tell was already slipping out of my hand. “Don’t lie, now, she’ll know. You know she’ll know.”
I nodded, and handed over the pages and skulked off and just waited and waited and waited until 2014, when the book would finally be published.

Except I didn’t have to wait. Because I had one last copy because I’d spent the previous life memorizing the book and read it over again in my mind. In fact, I even wrote this review back in 1978, I just had to wait and wait for someone to come around and invent Goodreads.com.

I thought the plot was a lot of fun, the characters an excellent cast with whom you could spend a few lifetimes. There were beautiful moments when kalachakra meet each other in passing (Joseph Kirkbriar Shotbolt’s story is a good one — ‘”Oh God,” he groaned, seeing me read. “You’ve trained as a doctor, haven’t you? Can’t stand bloody doctors, especially when they’re five years old.”), the mysterious Cronus Club saving its members, and sometimes not. The book was a spy novel, a time travel novel, a story about a couple of friends. What a fantastic read.



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Nest by Esther Ehrlich

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I got an advance copy of this book through NetGalley. It was written by a fellow Vassar grad and I had just returned from the Cape with the kids, so maybe I was hoping to rekindle some of the magic.

I thought this was an excellent book — Ms. Ehrlich drew the various relationships that intertwined and grew and changed throughout the story very well. At the end of it all you felt like you’d been on quite the journey with these folks.
The narrator’s voice was strong, not too naive and the author did an excellent job of respecting the reader, be they an adult or the middle-grader (at whom the book is pitched). The only time and only quibble I had with the book was the incessant beating of the 1972 drum — for a brief span it distracted me, the constant references to bell bottoms, to “the episode of I Love Lucy where Lucy and Ethel work in a chocolate factory,” the lava lamps, and President Nixon. But that was the only flat note for me and maybe it’s more of an instructive history lesson for younger readers. Otherwise the setting, local color, emotional ups and downs and worries of a young kid were all so well done.
There was one scene in the book where Rachel, the older daughter, sees her mom, who’s been suffering from the serious disease mentioned in the book description, after some time and the daughter’s “voice is slow and shaky, like she’s afraid she has the wrong answer to a math problem.” I thought that was a wonderful way of couching an emotional reaction in the younger sister’s language of stress and worry.
Now, it’s been a while since I’ve read “A Bridge to Terabithia,” one of my favorite books as a kid, but I did find myself thinking about that book, wanting to go back and see if it was just as poignant and powerful as I remember it being, while I read this one. I’ll have to let you know how that comparison goes if I do go back to it, but this story stands well on its own right.



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Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this story, the characters, the voice of Sandman Slim, and the action, for the most part.
I’m not normally a hardcore fantasy person: I don’t go for the straight up magical, I generally need it cut with a little realism. But I’d heard good things about this series and Richard Kadrey’s writing, so I figured I’d give it a shot. The book starts out with very little magical stuff — besides the guy returning from Hell. Slim navigates Los Angeles some fifteen or so years after he’s left and he’s back to hunt down some of his old gang who let him down. In fact, I forgot that the book was supposed to be more in the fantasy genre until the prospect of a magic circle popped up. When it did, and other magical things were referenced, almost ad nauseum, I did get jarred out of the story for a little bit, my suspension of disbelief rattled a bit. But I stuck with it, the magical stuff sunk to the background again and Kadrey’s story telling took over again.
I think I might come back to the series for those flashes of humor, the hard-nosed voice of a man who’s been, literally, to Hell and back, and Kadrey’s dark vision, and just be ready to skim when the fantastic — the type of fantastic elements that make it too easy or just a little too ludicrously difficult for our hero — rears its eight-eyed, fire-breathing, lizard pelted head again.



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The Last Girlfriend on Earth: And Other Love Stories by Simon Rich

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Damn, Simon Rich has written some fun stories.
A few of these, the best, I’d say, I’d heard on the Selected Shorts podcast, read aloud at Symphony Space in New York. My favorite in the bunch is “Unprotected,” the story of a condom, told from the point of view of the condom. “Center of the Universe,” about God’s relationship during the course of Creation is another sparkling story.
There weren’t too many dead notes in the bunch (I didn’t like “Occupy Jen Street” when it was read on Selected Shorts, either, “Children of the Dirt” is a little dull), and most of the stories sing out. Some weren’t quite dead, they were just less entertaining, a little more empty (“Setup,” the story of being set up with a troll was a funny premise but fell a little flat for me, “Victory” was cute but, again, just left me feeling a little hollow, like I’d eaten cotton candy or something).
If you get a chance, go listen to them on the podcast, and grab yourself a copy of the book for other little gems like “When Alex Trebec’s Ex-Wife Appeared ohm Jeopardy” and “NASA Proposal.”



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Twentieth Century Man by Michael Joyce

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book reminded me of Joseph O’Connor’s “Ghost Light.”
You’re faced with an unreliable narrator in both, someone who’s been marginalized by society by their age and sheer bloody-mindedness of continuing to exist, possibly long after they have.
Joyce forces this shriveled old professor, Cy, with all his warts and naked gooseflesh onto center stage, which is a very uncomfortable place for him to be as he attempts to reconcile just what it was he saw in the woods: was it the dead body of his assistant’s lover? Or was he hallucinating, an old man driven mad by his sometimes cruel aide?
Moreso than Ghost Light you — and the book points out at the second person perspective, which I’m normally not a big fan of, but it works, in this case — are dropped in the same muddle as the narrator. This makes the book a bit thicker read than Mr. O’Connor’s, it’s a little tougher to get into, but the effort is well worth it.
The bit players in the drama round out the book. The caretaker of the cabin in which the narrator takes refuge, the local policeman who stops by to check on things and rough it up with the caretaker, Cy’s daughter, the sadistic assistant Cy is saddled with for his language work at the university, the dead/not-dead boyfriend, the shade of Cy’s departed wife, who sailed off into the sunrise some time ago and continues to haunt his days.
It’s a beautiful book about aging, loss, with a slow simmering mystery on the back burner the whole time. It’s not quite the fact-paced thriller whodunit, it’s more of a thoughtful examination of a life. Worth the read.



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