ironSoap – Complete

author: Donald Hall
name: Paul
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at: 2012/05/07
date added: 2012/05/08
shelves: memoir, non-fiction
review:
Let’s assume you were wondering if there was ever a market for blogging before the semi-coherent daily ramble became a legitimate form of communication ten or twelve years ago. To confirm this, you need look no further than Donald Hall‘s Life Work, a semi-topical serialized set of quasi-daily ruminations on the subject of work, self, life, death, family, history and the intersections of all the above. Written in the very early nineties, this book is a blog, regardless of whatever memoir title might be attached to it. The short essay formatting, the tangental discussions on a broad central theme; the only things missing are ironic hyperlinks and the occasional “sorry I haven’t posted in a while, I’ll be better soon, I promise!” entires.

I was assigned Life Work as a part of an English course I took during one of my failed attempts at college. This would be back in like 1996, when the web was just starting to be ubiquitous and when the notion of an online life was still mostly science fiction. In that time, which sounds quaint to describe and depresses me greatly to think of a time less than twenty years ago as such, the notion of a person spending an hour or more a day on actual post mail as opposed to email or Twitter or whatever was still current enough to not seem strange. Reading the book now, it kind of boggles my mind to know that something so central to communication when I was not even just a small child but a teenager, a near-adult, has all but been antiquated. Hall describes his work, his idealized day involving the anticipation of a day spent working on poems and essays and letters and books, then relaxing with his wife and attending to various chores come evening. He describes the workdays of his parents, his grandparents and great-grandparents. He talks about work in a general sense, he talks about it in great detail.

You can tell that Hall is a poet; his prose and essay stylings are peppered with dips into lyrical rhapsodies. He’s also kind of hard to like sometimes: he is stuffy and pretentious one moment and then grounded and rootsy the next. I kind of liked that he manages to convey the complexity of a real person by preserving the daily shift in tone and mood, in refusing the temptation to not edit down or smooth over these transitory notes. Still, there are a lot of points where Hall’s topic of work, as presented in this proto-blog format, become a kind of slushy non-thesis, weighed down by specifics that I don’t think anyone asked for.

Partway through the book, Hall deals with a health crisis, which puts a new spin on the topic (and a welcome one, though saying so sounds absolutely terrible I know), propelling the end of the book through with a renewed urgency that adds a nice edge to the languid tone of the first half. I did like that Hall kind of sold me (as if I needed selling) on the quiet life of the comfortable country writer; his depictions of an unhurried New England life ignited both my aspirational drive as well as some wanderlust to explore the semi-rural areas of Vermont and New Hampshire he creates in mental landscapes. Perhaps these places don’t or never did exist, but I’d like to go and see for myself.

And maybe, then, this is the final success of the book. In a collection of meandering essays about living and working, Hall has made me interested in doing both, doing more with each, and finding a happier junction where the two—inevitably, as Hall believes—meet.

from Paul’s bookshelf: read — May 08, 2012 at 08:23AM

author: Lemony Snicket
name: Paul
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1999
rating: 3
read at: 2012/05/04
date added: 2012/05/06
shelves: childrens, humor, novel
review:
Occasionally my forays into young adult or children’s books turn up gems like The Island Of The Blue Dolphin, which transcend their target audience and manage universal appeal. Then there are those like Lemony Snicket‘s Series Of Unfortunate Events which are clearly, perhaps almost painfully, for kids. This isn’t, I suppose, as harsh of an indictment of The Bad Beginning as it sounds, since it’s only doing what it was designed to do. But the frequent vocabulary lessons—in this case meaning in-prose definitions of words that may not be familiar to young readers—can be pretty distracting for an older audience.

Additionally, this is a wisp of a book in which not terribly much happens: The Baudelaire children—Violent, Klaus and baby Sunny—lose their parents in a fire, are put under the care of their evil uncle, Count Olaf, and try to thwart a plot by Olaf to steal their inheritance. There are a couple of other minor characters here and there, but that’s basically the gist of it. Granted, there are twelve other volumes to the series so between them all I suspect there may be a small handful of more complete novels, but The Bad Beginning seems particularly glib, almost unfinished.

