Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

“He has the strangest expression on his face- the emotional equivalent of 404 PAGE NOT FOUND.” (Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan)

This is exactly the kind of book I should love. It blends technology and art with a kids-book-like quick-paced  plot, quirky characters, and even contains a book within a book – which gets me every time. But not this time. The characters were too perfectly eccentric, the plot too quick and tidy, and the blend of tech and books a little too forced. In real life, people’s talents and hopes are not so easy to ferret out and use to your advantage.

Perhaps one of the reasons people love fantasy so much is that it models a passion and purpose that modern life, with all of its apathy, can no longer contain. Sloan attempts to update the fantasy quest storyline by giving it a modern, skeptical hero – but by doing so defeats the purpose of reading fantasy in the first place. Basically, this is a quest with no passion. The main character finds himself in a pseudo-fantasy mystery mirroring the plot points of his favorite book, which he cannot bring himself to really care about or believe in. He goes through the motions of the quest because he might like his boss a bit and encounters no stumbling blocks that cannot be overcome by a quick text to his friend-of-choice. The quest does not change him in any significant way and only marginally improves his life.

Essentially: this is the story of a master networker, who uses his connections to solve a bizarre mystery he isn’t invested in, which leads him to a much-needed job. When I need some escapist literature, I don’t want it to be that close to real life.

Recommended Action: Buy – Borrow - TBR - Avoid

Length: 304 pgs.

Audiobook quality: narrator’s voice made me think I was reading a children’s book.

Ending: Epilog tidied everything up, as expected.

Further reading: I did read a quest story recently which managed to be modern and exciting, but still convey the thrill and excitement of a character with a real need to complete his quest. It had its own problems, but Ready Player One is a crazy readable book.

fantasy

Books, fantasy, Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore, Mystery, Robin Sloan

May 20, 2013

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Bridget Jones’s Diary

“It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It’s like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting “Cathy” and banging your head against a tree.” (Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding)

Recently, I have discovered a new-found love for the 90′s. Think about it: STNG, DS9, X-files, Meg Ryan rom-coms, and Bridget Jones. Somehow, I missed the Bridget Jones phenomena at the time. I was too young to see the movie when it came out and had moved onto my ‘literary snob’ phase by the time I was old enough to indulge.   If you, too, missed the fad because of age or snobbiness, there is only one thing you need to know about Bridget Jones: she is absolutely hilarious.

What stimulated my curiosity some 15 years after its publication was finding it on a list of Jane Austen book adaptations. What I thought I knew about Bridget Jones, which basically stopped at ‘famous 90′s movie’, didn’t add up to anything relating to Pride and Prejudice. But I found out that Bridget Jones isn’t just a P&P adaptation – it is a meta adaptation. Get this: in the book, Bridget Jones ends up with a ‘Mr. Darcy’ in a slightly P&P fashion. The book is set during the initial broadcast of the BBC ’95 P&P, and Collin Firth’s brooding Mr. Darcy is the subject of many an excited phone call. Then the movie of Bridget Jones stars Collin Firth! When I put this all together for the first time, it blew my mind. So essentially the movie is an adaptation with references to another adaptation of an adaptation with references to another adaptation. Whether or not all of that excites your P&P nerdiness, the bottom line is this: if you haven’t yet, read the book.

Recommended Action: Buy – Borrow – TBR – Avoid

Length: 288 pgs

Audiobook quality: Superb – narrator doesn’t just read, but acts.

Ending: irreverently P&P-like

 Further Reading:  If you’d like more P&P adaptations, check out our booklist. If you’re more interested comic chick-lit, you might want to try out Plum Syke’s Bergdorf Blondes.

Comedy

90's, Books, Bridget Jones's Diary, British Comedy, Chick-Lit, comedy, Helen Fielding

May 10, 2013

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The Dinner

“The first thing that struck you about Claire’s plate was its vast emptiness. Of course, I’m well aware that, in the better restaurants, quality takes precedence over quantity, but you have voids and then you have voids. The void here, that part of the plate on which no food at all was present, had clearly been raised to a matter of principal.” (The Dinner by Herman Koch)

If you, too, have been craving subtly creepy, slightly shocking stories told with excellent skill and attention to language, you couldn’t do better than follow up whatever literary psychological thriller you just read with The Dinner. You’ll be lead through a four course meal by the incredibly unreliable narrator, Mr. Lohman, as he negotiates a ‘small’ family problem with his brother. As Mr. Lohman captures the reader’s trust with sly jabs at the upper-class and witty complaints, he slowly reveals his own history and the real trouble in his family. The real question becomes not whether the narrator is unreliable, but how it is possible for anyone  to have developed such a complacent, twisted view of himself and his situation.

