7 posts tagged “review”
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So, recently I read It's Only Temporary by Eric Shapiro. I finished the book in an evening, but it took me a while to process it.
It's quite strange, really. It's a novella. Not the shortest of novellas, but I got through it pretty quickly. The thing is, there's so much more in this than the words would make you think.
The premise is familiar: there's a giant piece of rock hurtling towards the Earth. When it hits, just about everyone and everything on the plant will die almost instantaneously. There will be a few survivors here and there, but don't count on being one of them.
It's still hard for me to comment on this novella. I've been taught to tell you why it is I like something, rather than just say, "It's good." There are a number of things that appeal to me: the realness, the unexpected humour, the optimism, the characters.
The thing is, there's no one part of the book that stands out. I think what makes this so good, is the way that the various elements work together. There was a good cohesion and flow. Despite the extreme and alien setting, everything seemed to be right.
It was also fabulously edited, of course.
One part of the work that I can single out for extra praise is the ending. I heard that a lot of people were disappointed by the end of the book, but I loved it. The writer had the balls not to cop out at the last minute, and the chops to pull off a touching and satisfying ending.
I can't think of a single person I wouldn't recommend this to. Actually, I can: if drug use or the creative killing of large, dangerous animals offends you, don't read this. If that doesn't bother you, read this asap.
So, I've been busy reading. Not too surprising considering my subjects at uni, but I am Captain Obvious.
Stuff actually happens in this book though - there's an actual plot! Wow.
Funny thing is, this book didn't grab me in the same way The Sun Also Rises did. It's quite strange, seeing as I actually liked Nick and Gatsby, whereas I detested everyone except Cohn. In The Great Gatsby, things happen - Gatsby wants something, he does all he possibly can in order to get it. The characters all struggle with something other than themselves.
And yet, when it came to discussing this book during the work group... I didn't have much to say. That in itself is unusual. I usually have an opinion on everything I read, even if I'm tired and looking forward to being somewhere else. Our course instructor thought that I hadn't read the book. I had to tell her that I just didn't have much to say.
I'm quite surprised. I thoroughly enjoyed TSAR, yet TGG didn't really do anything for me. I did feel a pang towards the end, after the two shots were fired. I felt angry at Daisy and her indecision. I felt melancholy during the funeral. But afterwards, when I tried to think of the book, nothing really stirred me. None of the scenes come to mind.
I quite enjoyed the reading of this novel, but it hasn't stuck with me as some other recent reads have, which is a shame.
Still, reading week is coming up. I'm going to try to get ahead with the books I need to read for my various lit classes. Coming up are Sense and Sensibility, Death of a Salesman, Frankenstein, As I Lay Dying, and Invisible Man. I doubt I'll get all these done in the coming week, but it'll be good to make a decent dent in my to-read list for the coming weeks.
I also want to get around to The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke. I'm a way into the first story, but I haven't really been able to sit down and enjoy it. That's something I'm definitely looking forward to doing.
So, the 'flu has had a slippery grip on me for the past week. I'm not sick enough to spend a few days in bed, sleeping and sweating it off, but I'm stuffy-headed and tired enough to feel dreadful half the time.
Deciding that I needed some pampering, I headed over to my parents' place this weekend. After living on my own for a year, I've really come to appreciate the luxuries of having someone cook for you, not having dustbunnies in the communal areas, not having to share a toilet with lots of people, not sleeping less than a metre away from the kitchen, not having men walking around wearing nothing but tight boxer shorts and hairy beer guts... the list goes on, really. So yeah, I went to stay with the 'rents.
As always when I stay round their place, I got a lot of reading done.
I finally read From a Buick 8 by Stephen King. I'd listened to the audiobook before, but something had gone wrong during my listen and I missed about a third of the book. I found a lovely hardcover edition of this recently, and I picked it up straight away.
I'm definitely glad I did. This is possibly my favourite King book. It's not scary, it's not horrifying. Yes, there are monsters, but even though they are strange, they're not there to frighten us. They're just there.
