2024 reads, #51. This early novel by Arthur C. Clarke was recently featured at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor; and it sounded interesting e2024 reads, #51. This early novel by Arthur C. Clarke was recently featured at the blog of science-fiction publisher Tor; and it sounded interesting enough that I decided to take a chance on it, despite my checkered results of trying to read Clarke in the past. (I’ve read all four of the “Space Odyssey” books, all four of the “Rama” books Clarke had a hand in, and Childhood’s End, but found all nine books lacking in one way or another as good literature.) And alas, that turned out to be the case here too, a book that suffers the exact same problem I found most troubling in these other books too, which is that Clarke struggled profoundly during his career as a fiction author with the basic mechanics of the three-act plot, and thus tended to turn in novels where the first act takes up almost the entirety of the full book, there is no second act at all, and the third act is just blurted out as this gigantic infodump in the last chapter as fast as he could possibly move his fingers over his typewriter.
In this case, that’s in service of an admittedly fascinating Gene Wolfe-like “space fantasy” concept; namely, it’s one billion years in the future, Earth has just one single domed city left on the planet’s surface (one so sophisticated that it can literally run, repair and upgrade itself), the people who are still around know that humanity once went out and colonized the Milky Way galaxy a billion years ago, and now humans don’t and no one understands (or particularly cares anymore) why, other than vague myths about “invaders” who may or may not have destroyed the Earth’s surface, and who may or may not have agreed to let a single enclosed city of humans still exist as long as they promised never to return to space again. To be honest, the main reason this got my attention is because Tor mentioned that it’s a novel about an AI bot who gains sentience and then promptly goes psychotically insane; but unfortunately, while Clarke does mention this insane AI for a couple of paragraphs in his chapter-long expository monologue at the end of the book about what exactly happened to the human race a billion years ago to land them in the situation they’re now in, the insane AI doesn’t actually have anything to do with the main plot, just another of the dozens of interesting concepts that Clarke just randomly threw into this book willy-nilly with no particular rhyme or reason (cloned babies! Living sidewalks! A computer the size of a city! Robots that can walk up and down stairs!), a guy big on ideas but (I’m coming to realize) woefully short on actual writing skills.
Between this and my disappointed reads in recent years of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, it kind of makes me wish I had been a young writer in the 1950s myself, when science-fiction authors could apparently become world-famous just by crapping out whatever barely readable nonsense they wanted, merely because the genre was so new and there weren’t any better books around to unfavorably compare these to. (I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating that if you directly line up these ‘50s “classics” next to the average sci-fi novel coming out today, you’ll get a powerful lesson in how three generations now of passionate genre fans have pushed and elevated sci-fi into a level of quality that these ‘50s pioneers only could’ve dreamed of, which is ultimately a good thing despite the reputations of these ‘50s pioneers getting a good sound thrashing as a result.) Sadly, though, until Zorp and his minions finally visit the human race and grant us this ability to travel through time (All Hail Zorp), my dreams of making a killing in the ‘50s sci-fi community will have to remain just that, so let all this serve as the only warning you need about what you’ll be getting into if you decide to pick this up. Glutton for punishment that I am, I’m still thinking of reading more of Clarke’s work in the future -- in order to read this obscure novel, I had to download a torrent containing every fiction book Clarke ever wrote, and having those 33 novels and the four-volume short story omnibus now sitting patiently on my hard drive is a tempting thing indeed -- but for now, I suppose today’s disappointed write-up will have to do.