A review of this book in the NYT  stated that ‘the most disturbing thing about this book is how meaningless it turns out to be’ or something of the sort. I partially read the book to figure out what on earth that conclusion could mean; unfortunately, I’m still no closer to an answer. Part of my job is reading through tons of reviews of fiction, and sometimes I feel as though they seek to create a tone or pattern instead of saying anything true about the work. Intelligent ones compare the author to other obscure, modern authors, compliment the author’s language paradigm by quoting specific passages, and then, unfailingly, criticize the book in the last paragraph in order to prove that no work is perfect. Personally, I would say that the ‘meaning’ of this book comes in reflecting on how we each recreate the stories of our lives for ourselves, etc, etc. If you’ve read it – would you say that it is ultimately meaningless?

Recommended Action: Buy - Borrow - TBR – Avoid

Length: 304 pages

Ending: open to interpretation; haunting

Further Reading: an excellent follow-up to Familiar by Lennon

Psychological

Best Books, Books, Herman Koch, Literary Psychological Thrillers, The Dinner

April 30, 2013

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Booklion Birthday Awards, Year 3

As I review the past year at the booklion, I can see myself growing as an omnivorous reader. Prior years saw more posts about older, tried and true novels and steady reading in already favored genres. Working at a library for the past nine months has allowed me to grab more books on a whim, simply because I’d never seen or heard of them before. Also, since I spend a great chunk of my time reading through review journals at work, I’ve become more courageous in reading new and experimental titles. I think you’ll start to see these shifts in year four of the booklion: I’ll be reviewing more recent titles and hopefully discovering books you’ve never heard of before (but you should still expect that I’ll try to convince you to read a classic every now and again).

If you’ve been with the Booklion for a while, you know the birthday awards spiel: these awards should serve more as a guide to this blog than an objective assessment of any normal category (such as publication date or specific genre).

Booklion Awards:

Best Books:

Seraphina

Rules of Civility

Cooking with Fernet Branca

 Honors:

Anne of Green Gables

 Wish I wrote:

I Capture the Castle

 Best Audiobook:

Mistborn

 Most Life changing:

An Everlasting Meal

 Most Disappointing:

The Casual Vacancy

compilation

Books

April 23, 2013

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Familiar

“But how can you prepare for the unknown? For the impossible? She wants to know what to do, how to behave, but there are no precedents in her life, or any other life she has heard of to follow. She can only think of movies.  A spy picture: the agent going undercover, pretending to be somebody else, ferreting out secrets.” (Familiar by J. Robert Lennon)

This book is part of that strange-sounding sub-genre that I’d never thought I’d come to enjoy so much: literary psychological thriller. If you’ve never read one before, the mainstay is that the ‘literary’ pretty much cancels out the ‘thriller’ aspects, and the reader is left with a slow, creepy novel that crawls into your subconscious, depositing fears you never knew you had. In this case, Lennon draws out the fears of being unfamiliar with one’s self and one’s own family.

Lennon writes a character who suddenly finds herself transported into a different version of herself, living a different life. She simultaneously has to find clues about her recent past and discover why this change happened to her. She considers parallel universes, insanity, or some sort of divine intervention, but never finds proof for any hypothesis. Lennon does not do the work of answering these questions for the reader; instead he lets the unsettling tension between the familiar and unfamiliar pull the reader through the book without succumbing to the temptation of a tidy ending. Yet, Lennon is also too sly to write a novel that simply experiments with the possibilities of alternate words; he also explores the disturbing realities of dysfunctional families – of how our children can be both familiar and completely unknowable.