I will say that Snicket surprised me with the resolution of the central conflict and the characters of the children are all likable and egaging. Plus the gentle dark humor strikes a tone that my ten year-old self would have really enjoyed so overall I can say that it was enough to make me think that at some point I might like to finish the whole series. However, they strike me as the kind of books that one might find in a family bookcase while housesitting for some friends or borrowing a cabin and read through in a sitting on a slow weekend afternoon. They don’t feel like something I want to dedicate a lot of time to tracking down and acquiring.

from Paul’s bookshelf: read — May 06, 2012 at 05:08AM

author: Margaret Atwood
name: Paul
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2012/05/03
date added: 2012/05/04
shelves: novel, science-fiction
review:
The stylistic decision making process in literary fiction interests me. This is probably due to my aspirations of writing, but I think even without that I would find it intriguing to note what the selection process is among those who write as a means to not just convey happening. Literary writers seem to want to convey poetry, rhythm, implication, dynamism and other less tangible elements than might be strictly necessary for storytelling.

I can see why it is done, certainly. I think to one degree or another all writers are trying to use language to convey more than just the meanings of the words, but the line that separates exposition from aesthetic depends on what the writer is choosing to focus on. What pushing off of mere conveyance of ideas toward something more ethereal facilitates, though, is obviously to elevate what might otherwise be a simplistic narrative. For instance, Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale: the story within of a dystopian, feminist’s nightmare world where literal biblical interpretations have segmented a society into female objects and male people, is familiar enough in set up. Comparisons to Aldous Huxley‘s Brave New World or George Orwell‘s 1984 are ready and appropriate.

But what Ms. Atwood performs is a feat of linguistic inflation, using her stilted, meandering prose to create more than just a satirical rebuff of modern society. She manages to define a multilayered dissection of gender roles, sexual politics, the passivity of modern first-world disconnection, the role of dissent in structuring societies, moralism (and its associated relativity) and the character archetype of the reluctant survivor.

The Handmaid’s Tale unfolds like a mystery, casting the reader as the detective trying to wade through a frustratingly obtuse narrator’s account of events that are not necessarily unreliable but disjointed and incomplete, especially through the first third of the book. What carries the novel in this early portion is the staccato, thoughts-to-page style of the writing and the curated curiosity that demands at first an answer to “what is going on here?” but rapidly shifts into the far more pertinent, “how did it get this way?” Eventually Atwood does begin to peel back the layers and the protagonist, Offred, recalls the key moments in the societal collapse (it’s worth noting that Atwood or perhaps just her narrator seem to frame the establishment of the fictional setting Gilead as a construction, a building process, when as a reader we can see it as plainly destructive).

Early on what is most fascinating is to see Atwood carefully constructing her sentences in fragments, tangents, callous declarations, cagey deviations and avoiding some core mechanical crutches like quotation marks or leaning heavily on others like metaphor and simile. Later, the plot thickens and the style fades to the background, which is both where the book starts to be a bit more enjoyable but also where it loses a bit of its luster. Some of the contrivances to explain the establishment of Gilead are suspicious or perhaps just overly convenient, and the mounting tension as Offred worms her way into a state of agitation seems incongruous with the amount of time that she indicates she has been laboring under the new regime.

All of which builds with mounting momentum to the brilliant/baffling conclusion. It’s not a spoiler to say that this is perhaps the first novel I’ve ever read that had a non-ending the way a short story might. In fact, I was reminded of several of the Raymond Carver shorts from a book I read last year, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in the way the narrative ceases without any sort of closure whatsoever. In a way, I like this, and the epilogue, which is out of character and distinct from the rest of the book, worked well enough to me to re-contextualize the whole story and make it seem somehow historical. To the writer in me—the guy who watched Atwood pepper the first two dozen pages with semicolons and intentional sentence fragments with sly approval—this was pretty great. To the reader in me—the guy who just wants a good story—it was really frustrating, as if I’d read a 300+ page psych-out or had tried to read the second book in a trilogy all by itself.

But still, The Handmaid’s Tale has lingered with me, and I suspect it will for a long time. It wasn’t a particularly joyful book (then again, when are dystopian satires fun?) so it’s not something I can say I’d be dying to read again, but it is the kind of book that really makes you think, the kind that you want to find others who have read it so you can discuss your perceptions of certain things. It is the kind of book that I find occasionally makes me wish I still had a legitimate excuse to go back to college and take a bunch of contemporary literature courses. For a guy who can only stomach the occasional bout with picking through the weird styles of literary fiction authors and whose study habits are legendarily poor, that’s much higher praise than it may seem on the surface.

from Paul’s bookshelf: read — May 04, 2012 at 08:00AM

author: Brandon Sanderson
name: Paul
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2012/04/25
date added: 2012/04/25
shelves: fantasy, novel
review:
When I first finished Mistborn, I thought that I would rush straight into the second book in Brandon Sanderson‘s series. I even went pretty far out of my way to secure a copy of The Well of Ascension. But then, I hesitated. I read a couple of other books instead. At first I wasn’t even sure why I seemed reluctant to dive in, but upon further reflection I realized that the problem was that I had loved Mistborn so very much that I was afraid a sequel might not live up to the expectations set by the first.

