Category: Books

Book Review: I’ll Be Gone in the Dark – Michelle McNamara

Some readers, though eclectic in their tastes, have areas that they don’t tend to stray into. True Crime is the sort of genre that attracts people who are really into true crime. What satisfies them may not hit the spot for your average Joe who doesn’t stray onto that side of the non-fiction tracks. Crimes aren’t always solved, and facts aren’t always known; those who are looking for neat packages may be discouraged.

This is the case for I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which is about an unsolved string of rapes and murders, written by an author who herself passed away in the process of compiling the book. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark has become a blind alley in a blind alley, a doubly unsolved mystery which can never deliver on its promise. Is it satisfying to True Crime afficionados, or is I’ll Be Gone in the Dark a book published solely on the strength of its authorial cachet?

Book Review: The Woman in the Window – A.J. Finn

There is a closing paragraph that has only worked once, and that was back in 1985*. All variations on it – and there have been more than a few – should really see the books that feature it either pulped, or at the very least sent back for a slight edit before being released on a public hungry for the opposite of the cliché. Such is the case with The Woman in the Window, a The Girl on the Train-cum-Rear Window-cum-entire Golden Age of Cinema pastiche: it has an ending that is unforgivable.

But how did we get here, to this imperfect conclusion? The Woman in the Window is touted as “the thriller of 2018”, and it is easy to see how it will capture the imagination of a reading public that devoured The Girl on the Train and tore through Gone Girl – although it does not distinguish itself as well as either of those. One could be forgiven, simply from looking at the covers and blurbs of the recent spate of unreliable narrator led thrillers, that there is a definite trend in publishing. But they’d be right: there is a definite trend.

Book Review: Artemis – Andy Weir

Andy Weir is his own worst enemy. In Artemis he offers his readers a 26 year old Saudi-born Moon woman named Jazz, but one could be forgiven for confusing her voice with that of 42 year old American born Martian Mark Watney. Their sarcasm and their approach to problem solving are both very similar, despite their wildly different backgrounds. For the most part this is okay, but occasionally Weir will throw an absolute clunker of a line onto the page and hope that it will land; often it will not, and will go on bouncing indefinitely until it splats against the farthest reaches of your mind.

Book Review: Moving Target: The History and Evolution of Green Arrow – Richard Gray

Double disclosure: the author is a friend of mine, and my name is in the acknowledgements of this book.

Moving Target: The History and Evolution of Green Arrow represents an incredibly deeply researched history of one of DC’s most enduring but often under-utilised heroes.

Gray offers both fact and analysis and pairs them with far-reaching interviews with a wide variety of people tied to the history of Green Arrow, many of whom reveal far more than one might expect. The people who have worked on Green Arrow have obviously been passionate about the character, and that passion is reflected in both their own words, the work itself and Gray’s analysis.

Gray is not afraid to illustrate that Green Arrow’s catalogue has not always been a a cavalcade of quality, and his asides about the history of DC itself in relation to the character are invaluable.

If you want to know what primary colours combine to form Green Arrow, you likely cannot do better than Moving Target. Moving Target fills a niche you may not have known existed, but if you’re an Oliver Queen diehard or a fresh recruit to the cause of the Emerald Archer, this is a more than worthy addition to your quiver.

Book Review: Black House – Stephen King

The Talisman was the sort of book that a lot of people idolise, even if so much of it was a product of a darker, far less progressive time. Where that book had a lot of good material, much of it was mired in the unnecessary. Some seventeen years later, Peter Straub and Stephen King teamed up again to bring back Jack Sawyer, in adult form. Like its predecessor, Black House features children in peril, but none of them are the protagonist. This remove makes the novel easier to take because no unsuspecting preteen boys are being preyed upon by literally every car driving man in America, and the two have a stronger grasp of both audience expectation and precisely what they’re plotting.

