Chris Carrel
One of the best books I've read so far this year.
A fictionalized account of the last days of Algerian revolutionary Fernand Iveton before the French executed him in 1957, one of 198 rebels France executed during the Algerian Civil War. The prose is lush and lyrical and despite the book's brevity, one feels that one has finished a denser piece of work than 118 pages.
Andras embeds the reader in the life of Fernand Iveton and his wife Helene, and in Fernand's plight as a condemned man, through alternating vignettes of his days in custody and his life before that, centering on his relationship with his wife. What emerges is a nuanced and empathetic picture of a character living under the repression of a colonial state, and how a person in such a state might find political violence reasonable, even necessary.
The end, when it comes, is like the arrival of a guillotine blade, short, shocking and devastatingly powerful. Bravo.
I don't usually write reviews with my star ratings but I loved this book so deeply I had to rave a bit about it. I was hooked from the opening paragraphs, which are about the best opening paragraphs to a work that I have read in recent memory. The author immediately places you in a world that is both strange and unsettling, and yet familiar.
It Lasts Forever and Then Its Over is only ostensibly a zombie story. There are zombies and the protagonist is a zombie, and yet these are really only a lens through which to observe loss and grief, and question the concepts of endings and beginnings. It is these human elements that are the core of the novel and the considerable emotional impact of the story is strengthened through its nonhuman framing, allowing the reader to see the familiar with new eyes.
The writing is beautiful, both spare and at times, dense and philosophical. Both atmospheric and unsettling, and grounded deeply on the same ground we walk upon.
It Lasts Forever and Then Its Over is ironically a short novel that could be read in a day, but I knew immediately after the last page that I would read it again at least once to delve deeper into its meaning and imagery. The book is like a powerful film that has left me thinking about it days after viewing.
I loved this book! I took a chance on the title based on a brief recommendation I stumbled on online and was delighted to discover a captivating, at times scary, tale of a special boy in a small English village that is watched over by a very old, possibly malevolent, spirit.
It's not the sort of story I usually find myself interested in, but Max Porter invests such depth in his characters I felt I knew them, and had to find out what happened next. The story is told from the first person perspective of four primary characters, but Porter also weaves in the voices of many of the villagers through brief thoughts, or snippets of conversation heard by the spirit, Dead Papa Toothwort, a variation of the Green Man myth that lives in the forest outside the village. The result of this choice is that the village comes to life in a three-dimensional way.
The lives of the characters intersect with Dead Papa Toothwort in a way that is genuinely scary and uncertain and kept me guessing to the end.
I also enjoyed the way the tale straddled the territory between the human world and the ancient natural world where pagan spirits and faeries might live.. Although 90 percent of the tale is definitely rooted in a world that is familiar to me, the whole story felt magical.
I listened to the audiobook version, which I highly recommend. The voice actors portraying the characters and villagers do an outstanding job of expressing the characters' emotions. I will undoubtedly read the book eventually, as the writing is very good and features lovely turns of phrases best enjoyed with one's eyes, rather than ears.
Lanny is a book of modest length so it is fairly easy to breeze through.
This is an amazing work of fiction that I highly recommend. The author weaves together an epic yet very personal story that spans decades and two countries, telling a story that begins with the failed 1976 assassination of singer Bob Marley and ends up with the 1980s crack epidemic in Brooklyn. The narrative connective tissue joining these two points is articulated by a shifting cast of characters from Jamaica, America and Cuba, among others. The plot is so well constructed and interwoven through the various characters' perspectives that the alternating voices never confuse, and always propel the story forward. And the voices are distinctive. I listened to the audiobook (with excellent narration by at least 5 voice actors) and I found myself frequently repeating pieces of the often musical dialogue. This book recently won the Man Booker prize and a host of praise. It is well deserved. This is a dense story that seems compact and tight, populated by three dimensional characters so rich and colorful that I feel like I know them. As I passed the halfway point of the book I found myself both wanting to hurry up to reach the end and see what happens and to slow down so that I could enjoy the pleasure of reading this book longer.
Now, off to read James' other work.
A welcome return to form for Tom Perrotta after the somewhat disappointing ‘The Abstinence Teacher.' Leftovers' plot device is refreshingly original and thought-provoking: what would happen if a Rapture-like event (inscrutably mysterious and secular, with non-Christians and bad eggs just as likely to have disappeared as Rapture-believers) occurred causing millions to just suddenly disappear from the world? The story takes place two years after the event and follows a ‘typical' suburban family through the aftermath.
Perrotta excels at developing multiple characters and propelling a story through those characters' alternating takes on the narrative. The characters in The Leftovers are nuanced and believable, while being sympathetic. The Garvey family and those in their near orbit are real enough that their mistakes are both cringe-worthy and horrifying, and their suffering palpable.
The plot bogs down slightly in a couple of places late in the book, but was otherwise a page turner (or rather button pusher). The Leftovers is both an entertaining read and, at a deeper level, a remarkably unsettling story. While the mass disappearance that propels The Leftovers doesn't engender easy parallels with the real world, I found the widespread breakdown of both society and individuals disturbingly familiar.
There appear to be two authors named Dan Simmons. One, who wrote The Terror, one of the better works of fiction I've read in recent memory and the other who wrote this piece of tripe, a pastiche of far right-wing paranoia - America destroyed by “entitlements,” invaded by Mexicans, a “global caliphate” ascendant, Israel nuked by Iran (of said caliphate), global climate change a myth, etc. The only thing missing was the main characters extolling the virtue of investing in gold.