There is precedence for this, in fact. I read and loved Anne Rice‘s The Witching Hour years ago, then started book two, Lasher, only to literally throw the book across the room within the first few chapters, disgusted by what unfolded there. I never finished it and my opinion of the first was sullied. I don’t even remember now what I liked about the first Mayfair Witches volume. Stephen King nearly lost me as well in the opening pages of The Drawing of the Three which followed the remarkable The Gunslinger with a seemingly devastating character event. I stuck with King through a couple more books, but the extended break I had to give myself before I could face Roland again put distance between me and the series, one I’ve never been able to recover.

I was afraid, in fact, that Mistborn, despite being an imperfect novel (no one is likely to mistake Sanderson for a literary genius), was so fun and so exciting and so right up my alley with even a completely satisfying conclusion that made the book wholly standalone, a sequel had the chance to undo that. I subconsciously wanted to give myself some time to just bask in the giddiness of having read a really good book. However, after a couple of weeks, I had to finally admit I had no choice. Knowing there were more adventures out there to be experienced with Vin and Sazed and Breeze and the crew, I needed to know what else Sanderson could come up with.

I’ll say this right off the bat: The Well of Ascension is not as good as Mistborn. In a way, I’m not sure it could be. Mistborn is a novel of discovery, of revealing, while The Well of Ascension is a novel where much of that exploration has already occurred. By this point we’re familiar with Allomancy, we understand what Mistings and Mistborn can do, we know some of the nature of Obligators and Steel Inquisitors, and the Final Empire is a place we’ve been before. So instead, The Well of Ascension has to be about happenings, about events that take place within that framework set up so well by the first novel.

And in part, that’s the core flaw in Well, because the events that Sanderson chooses for this book are grand in scope and impact but limited in intrigue. The book chronicles the aftermath of Mistborn, where the survivors are now tasked with keeping the central setting of Luthadel secure now that everything has changed. Doing so is not going to be easy, of course. The power vacuum has made Luthadel and its fledgling government a target, and one by one three distinct armies lay siege to the city. The new government struggles to determine how to deal with the impending invasion(s) while working through the growing pains of any new leadership. Meanwhile, a more ominous and less tangible threat begins to take form, and the walls start to close in on the cast of still-wonderful characters.

Part of what I loved about Mistborn is that it was so gripping: full of tension, unpredictable and full of a kinetic energy that kept the pages always turning. The Well of Ascension is successful in its way because it maintains the tense atmosphere (I’m inclined to say it is even more taut, with the stakes raising from grim to hopeless to utterly bleak by about the halfway point) and remains just as unexpected as the first. Where it falls short of Mistborn is that, without that sense of newness that made the first volume so exciting, Well grinds down at times, especially in the first third, to something that isn’t ever close to boring, but is—to butcher a phrase—put-downable.

This is something that eventually goes away, and the final quarter of the book is ridiculous almost in how breakneck fast it moves. I mean, you know it’s got a no-brakes ending when the “epic journey foretold in legend” doesn’t even begin until there are less than 150 pages left in a 700+ page novel. The early parts of the book have their moments of triumph, but one does have to acknowledge that by comparison the book can feel very weighted in terms of significant events toward the back. This was true in Mistborn as well, but it felt less like a flaw because the slow burn to that point was full of so much wonder. Here, that wonder is replaced by some compelling character arcs, including several fascinating new additions (and subtractions) to the core cast, but developing characters just isn’t quite as much fun in a fantasy setting as developing the world, so the odds were kind of stacked against this book. I think, perhaps, this is what I feared all along during those weeks where I saw the book sitting on my shelf, but I was reluctant to open it.

But, I can admit when I’m wrong. Despite The Well of Ascension being not quite as amazing as its predecessor, it’s inferior only by comparison to a book I adored. Which is to say, taken by its own merits, Well is a triumph in its own rights. The most impressive part about it, perhaps, is that it manages to be satisfying in spite of being an Act Two book. It’s obvious by the end that we’re going to need at least one more sequel to finish the tale (I happen to know now that there is a fourth book as well) Mistborn began, but where other series or trilogies might simply drop a cliffhanger on the reader, content to know that two books in most readers will be committed to at least a third, but The Well of Ascension actually has a real ending. It’s not The End, true, but it doesn’t leave you feeling like you’re dangling, rather it neatly ties up the central conflicts it presented and then paves the way for the much greater conflict to come. Lots of people could learn from Sanderson about how to finish series books.