I've always liked King's characters, and the group of Pennsylvania State Police officers presented in this novel are as real and as sympathetic as ever. They engaged me as a reader right from page one.
Also, please, do yourself a favour and don't write this off as another 'scary story with a car'. This is completely different from Christine, despite the whole teenager-becoming-obsessed-with-an-automobile angle both the works have going on. Anyone who has read both novels and has half a brain will see this.
It's extremely well written. I enjoyed the language, I came to care for Rosemary and Hutch, and once I started reading the book again I just didn't want to put it down.
Thing is, I knew how it was going to end. Obviously. It's Rosemary's Baby, everyone knows what the big revelation at the end is. Unfortunately, it would have been pretty obvious even if I hadn't seen the movie a few years ago. So, for me, the big things that happened didn't really move me.
What did get to me was the psychological aspect of the novel - Rosemary is a young woman who is still trying to find her own place and is shockingly susceptible to outside influences. She's also nowhere near as free from her family's influence as she'd like to think. Also, quite surprisingly considering how likeable she is, she's very much like her husband, Guy, who is set up to be the real villain of the piece. He sacrifices his wife and child to get what he wants - but what does Rosemary do in the final pages of the novel? Her rationalisations disturbed me so deeply that I was left with a sick, empty feeling once I was done reading. It became a hell of a lot clearer why she put up with Guy.
I really don't know what to think of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. Nothing happens, the two main characters were utterly repulsive and the one character I could somewhat sympathise with was humiliated and exiled.
I felt no connection with Jake or Brett. All I saw was two spoiled, impulsive and inherently stupid thirty-somethings acting like 15-year-olds. If they're representative of their generation, I'm extremely glad I wasn't born till the eighties.
The plot was... almost nonexistant. First a load of nothing happens, then they go to Spain and a load of nothing happens in between bullfights. Then Cohn punches some annoying people - highlight of the novel, if you ask me. Then there's some puerile drama, everyone goes away and carries on as before because they learn nothing.
Still, even though I didn't like the protagonists and the plot bored me to tears, I couldn't stop reading. I started and finished it in one day, and not just because I'd been assigned to read this for tomorrow, either. The writing was compelling, concise, elegant.
I suppose I also just like watching trainwrecks, which is basically what Jake and Brett are.
I enjoyed the novel, but only because the writing was good. What happened and who it happened to bored and annoyed me.
So, I'm hoping that I'll be rid of this flu soon. I hate being sick, it just puts a dampener on everything.
Well, not everything. But that's coming up in the next post.
A few weeks ago, I won an impromptu competition on the Permuted Press forums. My prize was a copy of one of their zombie anthologies.
Now, I was extremely chuffed with this. I quite enjoy zombie stories, so long as they're somehwat original, and I love short story collections. I took my time reading this, just one story every now and then.
What really struck me about this collection is the way that the writers play or just simply ignore the genre conventions. Yes, there are a few that resemble 'typical' survivor stories, such as Vince Churchill's Misfortune, but even that has some wonderful imagery and an unexpectedly pessimistic ending.
However, most of the anthology is full of imaginitive stories which are extremely satisfying to read.
There are tales of dinosaurs, undead cowboys, zombies working office jobs, and teenage alienation described using the undead.
Stories that I particularly enjoyed include The Hill by Eric Shapiro. This tale had some vivid and disturbing imagery that stayed with me long after I was done reading. The Finger by Matt Hults has a wonderful opening scene, and there was something about the main characters that made me like them, even though I probably shouldn't have. Read the story and you'll know what I mean.And the anthology's opener, Cyclopean by established author David Wellington, also stood out. Not just because of the engaging protagonist or the great pacing. The themes of this story strongly appealed to me, as a fan of Lovecraftian fiction.
I strongly recommend this anthology to anyone with any interest in the genre. The tales are diverse in subject matter, examining the zombie tale from every angle. Also, the writing is of high quality, and the book itself is gorgeous.