Recommended Action: Buy – Borrow – TBR – Avoid

Length: 224

Ending: Generally untidy and vague, except for the last page, which is just weird

Further Reading: This book is not for everyone, but those who loved the mild and haunting creepiness of, say, I am the Cheese, might find that J. Robert Lennon is their new favorite author. I also read The Dinner (post pending) by Koch recently and thought it was an excellent follow-up to this book.

Psychological

Books, Familiar, J. Robert Lennon, Literary Psychological Thrillers, Thrillers

April 22, 2013

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2312

“All landscape art reminds us: we live in a tabula rasa, and must write on it. It is our world, and its beauty is entirely inside our heads. Even today people will sometimes go out over the horizon and scuff their initials in the dust.” (2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson)

‘Strange’ is the word that must be most often used to describe this book. Yes, it is beautiful and entirely unexpected, but mostly, it’s strange. It is a science fiction epic set in the years leading up to 2312, where all the people who could left earth and populated each planet in the solar system. Mars is a snobby upper-class planet, Mercury an artistic haven, and Venus worked by the lower-class, endlessly moving enormous piles of snow; humanity travels space  on beautiful asteroids hollowed out and terraformed to resemble earth or something entirely new. The plot, such as it is, centers around a small group of ‘spacers’ trying to fix earth’s environmental and political quagmires in the hope that it will stop holding back the human race.

Not only are the characters strange, each being one of 20 possible new genders and having lived for over a hundred years, but so is the writing. Robinson spends a lot of his time following the perspective of only three to four characters, but in between each chapter he gives the reader an excerpt or a list , which serve as a complex and fragmented background of the world. Some of the excerpts are written in second person, as if the book were instructing the reader on how to create a terrarium, or life itself: “You have cooked up life from scratch! Eat it with gusto.”

2312 is a difficult read, technically classified as ‘hard sci-fi’, so carefully evaluate how much time and effort you are willing to put into the book before picking it up. The way Robinson combines art and technology in his vision of the future is absolutely stunning  and it somehow strikes me as more real and plausible than any other sci-fi I’ve read. Though it is slow paced, and sometimes off-putting in its extreme weirdness, I could not put the book down because of its pristine originality: this is not the same science fiction that has been written and rewritten for decades.

Recommended Actions: Buy – Borrow – TBR – Avoid

Length: 576

Ending: Happy and hopeful

Further Reading: I feel as though I’ve stumbled upon a whole new branch of science fiction here. I’ve never read anything like it before. Robinson isn’t a first-time novelist, though, so if you liked this book you might want to read his mars trilogy.

Science Fiction

2312, Books, Hard sci-fi, Kim Stanley Robinson, Science Fiction

March 25, 2013

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Sweet Tooth

“My needs were simple I didn’t bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn’t mind so much if they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say ‘Marry me’ by the end.” (Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan)

About half way through this novel, I realized that I saw no reason why everyone was calling this ‘the best book of 2012′. Sure, the 1970′s cold war/ female British spy scenario was a pretty nifty background, but the plot and characters weren’t doing enough to attract me. The writing was excellent, and the plodding plot was occasionally interrupted by fascinating short stories and extremely well done sex scenes, but until the last few pages I couldn’t see a single reason to recommend a book. Yet, a week after reading it, I feel great about recommending to just about anyone – and the only reason is the last few pages.

You might wonder how I could possibly recommend a 300 page book based solely on the ending, and it would be a great question to ask. If the ending were simply surprising or good it wouldn’t be enough to ensure my recommendation, but this ending is transcendent. It twists your perspective of the entire novel, gives it meaning and substance, and ensures that you will be thinking about it, re-writing the book in your head, for weeks afterwards. In my mind, the whole book is very much about storytelling and authorship, and the ending of the book deepens this theme by shifting the authorship to the reader – since so much is left unsaid, so much implied, and so much left to be retold.

Recommended Action: Buy - Borrow – TBR – Avoid

Length: 320

Ending: Transcendent

Further Reading: The first-person female protagonist reminded me a bit of Ms. Kontent from Rules of Civility. If you are a fan of that fine book, you won’t find the language quite as beautiful, but there is much here to admire. In terms of other books with transcendent endings, I can only come up with one other: A Confederacy of Dunces, where the last sentence turns the book from a comedy into a charming romance. 

Literature

Books, British Fiction, Ian McEwan, Literature, Sweet Tooth

March 17, 2013

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