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Book Notices | Summer Frost by Blake Crouch / The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz / The Answer is No by Frederik Backman

Blake Crouch, Summer Frost

Amazon   Blake Crouch's Summer Frost is a an entertaining short read about a not-too-distant future in which artificial intelligence has the potential to become life, or at least to approximate it very closely. So what happens when an NPC in a video game strays from its programming? Well, Crouch has come up with a readable account of one potential outcome.

Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Sequel

Amazon   I read and enjoyed Jean Hanff Korelitz's book The Plot back in 2021 (my review), but by the time this sequel came along, I had to refresh my memory: A professor of writing steals a killer plot from a dead student to write his own bestseller, and trouble ensues because the plot wasn't all that fictional. And the bad guy in that book was...well, I had to be reminded of that too, but I won't give it away here. Okay, so the protagonist of The Sequel is—I'm trying hard here not to spoil the plot of either book—someone who's done a lot of bad things in the past and who racks up more of them in this book. This character is presented as a sort of Tom Ripley, the eponymous antihero of Patricia Highsmith's series that started with The Talented Mr. Ripley: Tom is a complex character who winds up having to commit a number of murders, but usually for understandable reasons. Despite disapproving of his behavior, readers are invested enough to root for him and worry that he may not get away with it. So Korelitz sets out to create her own Tom Ripley. (In fact, that professor from the first book taught writing at Ripley College.) Unfortunately, it just didn't work for me. Unlike Tom, Korelitz's protagonist is unlikable and unsympathetic and, for a supposedly clever criminal, makes a lot of stupid mistakes. Nor is the book suspenseful. The story just rolls forward from one unlikely scenario to another without ever creating any buildup of tension, at least for me. Not the worst book in the world by any means, but only a so-so sequel after The Plot, which seemed for a time to be a darling of the book world.

Frederk Backman, The Answer is No

Amazon   This Amazon Original Story by Frederik Backman is about a happy loner named Lucas who just wants to continue to live his peaceful, solitary existence. Unfortunately, he is dragged into the politics of his apartment building by a series of unrealistically quirky characters. The plot is unrealistic too, and kind of stupid, and just in general the whole thing is trying too hard to be cute. It wound up just being cloying and irritating. Imagine Gilmore Girls in book form but even more annoying.

Book Notices | Twisted Lives by Tim Tigner / 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill

Tim Tigner, Twisted Lives

Amazon   Tim Tigner's latest thriller tells the story of a federal air marshall, Felix Sparks, whose career and family life are upended after an incident on a plane with an entitled Chinese princeling. Sparks is framed for murder so convincingly that he feels it's imperative to avoid arrest in order to find the real killer himself. The plot sometimes strains credibility, and events sometimes feel too rushed. Also, a scene or two in which great emotions are expressed didn't ring true to me. But it's nonetheless an exciting page-turner that I don't hesitate to recommend if that's the sort of book you're in the mood for. The real surprise is that this crazy plot is apparently based on something that happened to the author (presumably not in every detail), a story told in his book What New Hell Next?: One Thriller Writer's Personal Horror Story, which I have yet to read.

Joe Hill, 20th Century Ghosts

Amazon   I read Joe Hill's Kindle short "The Ushers" one night recently just before bed. It hit exactly the right spot: a good length, nothing too serious, kept me off my phone so I could fall asleep at a reasonable time. The experience was very much like reading an episode of The Twilight Zone. And because that was such a pleasant experience, I ordered the author's 20th Century Ghosts, a collection of short stories first published in 2005. This too hit the spot. The edition I read contains 15 main stories plus another hidden in the Acknowledgments. I enjoyed some of the stories more than others, of course, and I'll remember some more than others. Some qualify as horror and some do not, but all of them depict a world where things aren't quite right—a boy wakes up as an insect in "You Will Hear the Locust Sing," another builds creepy cardboard forts in "Voluntary Committal," an old man runs a museum in which the last breaths of the dead are collected in bottles. "The Black Phone," which was made into a movie a couple years ago, and "Abraham's Boys" are among the most memorable of the stories, in my opinion. And I'll certainly remember "Best New Horror"—in fact I'd like to forget it!—because it totally creeped me out.