Maybe not too strange, considering the subject matter of the book. Jessie Burlingame ends up stuck in the middle of nowhere, handcuffed to a bed. A few feet away from her, her husband lies dead on the ground. He had a heart attack after attempting to rape his own wife.
This is without a doubt one of the scariest novels I've ever read. There are no supernatural monsters in this book - Jessie is up against the stray dog that has wandered into her lakeside house, intent on making a meal of her husband. She is also up against her own mind - the voices that talk to her, giving her conflicting advice; the suppressed memories that fight for a confrontation after all these years; the thing that comes to visit her at night.
The story of Jessie's 48 hour ordeal is harrowing and disturbing, not just because it is extreme but also because it is completely plausible. This is a very real person in a very real situation. Even when Jessie's mind seems to be playing tricks on her (including some of the most vivid imagery I've seen in a while), even when her mind takes her back to the day of the eclipse that has haunted her for decades, the urgency and severity of her situation never leaves the reader.
This is the first book I have ever had to put down because it scared me. No, it didn't help that I was reading at night, in bed, alone, but that wasn't the reason. I have never had something so awful happen to a character I care about so much. I simply couldn't read on. Of course I picked the book up again the next day, because I had to know what happened, but it wasn't without a feeling of dread that I read on.
Something that impressed me, as a writer myself, is King's ability to so perfectly capture someone of the opposite sex. This book is very much a women's book - Jessie thinks about the relationship between men and women, the way men think about women, the way men treat women. She does not come across as a man's thinly veiled attempt to explore his own attitude towards the fairer sex. She is so convincing and complete as a character that it didn't enter my mind one moment that she was actually written by a man.I can only hope to master characterisation half as well as Stephen King one day.
This book is an amazing read. The plot is tight, the backstory interesting and the characters real and extremely effective. The final part of the book is unexpected yet extremely satisfying. For me, this is without a doubt one of King's best books.
Since listening to Seize The Night, I'd tried to get into some of Koontz' other audiobooks. I started listening to one of the Brother Odd books, but I just couldn't get into it.
When I saw TVOTN for only five euros, I picked it up. I decided that I owed it to myself to give one of Koontz' other books a shot, considering how much I had enjoyed STN.
I found this book a lot easier to get into than the Brother Odd novel. There was less obvious exposition: whereas the Odd novel I had listened to was in first person and began with a lengthy explanation of his situation, surroundings and abilities (this was also done in STN, but with more charm), in TVOTN you are simply shown two boys and they draw you in immediately. This is probably one of the best reinforcements of the 'show don't tell' rule every beginning writer hears about.
I kept reading because I felt I could relate to Colin, the awkward kid who is overjoyed to finally have a friend, and because I was fascinated by Roy, the popular jock who for some reason wants to spend all his time with the geeky horror fan. I developed quite high expectations.
Unfortunately, I was disappointed. What I expected to be a tense psychological thriller turned out to be a rather gruesome take on a boy's adventure story. Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It was mostly my fault for expecting something different to what I actually got. However, I was struck by the YA elements of this book. Yes, there are some truly horrific events in this book. Yes, some of the situations described are quite extreme.
Yet the fact that the book is told entirely from the perspective of the young Colin, and the fact that Koontz is able to capture the boy's personality so well left me feeling as if I was reading a YA novel - which, I might add, is definitely not a bad thing. Also, the plot's structure was very tight and the ending satisfying, in a happily-ever-after, all-loose-ends-tied-up kind of way. The protagonist solves his problems and triumphs over his enemy. It's not until you get towards the end of the book and the gruesome origin of one of Roy's favourite phrases is revealed that you're reminded that this isn't a book intended for children.
If I had been geared up to read a YA adventure, I wouldn't have enjoyed TVOTN a lot more than I did. Due to my misplaced expectations, the book felt strange to me while I read it, which is a great shame. Because I expected something completely different, the very elements that make this book so strong made it difficult for me to get through it. I do not feel the need to reread this book, even knowing what I know now. I would, however, recommend it to someone who wants an entertaining read and is open to non-challenging, YA-orientated ficton and who is able to stomach some particularly horrific imagery.
