Category Archives: Books

Book Reviews

Book Review: Still Missing

Still MissingTitle: Still Missing

Author: Chevy Stevens

Genre: Thriller

Read: Late Sept 2010

Summary: Ambivalent

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I picked this up because it was edited by the same editor that I use (the amazing Renni Browne), represented by a top WME Agent, and debuted on the NYT best seller list. It’s not normally my cup of tea, even though I am very guilty of reading plenty of chick novels. Essentially, it’s about a woman who’s kidnapped, held for a year, and repeatedly raped, by a creep she can only call “the Freak.” In the present she’s escaped and is attempting to deal with this rather horrific course of events. The flashbacks to her captivity are intense and gripping in the same way that the police reports for serial killer cases are. They certainly feel realistic and whipped by, but they also left me with a kind of “dirty” feeling for enjoying them — not the what was being done mind you, but the reading of it. The present tense “action” however bored the hell out of me, for there was no action, merely interior monologue and brief conversations with her therapist. Obviously getting over such a thing would be HARD, but it doesn’t really make for a fun read, or represent a mental process I really need to work through a fictional telling of. Then in the last third, after the backstory has caught up to the present, the book takes a whacky left turn and the whole thing turns out to be a cockamamy conspiracy and non-coincidence. This, while easy enough to read, just bugged me. The writing was clean and out of the way. You didn’t notice it — which is about right for this sort of thing. So overall a was just left with the sordid tale of her capture, captivity, and escape, which was pretty good, but felt exploitive. The rest I could leave back at the cabin in the woods.

Book Review: Rabbit Run

Rabbit Run

Title: Rabbit Run

Author: John Updike

Genre: Fiction

Read: Mid Sept 2010

Sum: Ambivalent

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I’ve read a good amount of Updike, but I’d never read this, so I figured I should. At first I liked it a lot, mostly for the prose. The prose is great. The third person present gives it that breezy literary quality — I’m not sure of this, but I have to assume Updike was a fairly early proponent of this tense/pov in fiction. As usual his sketch-like descriptions and wry humor engaged. But, about a third of the way through I found myself bogged down in the slow pace of the plot and the overly moralistic — or perhaps even post-modern amoralistic  — pandering. You can’t really like Rabbit. He’s kind of a shit, and the pastor fellow was really annoying. The book does have some graphic sexual moments, which Updike is always good for, but they aren’t really sexy. I pretty much had to force my way through the second half. Also, the daughter’s fate is also so avoidably unpleasant that it left me feeling unsettled. Maybe in the 50’s this whole “should vs. want” theme seemed more relevant but all it did for me was remind me thematically of Revolutionary Road. Overall (which I also had a similar reaction to). I can’t say I really enjoyed it, but I do have prose envy.

Book Review: A World Undone

A World Undone

Cover via Amazon

Title: A World Undone

Author: G.J. Meyer

Genre: History

Read: August 2010

Summary: Highly Recommended

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Doing research for the sequel to my novel I started reading a number of histories of World War I. This is simply put: an amazing single volume history of the war, its causes, and course of events (but not the post-treaty fallout). I’ve read hundreds (or more) of history books, and as single volume war histories go — this is excellent. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the world we live in, because the modern political arena was forged in World War I (far more than WWII). The often autocratic (or at least Imperialist) regiems of Europe were not prepared for what it really meant to bring the full might of post industrial powers into conflict. The last real shakeup of Europe had been a hundred years earlier with the Napoleonic wars, but the 19th century had remade the economies of the world. The clash, cataclysmic in terms of everything, ended the old world order. All of the big old autocratic states collapsed (Prussia, Russia, the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans) and even the winners were left unable to hold onto their empires. Meyer does a great job introducing the players gradually so as to not overburden the story of the war’s origins with background. It reads like a taut horror novel — and that’s pretty much what it is.