My final recommendation is that, if you read Mistborn, don’t hesitate to start The Well of Ascension. It’s a bigger book, in scale and size, and it’s not quite as taut as a result, but you’ll welcome the chance to catch up with these characters and a new excuse to revisit this world.

from Paul’s bookshelf: read — April 25, 2012 at 09:00AM

author: Kevin Smith
name: Paul
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2012
rating: 2
read at: 2012/04/16
date added: 2012/04/16
shelves: memoir, humor, non-fiction, new-in-2012
review:
Talk about unusual: I just finished Kevin Smith‘s sort of memoir-meets-motivational-self-help-vanity-project in one sitting. This is unusual primarily because having the time to read nearly 250 pages in an evening almost never happens, but it’s also unusual because you might expect that I’d only devour a book this way if it was amazing.

Well, Tough Sh*t isn’t amazing. It’s kind of repetitive, honestly: Smith has an analogy about Wayne Gretzky that he references a half dozen times; he talks a lot about how amazing his wife is; he frequently describes his up-and-down relationship with Harvey Weinstein. Sometimes it feels like the individual chapters were written separately and he’s refreshing readers who are perhaps not privy to earlier discussions about his pet concepts or jokes, but then he’ll do it within pages of each other as well so maybe he just doesn’t have a great editor?

The book is funny, but not in the way that generates actual real-world laughter. It’s sort of effective as a motivational tome, except that he branches off into über-digression an awful lot so the point gets muddled and spread around. There’s some interesting anecdotes, but it’s not riveting.

What Tough Sh*t does do well is capture a tone that set me at ease, coming across like listening to a friend sit in your living room and tell stories. Smith is sort of a strange person to write something akin to self-help because his success seems a bit accidental and he spends so much of the book kind of justifying his work that one gets the impression that even he isn’t quite sure how it all works out for him. He’s smart but he seems to suffer from the same affliction as a lot of people who had just the right mix of serendipity and skill: He assumes that the same lighting can strike for everyone.

Granted, Smith is bright enough to know that’s not the case so he tempers the message a lot and comes up with the core concept that action is king. It’s a bit Nike in its core motivational strategy: Just do it. Of course, it’s easy to say that when the one time he Just Did It without any kind of fallback or failsafe he ended up with the indie hit Clerks. Not everyone is going to do that, so he mumbles something about how success doesn’t matter and skims over the fact that he writes about spending money with the casual nonchalance only someone with plenty of it can afford. I’m not saying its disingenuous, but the book wears enough of its author’s bais and “if I can do it, obviously anyone can” over-simplicity on its sleeve to not ever be in contention for a legitimate life manual.

Which is not to say there isn’t some valuable insight here. The opening chapter, a crassly told case study in how, from a biological perspective, every living human is the result of astronomic odds, is strangely effective in giving perspective on the moral imperative Smith seems to ascribe dream-chasing. He also makes a semi-convincing case for art as a legitimate pursuit and offers some reasonable-sounding practical advice for tempering expectations when pursuing lofty ambition. The biggest thing the book made me reconsider was criticism, which is a bit of a funny thing to say in a critique of his book.

Smith decries criticism, then blasts critics for getting understandably haughty when he stabs at their means of expression, but there’s circular logic going on somewhere (I suspect both sides have valid points). Obviously Smith himself isn’t exempt from criticism: He spends a lengthy chapter describing his run-in on Southwest airlines over his weight and seat accommodations which amounts to a very pointed criticism of that company. He is also unshy about criticizing actors, other movies and business execs in Hollywood, so the sword kind of cuts both ways. But he did make me think about what I do when I review books and movies online. Granted, I don’t get paid to do it and I’m no authority nor do I even have much of a voice, but it does pay to be reminded sometimes that I am publishing my thoughts and opinions online where anyone, including the creative forces behind those works, can see them. Potentially, me saying negative things could be hurtful and it’s worth remembering that while I have every right and justified intention to describe what I personally thought of something or what it made me think about, it’s not really worthwhile or even accurate for me to judge the artistic value of someone else’s work.

That doesn’t mean I should just avoid writing with an empirical tone, only that it’s worth it to remind myself as I discuss what other people are doing by way of self-expression, perhaps some day I may be the target of people like myself who are dissecting what I’m expressing. I would expect those people to be honest about what they think or felt about something creative I did, but much as I wouldn’t want them declaring whether my work is worthy or not, it’s not my place to do so either.