Handler, Daniel: And Then? And Then? What Else?

  Amazon  

In his newly released memoir—the title of which is from a poem by Charles Baudelaire (to whom, yes, the author’s Baudelaire orphans are an homage)—Daniel Handler writes about his “canon,” the words and music and art and incidents that have taken up space in his head over the years. He is evidently fascinated by the juxtaposition of things that don't ostensibly fit together, how they bump along beside each other, in his case waiting for their chance to be expressed in his writing. I like this idea a lot. Each of us has a unique collection of such sticky bits—in my case, for example, deep-cut Harry Chapin lyrics alongside an explanation for subliminal messaging (name that Columbo), bouncing next to this line from the novel Hannibal, which for 23 years now has seemed to me a perfect description of the amorphous but pregnant state of one’s mind prior to an aha moment:

“Dr. Lecter was well aware that all the elements of epiphany were present in the policeman's head, bouncing at random with the million other things he knew.”

That bouncing around of bits sounds similar to what Handler writes about, which may be why it’s popped into my head just now.

Handler’s prose in this book feels like it’s replicating the experience of having a head full of flotsam. You’re carried off in each chapter to swirl around in a slurry of unexpectedly juxtaposed ideas and song lyrics and memories. You could almost believe that there's no plan to it—you're floating downriver, just going where it leads, and the author’s just chatting—but of course there's a plan, because ultimately the writing hangs together perfectly, making sense of the slurry.

In his final chapter (the 13th, of course) Handler writes more about this canon and the reason we read, and I find it kind of beautiful:

“The reason we read—the reason you’re reading this book—is because some other book enchanted you, earlier on, and before that another, and before that another. This is the real literary canon, not some hegemonic pantheon, adapted and debated over time. We each have one, a literary canon, and we make it ourselves, not out of what is respectable or prestigious or prominent or lasting or moral or even well-made. We make it out of enthusiasm, out of what we love.”

Maybe that will inspire you to read the book. If not that, then perhaps this bit of wisdom will, which sounds like it might have come from Lemony Snicket rather than his representative: “Every café has a tragic flaw….”

Anyway, it should be clear that I've enjoyed this book. I loved Handler's A Series of Unfortunate Events—the origins of which we read about here, and which I read aloud to my older daughter back in the day. And I loved The Basic Eight—which I hadn't realized was Handler’s first novel, and which he initially had trouble publishing, he says. I now also love this memoir.

Book notices: Your Inner Hedgehog by Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith, Your Inner Hedgehog

Amazon   Your Inner Hedgehog is the fifth book in Alexander McCall Smith’s delightful series focusing on Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, renowned author of the masterwork Portuguese Irregular Verbs and senior scholar at the Institute of Romance Philology in Regensburg, Germany. As usual, the story focuses on the small irritations and points of pride that motivate von Igelfeld and his colleagues. McCall Smith helpfully begins the book with a breakdown of the characters who populate the Institute. Among them is a relative newcomer, Dr. Hilda Schreiber-Ziegler, deputy librarian under the tedious head librarian, Herr Huber. The first sign of trouble is when Dr. Schreiber-Ziegler fails to recognize the accepted protocols surrounding access to the Institute’s Senior Coffee Room—the rarefied air of which place is not for the likes of mere deputy librarians. The resulting clash sees von Igelfeld and his compatriots fighting against progressives who would throw open the coffee room doors, et alia, and generally disrupt the Institute’s “current way of doing things.” This installment in the series was published in 2021, a full ten years after book four (Unusual Uses for Olive Oil) appeared. (The first three installments were originally all published in 2003.) This fifth novel differs from the others in that it tells a single story, while the previous books are collections of related stories. It's a shame there aren't more von Igelfeld books, but I suppose McCall Smith has his hands full with the numerous other series he keeps updated. These are favorites, though.