Book Review: The Gathering Storm

The Gathering Storm

Cover via Amazon

Title: The Gathering Storm

Author: Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

Genre: High Fantasy

Read: Late Sept 2010

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Summary: Recommended only to the very determined WOT fan. If you haven’t read any of them, read Eye of the World, since it is very good.

After reading the rather enjoyable The Way of Kings I figured I’d finally return to the latest in the world’s longest running Fantasy series, The Wheel of Time, also known to us long time fans as The Wheel of Tedium. Sure the first five or so volumes were amazing, but now at twelve, plus a prequel, and with each clocking in at around 400,000 words it’s getting a bit… long. First of all, since it had been five years since I read volume eleven (which was decent, and cost me a good chunk of life by motivating me to install World of Warcraft) I had to do a little studying. Even with a partially photographic memory I found that while reading the summaries of books 9-10 online to “bone up” that I couldn’t remember even remember reading 10. Well, maybe a little. Anyway, the cast of characters has grown so vast that no one could be expected to follow it without extensive study if any appreciable time has passed between reading (and eleven was released five years ago). But I began. I forced myself through about 200 pages (no movement in the plot) and found I could only care about the tower thread. This major plot thread, the most important one of this volume, involves Egwene in the White Tower.  I’ve always liked the White Tower, as long as I turn off my sexism detector because the way in which Jordan has always written women — bitchy and he goes to great length to show and tell this point — grows very tedious. For pages 200-500 I read the Egwene chapters (enjoying them immensely, and skimmed most of the other chapters. Eventually, even this became too much and I had to resort to the WOT wiki to read chapter summaries for all the chapters except for Egwene’s and Rand’s, and even Rand’s were pretty painful. To tell the truth, ever since Rand became the Dragon Reborn and big head honcho he hasn’t been that interesting. Being a ridiculously-all-powerful-dude-in-command-of-vast-resources-and-armies leads to scenes that smack of the new Star Wars council or those with Orpheus in the Matrix 2 or 3. If you loved those… read on. Anyway, the Egwene section is a novel in itself, surely over 100,000 words, and is quite good, wrapping up with a big battle at the end. Because I’m a completist, I’ll force myself to skim through volumes thirteen and fourteen to finish the epic, but I doubt I’ll enjoy it. With all my skimming I was able to “read” the whole thing in one day. It was certainly no worse than any of the recent volumes and I was unable to tell where Jordan left off and Sanderson began, it felt authentically Wheel of Tedious.

Book Review: The Way of Kings

Cover of

Cover via Amazon

Title: The Way of Kings

Author: Brandon Sanderson

Genre: High Fantasy

Read: Late Sept 2010

Summary: Recommended for High Fantasy fans

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After finishing the 6th major draft of my own book I decided to tackle this 400,000 word hunk of “light” reading. Sanderson is the relatively young fantasy author who is finishing the late Robert Jordan‘s Wheel of Time series, and this is the first volume of a new massive epic fantasy of his own. Surprisingly, despite its tome-like weight, it was a fast read. Maybe three days, and gripping enough all the way through. Sure, I would have chopped about 30,000 words worth of interlude chapters involving completely irrelevant characters, and the beginning has the requisite boring high fantasy prelude, but the bulk of the book hauls right along. Probably about 2/3 of it is centered on the life of a slave in a vast military camp. This has a detailed personal feel that is highly engaging. Although there is a reasonably satisfying sub-conclusion, this is clearly a setup for a very long story and highly introductory. There is an interesting magic system and overall world mythos. The magic does borrow really obviously from his own Mistborn series — where I had found it extremely novel — but it’s still good. Overall, the book works, at least for the avid fantasy reader.

About Book Reviews

Lately I’ve been trying to read a ton of novels in order to improve my writing. I’ve always read a lot, but at the moment, I’m targeting one a day. I’m hitting a bewildering assortment of genres and styles, but of course, being a supreme fantasist, mostly those with strong fantastic elements of one sort or another. So to that effect, I’m going to experiment with blogging short reviews of each. I may also review some of my favorites, and I’ll tag those with “classic,” meaning that I read them significantly previous to the post.