P.S. As the always great Manny Rayner says in his own review of this book, and which I had totally forgotten I was going to write about in my review too, one of the inherent problems in sci-fi -- and why it’s so problematic to write a story set One Million Years In The Future -- is that we generally can’t imagine existence more than a few generations in the future from us, which is why Clarke’s Earth One Billion A.D. here sounds pretty much like 1956 Earth but with better gadgets. This is related to what I was going to mention, how again like my previous reads recently of Asimov and Heinlein, the sheer amount of casual sexism on display here is just head-shakingly astonishing in the 2020s, and such grand irony from writers who otherwise advocated for a more enlightened and liberal future. The fact that Clarke can write here about how sexism will have been entirely eliminated by a billion years in the future, then in the very next chapter state the line (I’m paraphrasing), “Like women have been doing for a billion years now, she couldn’t stop obsessively looking at herself in the mirror,” is just the freaking chef’s kiss of unironically unaware sexism, and gives you a good idea of just how baked into the very fabric of society this casual sexism was back then....more
2024 reads, #50. As always with books like these, I have an important ethical disclosure to make here at the start of my write-up, which is that Lucie2024 reads, #50. As always with books like these, I have an important ethical disclosure to make here at the start of my write-up, which is that Lucie Klaassen is one of my freelance clients and that I was actually the editor of this book, so my opinion here is far from “objective” and you should take that into consideration when reading my thoughts. That said, I can honestly say that I really enjoyed this book just as a simple reader, despite the fact that I’ve never actually interacted with a horse even once in my entire life. That’s because of the fascinating theory that Klaassen puts forth here, that highly intelligent horses are essentially like the much better known cats and dogs, in that they have individual personalities, can profoundly sense when the humans around them are happy, sad or angry, and respond to training much better when they can form a profound emotional attachment to the person training them, which you can essentially facilitate through many of the theories we currently have for human mindfulness.
Her guide here to the subject is both a fascinating and a practical one, leading you step by step through the process of connecting with your horse, making sure they’re in the best emotional and mental state possible through external cues like how high or low they’re hanging their heads, what angle their ears are at, and the kinds of noises they’re making as you’re going through the training. Essentially she’s calling for the end of the old mindset behind horse training -- that is, that the horse’s rider is the whip-wielding “master” over that animal, and that your main job is to teach the beast “who’s boss” -- and her results speak for themselves, including a video montage of her training a formerly abused horse through calmness and empathy that became a huge viral hit at Instagram several years ago. I can’t personally attest to the accuracy of the training methods, since I’ve never trained a horse myself; but I can tell you that this was an extremely interesting read even not being a horse person, which makes me suspect that actual horse people will find it mesmerizing. It comes strongly recommended in this spirit. ...more
2024 reads, #39. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #39. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #40. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #40. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #41. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #41. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #42. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #42. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #43. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #43. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #44. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #44. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #45. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #45. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #46. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #46. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #47. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #47. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #48. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #48. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #49. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #49. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 book reviews, #36. I’m 55 this year, which means I’ve begun developing “old people problems” for the first time in my life; specifically, I’m sta2024 book reviews, #36. I’m 55 this year, which means I’ve begun developing “old people problems” for the first time in my life; specifically, I’m starting to develop arthritis, and the pain that this causes is starting to put a major crimp in my life as an urban-dwelling heavy pedestrian, something I find quite alarming. So when this book popped up in the “newly acquired” list at the Chicago Public Library, I went ahead and put it on reserve right away, and just got done reading it today.
It’s well worth your time, although I will say that it essentially only repeats information I’m reading in all the other wellness books I’ve been reading these days, confirming yet again what the latest research in modern medicine has been seemingly saying over and over in the last ten years -- that conditions we used to think of as naturally occurring ones in old age that nothing can be done about, from arthritis to high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s to Parkinson’s, can in fact be largely prevented by a change in lifestyle, as well as focusing on a few specific new things once you get over the age of 50. To her credit, though, author Meredith Warner (a veteran orthopedic surgeon and professor at Louisiana State University) describes this well-known advice using an acronym I’ve never heard before, the easily remembered MEDS which stands for Mindset, Exercise, Diet and Sleep. Or in other words, if you adopt the mindset that you really can change your health for the better through your own actions; reduce stress through meditation; get the government’s recommended weekly amount of moderate exercise, including resistance training; follow the Mediterranean eating plan, plus add a few supplements to your life (most importantly omega-3); plan your meals to always take place at certain times, and go at least 12 hours a day without eating anything at all (i.e. no late-night snacking); and get a good solid seven hours or more of sleep each night (including going to bed at the same time each night), you can largely eliminate the pain that comes with orthopedic conditions such as arthritis, as well as lower your chances of getting degenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s to almost zero.