In that spirit, my opinion of Tough Sh*t is that it was half-successful at doing what I suspect it was trying to do. It did make me think some, it was easy to read but ultimately it was probably more for people who are much bigger fans of Mr. Smith than I am. I’m certainly not sorry I read it, but I probably won’t go searching for more.

from Paul’s bookshelf: read — April 16, 2012 at 12:39AM

author: Randall Sullivan
name: Paul
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2002
rating: 3
read at: 2012/04/10
date added: 2012/04/11
shelves: conspiracy, non-fiction, true-crime
review:
A couple of months ago my wife and I got sucked into some television show about 90s gangster rap and the glib details in that program prompted a discussion about the shooting deaths of Christopher Wallace (Notorious B.I.G./Biggie Smalls) and Tupac Shakur. I got kind of interested in the story because of course I had heard about it and I remember the news coming out at the time, and I’d heard the grumblings and rumblings since that there was something fishy about the way the murders had never been solved. That interest prompted me to watch the Nick Bloomfield documentary “Biggie & Tupac” (which was okay but not great) and check out Randall Sullivan‘s book LAbyrinth from the local library.

Like the documentary, Sullivan’s book is okay, but not great. The story underneath this is interesting, but watching the two you get the distinct sense that all the conspiracy theorizing smoke is coming from a single source, an ex-LAPD detective named Russell Poole. Poole worked on the Wallace murder case and was part of the task force investigating internal corruption that would eventually be known as the Rampart Task Force. Sullivan goes as far out of his way as possible to make Poole look like a supercop and something of an idealized example of the perfect police officer, which makes sense when you realize that his book hinges on the credibility of this one principal source.

Documentarian Bloomfield cites and interviews Poole in his film as well, which further reinforces the notion that a lot of the “this came from the top” language and veiled (or not-so-veiled) cries of “cover up” originates in a single man’s mind and is propagated by those who either believe or are predisposed to believe his tale. Which is not to say Poole is incredible, only that it would be nice if the characterization Poole gives that there were others in his department who agreed that something odd was going on during the investigations would step forward and either state definitively that they believe in Poole’s evaluation or that they dismiss him out of hand.

The nutshell version of the yarn is that Shakur and Wallace were killed as part of an elaborate plot by CEO of Death Row Records, Marion “Suge” Knight, to get rid of Shakur who was preparing to leave the label, and solidify the cover story that Shakur was killed as a result of the surging East Coast/West Coast tensions in the rap world, notably between Death Row and Sean “Puffy” Combs’s Bad Boy Entertainment label (of which Biggie was a part). By this explanation, then, Wallace’s death was more of an opportunity to prove, after the fact, that Shakur’s death was related to the rivalry. The explanation doesn’t make a lot of sense; if Suge Knight wanted to blame Shakur’s death on Bad Boy Entertainment, it might have been more logical to kill Wallace first and have Shakur die as the retaliation. Of course, the case could be made that such a reversal might have cast more suspicion on Death Row for instigating/escalating the tensions as opposed to casting them as simply wanting revenge for their downed star. In any case the story only makes sufficient sense when Sullivan characterizes the attack on Wallace’s convoy that left him dead as being most likely intended to eliminate Bad Boy CEO Combs, but his car had run through a yellow light, leaving Wallace’s car as the de facto convoy lead, suggesting the bullets weren’t meant for him at all.

Sullivan paints a portrait of Suge Knight as a gangster in the sense of Al Capone, perhaps even worse. Sullivan gleeful recounts hearsay of every mythical or urban legend style tale of brutality, intimidation and shady deal perpetrated by Knight and explains away the brazenness by saying that he was protected by a group of cronies who were dual employed by both Death Row and the LAPD. These gangster cops seem to float through Sullivan’s narrative like phantoms, showing up when it seems convenient and drifting away whenever legitimate law enforcement personnel try to make solid connections between the label and the department. Of course, they have help from a corrupt Deputy Chief (and later Chief), Bernard Parks (among others), who pushed back on any avenue of inquiry that may have revealed links between the record label and the police.