Snuff

Samuel Vimes is one of the most beloved, and most featured, of all characters in the ever broadening Discworld series. When Terry Pratchett presents you with a City Watch book (“City” having become increasingly loosely defined as the series has progressed), you attack it in a different mind frame to any of his other books. This is because, when Vimes is in Pratchett’s hands, he becomes an incredibly single minded author. It is only rarely that we are taken out of the mind of Ankh-Morpork’s chief protector, and then that is usually only to be placed at the mercy of the inscrutable Lord Vetinari.

 

Essentially, Pratchett knows what he likes when he’s writing Vimes, and he hopes that the audience likes it, too. Fortunately, Pratchett is in but one of his many elements. The transcendental nature of I Shall Wear Midnight was always going to be a hard act to follow, so Pratchett does not try. Instead, he places us in the company of a man who has not had a book to himself since 2005 – and he has had the good grace to have made the world move in such time. Vimes is not in the same space as he was in Thud!, and the novel reads all the better for it.

Reamde

 

Neal Stephenson and I go way back. Snow Crash, his breakthrough novel, was an enjoyably zippy future-tech adventure, overly hip and over in seconds. Over the years he learned verbosity and the ability to write more than was strictly needed, and this gave rise to Cryptonomicon. Then the Baroque Cycle came out and I gave up after only 200 pages, much to my continuing shame. Anathem has sat on my bookshelf, mocking me these past few years as I’ve ploughed through countless other books, all of them generally with fewer pages.

When Reamde was announced, I thought that my Kindle should be utilized to give Stephenson another chance. I would like to believe that my gamble paid off, although at Stephenson’s expense; against all odds, Stephenson has produced a pseudo techno-thriller: a jock in nerd’s clothing.

 

Jonathan Franzen – Sydney Opera House, September 13, 2011

(Working title: Franzen of the Opera)

A loose report of various things that may have been said at the talk.

It must be a huge burden to have people call you “America’s greatest living novelist” or “one of America’s greatest novelists” or “one of the greatest novelists”. I say this entirely without irony because, after being given that title, what left is there for you to say? Anything will be an inevitable disappointment, and none of it will be your fault. This is only true if the title was bestowed upon you; if you gave it to yourself, you deserve whatever you have coming to you.

 

In having written some pretty good books, Jonathan Franzen accidentally painted himself into a corner. His American novels became metonymous for the American novel. This gave Australians free licence to ask Franzen to deconstruct his country for our entertainment and edification. He was able to do this to an extent, but the evening was best when Franzen was being specific: why he writes what he writes, and how it all comes to be. Discussing the act of writing and what informs it is far more interesting than a simple oration on the general state of the nation in which it was produced.

John Dies At the End

John Dies At The End is not a novel, but a monster stitched together piecemeal from the detritus of David Wong’s mind over the course of several years. That it never delivers on the promise made by its title would probably not matter to the many readers unable to sustain patiences enough to stick it through to the bitter, bitter end. I stayed around, and let me say that it was so ridiculously not worth it that I practically embraced my Sookie Stackhouse chaser. John Dies At The End transmutes pulpy vampire novels into high art through sheer proximity; take Wong’s work and you can make anything entertaining by comparison. It’s a kind of magic, or alchemy at the very least.

There are several kind of misanthropies in this world: there is the kind that hates fun and the idea of anyone else having fun and must stop it at all costs (like me, telling you that this book is awful – I see this as more pragmatism than misanthropy); more sinister is the type of misanthropy embodied by Wong, which is based on the exploitation of humanity by utilising contempt for them to wring money from their all too willing wallets (this brand is also known as “capitalism”). While John Dies At The End was written by a man trying to kill the boredom of his low paying jobs, Wong has commuted that sentence to a presumably lucrative career as the editor of Cracked dot com, consistently one of the worst sites on the internet.


Club Dead

Sookie Stackhouse’s innocent abroad schtick was getting slightly on the nose, so I wrote an open letter to her based on the events of Club Dead. Bear with me, and try to forgive me for writing to a fictional character:
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