Book Notices | The Armor of Light by Ken Follett

Ken Follett, The Armor of Light

Amazon   The Armor of Light is the fifth novel in Ken Follett's Kingsbridge series, which started with the publication of Pillars of the Earth in 1989. The book spans about thirty years in the history of Kingsbridge, from 1792 to 1824, and focuses on the city's cloth trade—its millworkers and clothiers and the issues of the day that impacted their lives: the adoption of labor-saving machines, the rise of Luddism, anti-union policies, a corrupt justice system, press gangs, and the Napoleonic wars. As usual with Follett's novels, the cast of characters includes strong female leads and men who abuse their powerful positions, and good people are abused but ultimately find true love. Also par for the course is that the book is—for the most part—extremely readable. But there's a big chunk in the last 20% of the novel that could have been edited down. Follett describes the war against Napoleon in excessive detail, using his characters' participation in events as an excuse to write history rather than allowing the history to form the backdrop of the characters' lives. It also struck me as implausible that so many of the book's main characters would find themselves overseas and involved in the major events of the day while also by chance often finding one another amidst the chaos of military actions. So a good read, but with that caveat.

Book Notices | In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

Amazon   I'm late to the party reading Truman Capote's true crime classic In Cold Blood. Most people are probably familiar with the basics of the story, either from the book itself or from the film that was made of it (which I've not yet seen): In 1959, four members of the Clutter family were murdered in their farmhouse in Holcomb, Kansas, a crime that initially baffled investigators. Capote traveled to Holcomb (with his friend Harper Lee) to interview the townspeople and investigators and write about the case. His book, which was published in 1966, covers the events that preceded the murders, the crime itself, the investigation and trial, and the imprisonment and execution of the culprits. It ends with a lovely and surprisingly moving epilogue, which made me realize that the author had succeeded in depicting the Clutters as real people whose deaths can still feel tragic 65 years later. Capote's prose is at times beautiful, particularly at the beginning of the book when he is describing the remote Kansas landscape that forms the backdrop of the story. But elsewhere too, I was struck by the quality of the prose. Reading his account, I got a sense of Capote being on the scene in the aftermath of the murders, talking to people and soaking in the feel of the place, and yet he never explicitly inserts himself into the narrative. (After finishing the book, I was curious about the circumstances of its composition and so read this 1966 interview of Capote by George Plimpton. It's an interesting read, and it's very clear from it that Capote was a very intelligent and thoughtful writer.) I've seen In Cold Blood described as frightening. I may just be numb—and I do think I lack imagination when I'm reading, so that the film version of this story might have a different effect on me—but I didn't think it frightening in the least. Sad, tragic, unnecessary, all that: I can certainly regret the evil or lack of humanity or wretchedness of the human condition that propelled the two killers toward Kansas and the utterly unnecessary, unprovoked murders they committed there. But no, I wouldn't classify the book as a scary read.

Book Notices | Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris

Robert Harris, Act of Oblivion

Amazon   I've lived most of my life in or around New Haven, Connecticut, which means that the names Dixwell, Whalley, and Goffe are etched in my brain (alongside the locations of the best pizza places). They're the names of three main thoroughfares linking downtown New Haven with its suburbs. I've always been aware that the streets were named after the three regicides who fled here from England and hung out for a time in Judges Cave on West Rock. But that's about all I knew. Robert Harris's fictionalized account of the regicides—mostly Whalley and Goffe, with a smattering of Dixwell—follows their years on the run in New England and the efforts made to catch them. Now, a lot of Harris's story is made up. There's only so much that is known about what the regicides were up to, and the author had to fill in some blanks. So you can't allow the novelized account to settle as fact in your brain (which may be easier said than done). After finishing the book I read the following summary of events to help in that regard: https://www.ctexplored.org/the-legend-of-dixwell-whalley-goffe/. Although one has to be careful not to accept the whole story as gospel, I found Act of Oblivion a really interesting read, although honestly somewhat depressing: So many years passed in hiding—away from family, staring at attic ceilings—seems pretty dismal. But perhaps the reality wasn't as miserable as portrayed here. I'm happy to have read this one!