However, Sullivan somehow manages to both connect and decouple the insinuations at the same time by contextualizing the whole attitude of the department (and perhaps the city at large) in the framework of the heavy racial tensions of the time. This is, remember, the era of Rodney King and the riots in 1992, OJ Simpson and the racially-charged “Trial of the Century,” not to mention the event that Sullivan opens the book with, the shooting of African-American Kevin Gaines by white cop Frank Lyga (Gaines, it turned out, was also a cop who may have had ties to Death Row). The problem with explaining why the department wouldn’t deal with the possibility that black cops might be working with Death Row is because it fully explains why the department would be reluctant to investigate black cops, period. Sullivan (and Poole) try to characterize the feet dragging by the top brass as indications that Suge Knight had more than just a few dirty cops on his payroll but had the direct or implicit backing at the highest levels, but I think that’s just sensationalist wishful thinking. It doesn’t necessarily excuse the LAPD from making matters worse by not dealing with dirty cops, but it isn’t quite as book-selling as saying “Parks helped cover up hundreds of crimes on Death Row’s behalf!”

In a lot of ways that summarizes my complaints with LAbyrinth. Sullivan comes across like Oliver Stone in JFK, making every possible connection he can and tying it all into a central—and intentionally vague—thesis of “There Is A Conspiracy!” Some of the items stick, I’m sure, but for all of Sullivan’s shots leveled at the LA media (principally The Los Angeles Times) for being predisposed to dismissing a conspiracy angle, he’s no better, just working from the flip side of that coin. Sullivan also comes across as a strangely prejudicial narrator, injecting his personal politics not overtly but at that just-beneath-the-surface level of a slightly off Vietnam veteran talking about the war. There may not be any actual racial slurs tossed or anything you can pinpoint as being obviously racist, but the tone and phrasing leaves no doubt what the opinion really is. It’s evidenced even in the way Sullivan throws in disgusted asides about how white cops can’t follow the evidence if it looks like it might lead to anyone black being accused of a heinous crime. The subtext of reverse racism is obvious and highly distasteful coming from the author of the book. If these kinds of accusations are pertinent to the material, a truly neutral journalist would let them come in quotations from sources.

I’m really rather torn about this book. On one hand, it’s a fascinating look at a set of cases that will probably always be linked together, it’s a wonderful conspiracy tale and an incredibly interesting, if frightening, look at a particular time in Los Angeles’ history. On the other hand, the book is clumsily written and lacks a lot of journalistic integrity which makes it feel salacious. I suppose that may just come with the territory for conspiracy books (another example is Jim Marrs‘s Crossfire about the JFK assassination, which has the same grudging appeal to a reader like me), but one wishes there were somehow a more studious examination of the subjects out there.

from Paul’s bookshelf: read — April 11, 2012 at 09:11AM

author: Janet Evanovich
name: Paul
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1991
rating: 3
read at: 2012/04/05
date added: 2012/04/06
shelves: humor, mystery, novel
review:
I guess the benefit of having your heroine be a bounty hunter and not a private detective or an amateur sleuth is that the traditional whodunnit mystery format doesn’t necessarily have to apply. After two of Janet Evanovich‘s numbered Stephanie Plum novels, it’s pretty clear the star of the show isn’t the corpse du jour and the method by which the perpetrator is discovered, the star is Plum herself and the revolving cast of colorful, over-the-top supporting characters.

The plot here isn’t even really that interesting: A cousin of Plum’s antagonistic sort of half-crush, vice cop Joe Morelli, skipped bail on an assault charge for shooting a friend in the knee. After Plum misses a chance at an apprehension, the friend ends up dead and the chase is on. What is interesting is Plum’s falling-with-style approach to her job, where she ineptly channels her uncommon luck/unluck into a sort of passable career. That, and Evanovich’s knack for writing memorable characters.

One For The Money was pretty good, but this one showcases where Evanovich is going with the character and the stories, which is into a breezy, funny, quick read territory. The plot of the first novel was better than this one, but the humor and characterization are superior in this follow up which means they’re about a wash in comparison. I’m tempted to boost the final rating of this one just because of the laugh-out-loud ludicrousness of Grandma Mazur, who steals the show in this book. I’ll refrain though because Grandma is the kind of Fonzi/Urkel-esque character who can easily crowd the spotlight, so I hope Evanovich doesn’t feature her to this degree in every subsequent book. Still, she may be the un-quantifiably best elderly character I’ve yet encountered in fiction.

These books are empty literary calories, and there’s nothing wrong with a little mindless fun. I’m certainly putting Three To Get Deadly on my to-read list and I’m not even feeling guilty about it. I do hope as the series goes on the plotting gets a bit stronger while the zany tone and witty dialogue stay consistent, but even at the current quality level, I’m game for a half dozen or so, no problem.

from Paul’s bookshelf: read — April 06, 2012 at 04:42AM

author: Gary Paulsen
name: Paul
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1987
rating: 1
read at: 2012/04/02
date added: 2012/04/03
shelves: childrens, novel
review:
It is my opinion that if you, as a writer, are going to take on well-tread territory such as, let’s just say, a lone survivor tale, you had better bring something new or at least interesting to the table. Take a book I read recently, The Island Of The Blue Dolphins. In that book, Scott O’Dell made his protagonist a native of the island she was stranded on, which meant that the survival element was more about loneliness, the societal compartmentalization from her gender and mental survival than about her ability to figure out how to make fire.