It could've worked, though, if only the author had stitched those hare-brained ideas together with solid characters, good dialogue, and believable plotting.
One of the best pieces of post-collapse speculative fiction I've read. Bacigalupi's dystopian vision is rooted in a strong understanding of both ecology and human behavior. The story is told through the eyes of five flawed, yet compelling characters, chasing survival and/or prosperity in a future Bangkok threatened by rising sea levels and genetically engineered diseases. There are no true heroes, nor villains, in The Windup Girl's cast of characters as the author avoids moralizing and instead reflects the messy reality of complex characters trying to survive in a dangerous world. The plot moves forward smoothly, and accelerates into a thrilling final battle, and a conclusion that is both hopeful and terrifying.
This is a good collection of SciFi stories from a writer I haven't encountered before. The collection is worth reading just for Green Leopard Plague alone (I really like this story with its surprise twist), but several other standouts are included. Incarnation Day is a story that parents of teenagers (and their teenagers) will enjoy.
I will look for more writing from Walter Jon Williams.
Child murders are grim enough, but when set against a very stark, very real Stalinist Russia where even spouses can denounce (and send to their death) each other, it makes for a novel that is not for the faint of heart. Yet, the story of Leo Dimidev, one of Stalin's secret policemen, as he tries to find the truth about a serial killer in a society that doesn't want to acknowledge such crimes, is a story of redemption. The characters are full-fledged and nuanced, the narrative tautly paced. This is a thriller with its share of surprises, not the least of which is how redemption and some level of optimism is found in such a grim, dangerous place.
Just finished this comic masterpiece from TC Boyle, one of my favorite American writers. This time out, Boyle focuses on turn of the century American health nuts, centering on the Sanitarium run by John Harvey Kellogg in Battle Creek, MI. Although the main characters are largely whiny, arrogant, or otherwise unlikeable, Boyle (as he always does) finds the humanity behind the characters, which is one of the things that makes his novels so enjoyable.
If the concept of multiple daily enemas makes you squeamish, avoid this book like, well, an enema. Otherwise, I highly recommend it!
Robert Charles Wilson is one of my favorite sci-fi writers, and while I enjoyed Spin, the sequel Axis, left me a little flat.
It's a decent read, but the characters are just not that engaging and ultimately, the story of the Hypotheticals - the mysterious alien force that enclosed the Earth in a time bubble in Spin - is pretty pedestrian.
Wonderful, vivid tales of a gutter dweller's life aimlessly bounding along while lives (including his own) fall apart around; addiction, theft, violence, infidelity, overdoses and perhaps some salvation are found in Jesus' Son. Johnson unfolds the tales in a spare, first person narrative that drew this reader in as if I was having a conversation with the unsavory Son of the title.
I'd been debating whether or not to read Johnson's new, highly-regarded, but hefty book, Tree of Smoke. This collection of short stories has convinced me to invest the time (and money) to do so.
A future with wearable computers, wireless Internet connections everywhere, user-designed “views” of the world, a famous poet medically rehabilitated after Alzheimer's Disease, his teenage grandaughter and a white rabbit that appears from time to time. Normally this sort of story wouldn't appeal to me and I picked it up only because the author is one of my favorite SciFi writers, Vernor Vinge.
Unfortunately, I have to tell you that Vinge comes up short on this effort. Too many characters and plot lines made for a sluggish read; and the future world Vinge describes just wasn't that compelling for me. In the end...I couldn't make it to the end and dropped this book halfway through.
The narrator gets hit over the head by a mysterious falling object, and wins an outrageous amount of money in the settlement. Ok.
Then, he begins to use his newfound wealth to create experiences that remove his sense of artificiality with his life. He does so with a series of staged reenactments of real life events and places.
While at first a weird but interesting read, Remainder began to strike me as repetitive and just a bit too weird for my tastes. This was a tough read for me; I eventually finished, but it was tough to get there.
I read this several years ago and was blown away by the concept of an artificially created world, long abandoned by its creators, and maintained by machines some of which are understood and controlled by the world's current inhabitants. When an orphan child appears who can control the world's machines, he becomes sought after by differing sides in a protracted religious war.
The author creates a rich, believable world that is both ancient and technological, and a political structure ruled by competing departments that will ring true with anyone whose ever been within ten feet of a bureaucracy.
This edition is a trilogy book, containing all three books, Child of the River, Ancient of Days, and Shrine of Stars. I picked this up to read again and am halfway through Child of the River. I'll have more when I finish reading this.
Ah, high school in the 1970s: drugs, sex, alienation, cliques...and a strange alien plague that turns normal, every day American kids into freakish outcasts and murderers.
If you went to high school in the 1970s you should definitely read this graphic novel. Even if you didn't I recommend Black Hole.
As mentioned previously, I'm not a fan of narrarating-from-the-dead stories. An author really has to be on their chops to get me to read and enjoy a novel with dead people as characters. David Long did it with The Inhabited World. Kevin Brockmeier just missed with The Brief History of the Dead.
It's an intriguing idea that drives the novel: dead people “live” on in a city of the dead as long as they are remembered by someone on Earth. When the last memory dies, so do they, disappearing from the city of the dead. Unfortunately, the author doesn't have much to say beyond that concept. The dead are much like the living...except they're dead. And when everyone on Earth starts kicking the proverbial bucket and the city of the dead begins emptying out, he has little to say about what that - and being alive - means.