Book Notices | Calico by Lee Goldberg

Lee Goldberg, Calico

Amazon   I don't particularly like police procedurals, and I don't particularly like westerns, but it turns out that I really like police procedural-westerns that are blended with a dash of science fiction—at least this one. Lee Goldberg's stand-alone Calico is named after a town in the Mojave Desert. In the 1880s, it was a squalid mining town. Nowadays—in real life and in the book—it's a restored ghost town with attractions like gunfights and gold panning and a trading post. The area surrounding Calico (at least as Goldberg describes it) is the kind of place people drive through to get somewhere else—unless they get trapped there for some reason. Beth McDade is one of the trapped. An unhappy transplant from Los Angeles, she's a detective in nearby Barstow who's investigating a series of strange events that turn out to be related—a disappearance, a skeleton dug up at a construction site, a vagrant hit and killed by a motor home. Her investigation also winds up being connected with events in the same area in the 1880s, and Goldberg deftly alternates between the two timelines, both of which are equally compelling. I don't want to give anything away. Suffice it to say that this is the most page-turny book I've read in a while. With a six-shooter to my head, I'd complain that the pace of the book slows quite a lot at the end and that during the big reveal, there are a handful of names thrown at us that I had trouble keeping straight. But it would be a quibble. Loved this book.

Book Notices | Bad Weather Friend by Dean Koontz

Dean Koontz, Bad Weather Friend

Amazon   Benny, as we keep being told, is a really nice guy, and this despite having experienced a string of awful situations during his childhood and adolescence. But at 23, he's got money and a fiancée and a nice house and a good job—until one day, a lot of that inexplicably disappears. Enter a weird, casket-like box sent by a mysterious distant relative, and suddenly Benny's on a road trip with some new friends to figure out why his life has imploded. The story is told in two threads: Benny's present and past play out in alternating chapters and eventually end up at the same point. It's a fun enough story, engaging enough to read, but you have to suspend disbelief quite a bit—and I'm not talking about the insect-human hybrids and other non-human characters. It's more that the story is based on this bizarre conceit that nefarious forces are bent on methodically doing away with niceness in the world by targeting guys like Benny. Eh. It's a fun enough light read.

Book Notices | The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

Amazon   On June 25, 2003 (less than a month after my first blog post here), I ordered three books from Amazon. I read and reviewed two of them pretty quickly, Greg Iles' 24 Hours and Paul Hoffman's Wings of Madness. The third book was Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, which I was interested in because it's one of the first detective novels ever published. But my interest in its subject didn't lead to action on my part, and the book sat on my shelves for twenty years. I measure the enormity of that time mostly by the yardstick of my children's ages—the then 7-year-old is finishing up her MSW, and the 1-year-old is graduating from college in the spring—although God knows a lot else has changed besides. Anyway, clearly, I've finally gotten around to reading Wilkie Collins' book! It's been a while since I've dived into a sprawling 19th-century novel. I'd almost forgotten the pleasure of it. The mystery here has to do with the disappearance of a priceless diamond, the titular Moonstone, which was bequeathed to Rachel Verinder by an unsavory uncle and delivered to her on her 18th birthday. That very night, it goes missing from the Verinders' country estate. A police investigation follows, and thereafter investigations by private actors. The story is told as a series of accounts contributed by various concerned parties, all part of a project undertaken some two years after the stone's disappearance to record what happened as a matter of historical interest. My main impressions upon leaving the book are simply, first, that the mystery held my interest, such that I was quite riveted when approaching the resolution of it; and second, that with the luxury afforded by a high word count, Collins has created a handful of very well-realized characters. For me, the most memorable of them among the much larger cast are Gabriel Betteridge, the Verinders' long-time steward and resolute fan of Robinson Crusoe; the sanctimonious, religious-tract-thumping Miss Clack; and the tragic outcast-cum-physician's assistant Ezra Jennings. I'm happy to have finally read this one. (And holy cow! [That's an apt interjection given this book, as it happens]. There's a comic book version of The Moonstone coming soon!)