I guess the “twist” on Hatchet is that the survivor is a pampered, modern, TV-watching 13 year-old, but to me that was hardly enough to make this story feel unique. The other possible hook that Gary Paulsen might have had to work with was The Secret, which is the overdramatic flourish given to the fact that the hero here, Brian Robeson, knows more about why his parents were recently divorced than half his family. There might have been some dramatic, psychological territory to mine here or perhaps even a tie-in with the life-or-death struggle he’s thrust into, but Paulsen wastes it and then cheapens it by not even resolving the issue in the Epilogue.

If it isn’t really clear already, I kind of hated this book. The prose is stilted and repetitive, and while it starts of interestingly enough, the triumphs of Brian’s struggle to survive are constantly undercut by the fact that this feels incredibly familiar and the fact that, in terms of places you might find yourself having to survive on your wits alone, the Canadian wilderness in summertime is hardly the worst. He has plenty of food sources, clean water, finds an ideal shelter and he has a very useful tool in the titular hatchet. I guess it has to be somewhat believable that a 13 year-old might survive in this environment, but the problem is that believability quickly becomes a serious issue for Hatchet.

Let’s ignore for a moment the fact that Paulsen has to over-explain the presence of the hatchet in the first place. Near the climax of the book, there are two events that happen in short order that strain credibility to the point where I practically stopped reading. If I hadn’t been 170+ pages into a 200 page book, I probably would have. The author’s insistence on having Brian’s running commentary be variations on the refrain, this is insane doesn’t make up for the fact that in this case “insane” is code for “improbable and suspension of disbelief breaking.”

And after earning the dubious honor to be the first book since Michael Chricton‘s The Lost World to make me say, “Yeah, right!” out loud, Hatchet then races to a terrible climax and finale that are unsatisfying, before hand-waving the whole thing away in the rage-inducing Epilogue.

Here’s the thing about young adult fiction or children’s literature: I enjoy it, even today in my mid-thirties, and I don’t make excuses about it. Good stories are good stories, that’s how I look at it. But good writing and good storytelling should be the common thread among “adult” and young reader books, and if I’m going to accept fiction aimed at a younger audience for its successes I have to hold it accountable for its failures on those same terms. And any way I look at it, I can’t see anything in Hatchet worth recommending it, unless I start to use the qualifier, “…for a children’s book.” If you want a children’s book about survival with actual emotion and themes beyond “you’re more capable than you think,” try The Cay. As for Hatchet, give it a pass.

from Paul’s bookshelf: read — April 03, 2012 at 11:42AM

author: Brandon Sanderson
name: Paul
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2012/03/30
date added: 2012/03/30
shelves: fantasy, novel
review:
I’ve been listening to the Writing Excuses podcast for close to a year now, hearing Brandon Sanderson talk about his writing process and taking advice from him. What I haven’t done is read anything he’s written. I suppose Sanderson is most well known for being the writer tapped to take over the Wheel of Time series after Robert Jordan passed away. I tried WoT and it nearly broke me—after five and a half books—of ever wanting to read epic fantasy again. (Well, that and the initially good but increasingly awful Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind)

But last year I picked up A Game of Thrones and good ol’ George R. R. Martin restored my faith in fantasy a bit, enough for me to suck in my gut and give Mistborn (and Mr. Sanderson) a try.

Boy, am I ever glad that I did.

It’s going to be hard to talk about this book without gushing like a The Hunger Games fangirl, because I loved it so very much. The set up, while perhaps a bit overstated in the book jacket copy and some synopses I found online, is pretty refreshing in itself: A thousand years ago a hero of prophecy went on a quest to drive a dark force from the land. But instead of heralding an age of freedom and hope, that hero became a tyrannical oppressor, immortally ruling with an iron fist, segregating the populace into pampered nobility and downtrodden, broken peasant class.

In a way, then, this book isn’t your typical epic fantasy. There isn’t a lengthy, continent-spanning voyage. There are no prophecies to fulfill. There is no mysterious, plot-busting macguffin. That stuff has already happened by the time the book begins. Instead, this is more of a heist novel, full of political intrigue, elaborate schemes, subterfuge and grifts on top of grifts. But the setting is shifted to this semi-familiar fantasy realm and instead of your usual “it does whatever the author wants” magic to provide convenient escapes as needed, Sanderson has created Allomancy, a ridiculously well-crafted system of metallurgic-oriented superhumanity that, in practice, facilitates a very Matrix-like vibe to the action, of which there is plenty.

The struggle of the principal cast to execute their plan to overthrow the evil Lord Ruler combined with this clever magical construct might, perhaps, have been enough to create a gripping tale by themselves. But Sanderson isn’t content with that. He also creates a rich and detailed world, revealed only in part through the central location of Luthadel, and then populates it with at least a dozen memorable characters, plus plenty of compelling backstory for each. I absolutely love it when it seems like authors dumped every good idea they ever had into a single work and it brims over with fresh concepts, new twists on old ideas and fun little details.

On top of this, Sanderson writes with an assured voice, capturing the distinct personalities of his two main characters (the lovable, mistrusting protagonist, Vin, and the master to Vin’s apprentice, the flawed but inspiring Kelsier) in their respective point of view chapters. Even more impressive is that he is able to inject life and vitality into secondary characters, both with and without direct POVs, such as Sazed, Vin’s wise and surprisingly capable steward, and Elend, Vin’s nobleborn object of affection. Most impressively in the writing is Sanderson’s ability to block out and describe action sequences in a clear, exhilarating fashion. Many writers struggle to get the pacing and detail just right to convey combat (especially supernatural combat) in a way that doesn’t leave the reader confused and Sanderson comes as close as you could ask to creating a high-octane special effects sequence from a movie in your head. It’s really a treat to read, especially since he applies this same cinematic flourish to every corner of the book, from stuffy noble balls with their political subterfuge to training sessions to exposition about the history of the empire.

There are maybe a few extremely minor quibbles (Sanderson seems overly fond of the word “maladroit,” for example) but they don’t matter. The only thing better than reading this book is knowing that there are two sequels waiting for me. I adored this book and I’d recommend it to anyone who likes gripping, exciting, character-driven stories with strong writing. I have book two on my To-Read list already and it’s going to a challenge for me to select anything else to read next.

from Paul’s bookshelf: read — March 30, 2012 at 03:12PM

author: Mindy Kaling
name: Paul
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2012/03/16
date added: 2012/03/19
shelves: memoir, humor, non-fiction
review:
Mindy Kaling‘s witty and honest pseudo-memoir, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), is a light read that I enjoyed quite a bit. Kaling has a knack for striking a harmonious balance between sarcasm and sincerity, setting her conversational tone as the witty pal you wish you had, able to lampoon others and herself with equal grace.

The book reads kind of like a “best of” selections from perhaps a well-known blogger: intimate, revealing, scatterbrained, prone to random asides and brief chapters about pop culture or wry observations before picking up on the disjointed narrative about her life so far. In a way, the book is revealing in the sort of organic fashion; one gets the sense that they know Kaling pretty well by the end and they’ve learned about her the way they might over a lengthy conversation in a Starbucks somewhere, watching the shifts change at least twice.

Of course, there isn’t much to tell in a memoir for someone who is in her very early thirties, so the appeal here is going to be Kaling’s humor and this is a funny book. I found myself laughing out loud a number of times. For example:

…[I]t was surprising that I killed it as a babysitter. Er, maybe “killed it” is a wrong and potentially troubling way to express what I’m trying to say. The point is, I was an excellent babysitter.

Toward the end, Kaling runs out of official memoir material and the last quarter of the book consists entirely of random essays and tidbits of self-indulgence which aren’t bad necessarily, just sort of frivolous. The sum total is very light, both in tone, gravity and actual content, as the book weighs in at a generously whitespaced 222 pages, if you also include the Acknowledgements section. On one hand, it’s breezy and fun and amusing so it’s not like it isn’t worth a read or anything. But for a $25.00 hardcover?

I waited on a hold list and checked the copy I read out from the library. I felt like this was a good way to go, because I have to say that I think I would have been disappointed if I’d spent cover price for it, or even a discounted $15 or so. I don’t want to get into the valuation for entertainment discussion here, but I finished the book in a very short amount of time and while I liked it an awful lot, I just can’t seem to reconcile the enjoyment I gleaned with the MSRP.

Which is no real detriment to the content. Stripping the value proposition away, this is a recommended book, whether or not you’re a fan of The Office. It’s funny, endearing, and revealing; it’s perfect for chasing away a low mood on a rainy evening.

from Paul’s bookshelf: read — March 19, 2012 at 09:41AM