Book Notices | Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister

Gillian McAllister, Wrong Place Wrong Time

Amazon   Jen Brotherhood sees her teenage son kill someone and is immediately plunged into a nightmare. There's the expected one—police lights and handcuffs and shock. She has no idea what could possibly have led to this. But she wakes up the next morning in a second nightmare: She's started to live her life backwards, by days, weeks, years. Every morning brings a new date in the past. Obviously, that's a fascinating prospect in some ways: the phones get bigger; her son gets shorter; she gets to see old living spaces and old coworkers, old waistlines; old people grow younger, and the dead return to life. Cool idea. But meanwhile, she's trying to figure out what led to her son becoming a killer so she can prevent it from happening again. It's an interesting concept, and the book was a fun read. I found it a bit difficult to keep track of the timeline, although the author does do a good job in the narrative of locating us in the "present" with each time jump. One thing I really hated is an ostensibly small thing, but it had a big impact on my enjoyment of the book. The titles of most of the chapters refer to the date Jen has jumped to relative to day zero, for example, "Day Minus One Thousand Six Hundred Seventy-Two, 21:25." As you can see, the numbers get pretty big. And as you can see, they are written in words. I found it surprisingly difficult to mentally process them this way. Imagine how annoying and, to a degree, difficult it would be to read the time on a clock as, say, "eleven forty-seven" rather than 11:47. That's the trouble I had with it. This probably contributed to my having to refer back to the previous chapter's title each time to see how much time had passed in the jump. The information in written form simply hadn't stuck. (And then there was the added difficulty of having to convert something like "one thousand six hundred seventy-two days" into the more meaningful units of years and months.) I would suggest that these title dates be changed to digits if it all possible in subsequent editions of the book.

Book Notices | Upgrade by Blake Crouch

Blake Crouch, Upgrade

Amazon   Logan Ramsay lives with the guilt of having been involved in his brilliant mother's accidental destruction of the world as we know it. Now, in a post-apocalyptic world in which lower Manhattan is under water and dark gene labs are producing exotic new species to sell to Russian oligarchs, Logan—who only ever wanted to follow in his mother's scientific footsteps—is doing his penance as a federal officer tracking down rogue geneticists. At least until he's attacked at a cellular level and transforms into a kind of superman. And then he needs to save the world, more or less. Logan's metamorphosis is pretty far out there, of course, but it's so well described that it all seems very believable. There's a lot of science-y explanations throughout the book that lend the story credibility (but at the same time feel a little skippable). The dramatic battle at the end was a little hard to follow and felt rushed, but the story was capped off with a sweet epilogue that left me more contented than I would have been without it.

Book Notices | Mermaids on the Golf course by Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith, Mermaids on the Golf Course

Amazon   I enjoyed this batch of eleven short stories by Patricia Highsmith more than I did the last collection of hers that I read (The Black House), though I can't offhand say exactly why. These stories, not surprisingly, feature mostly unhappy—or soon to be unhappy—people. They are driven to murder or suicide, or they realize that their ostensibly happy relationships were a mirage. They seek an escape from loneliness in imaginary dates, imaginary (?) friends, and nearly imaginary penpals. "Life was nothing but trying for something," Highsmith writes toward the end of "The Cruelest Month," "followed by disappointment, and people kept on moving, doing what they had to do, serving—what? And whom?" That about sums up the hopelessness a lot of the characters experience in these pages. So, the book isn't a lot of laughs, and the stories aren't really suspenseful, as much of Highsmith's writing is, but I did enjoy reading them.

Book Notices | The Black House by Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith, The Black House

Amazon   The Black House is a collection of eleven short stories by Patricia Highsmith. The stories are all a little dark, which is hardly surprising given the author's tendency to dwell on the uglier side of human nature. In these pages, unpleasant people do unpleasant things, or they make questionable decisions in the face of unusual circumstances. (In the book's first story, for example, a friendly Scrabble game is interrupted when the cat drags in part of a human hand, which is truly a great start for a story.) I love the author's novels and have read all or most of them. But while these stories are fine, worth reading if you're a Highsmith fan, ultimately I doubt I'll remember them.

Book Notices | Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb

Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Amazon   Lori Gottlieb is a therapist and columnist, and I guess a podcaster too, though I haven't listened to her podcast yet. She has a background in writing, which may go some way toward explaining why this memoir is so very good. In it, she weaves together stories about her therapy clients (disguised versions thereof) with an account of her own struggles, principally the breakup that led her to seek therapy herself. So it's a book about a therapist giving and getting therapy and about the process of therapy itself, and it's fascinating and well written and heartwarming and heartbreaking and informative. It's a cliché to say that one didn't want a book to end, but I found myself thinking as I was reading that if this one somehow had an infinite number of pages, I would happily keep reading indefinitely.