It’s welcome news, even if Warner isn’t saying anything particularly new or radical here; in fact, you could say that the news is even better precisely because it’s not radical new information, but merely a confirmation of what health book after health book after health book in the 21st century is now saying about how to live a life that keeps you healthy far into old age without the need for medications or surgeries at all. Warner calls the MEDS protocol “lifestyle medicine,” which I think is a very smart term for it; so I’ll be calling it that myself from now, and considering it a legitimate form of mainstream medicine that all of us oldies should be adhering to on a daily basis. The book comes strongly recommended in this spirit, that you won’t be learning anything new here that you can’t read in dozens of other books on the subject, but that Warner puts it all together in a smart and easy-to-understand way in this particular version....more
2024 reads, #35. DID NOT FINISH. I wanted very badly to like this book; for one thing, just that title and cover art alone is the entire reason I pick2024 reads, #35. DID NOT FINISH. I wanted very badly to like this book; for one thing, just that title and cover art alone is the entire reason I picked up the book in the first place, once again proving the old adage, “You can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can decide what to read next by one.” Then after it arriving from the Chicago Public Library, I learned that it’s the latest title by a new imprint of the small press Zando, in which they asked the delightfully dark and weird Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) to hand-pick a series of unknown experimental female authors who deserve more attention, which is an admirable project and one that deserves our support. Then there’s the engaging story concept itself, a subversive coming-of-age tale about a ten-year-old girl who has recently discovered cursing as her new religion, as she develops a fascination for a twenty-something juvenile delinquent who’s been forced by the courts to move into the sort-of co-op, sort-of halfway home where our hero Molly (the “Kittentits” of the book’s title) lives with her zany dad and even zanier housemates, the whole thing set in Chicago where I live, which is always a nice bonus. And if this wasn’t enough, there’s a bit of a slipstream alternative history going on here too; in the world of Kittentits, Chicago is about to host a World’s Fair in 1992 to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the famous one that first put them on the global cultural map, while no such fair took place here in our version of the multiverse.
But alas, there were just too many problems in this book for me to be able to get into it in any other way than a purely intellectual, stroking my chin while murmuring, “Hmm, that was clever” way, which perhaps reflects the fact that author Holly Wilson is a professional academe with a PhD in creative writing, which as we were just discussing a few weeks ago tends to be the death knell for the ability to write really engaging fiction anymore. The main problem is that Wilson has written this entire thing in an extremely experimental style, one that omits all quotation marks, is always dropping words you would normally find in real conversations, and really playing up the slang, in order to present this highly stylized prose that’s simply difficult to follow along with; then she marries it to the kind of “quirky unto infinity” milieu that became so big in the popular culture in the early 2000s (think Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, etc.; and let’s not even get started on those fucking Skittles commercials).
That’s not bad unto itself, but unfortunately for Wilson, that endlessly quirky style really got played out among audiences by the end of that decade, meaning that she’s not far enough away from those years to present this as a retro-quirky novel but not close enough to those years for readers to be able to enjoy it unironically. Or I suppose I should say “enjoy it in an ironic way unironically,” which is a big part of why this style burned itself out; by the time Postmodernism wheezed out its last gasps before its death, right around Obama’s first Presidential win in 2008 which birthed our current Wokeism artistic movement, it had become so masturbatory and deadpan and self-referential, it was impossible to enjoy it anymore in any kind of simple, unironic way.
So, while I applaud Wilson for doing an excellent job at late-period Postmodernism, I have to confess that I simply don’t want to read even a single new book in that style ever again, which made me lose interest in this book quickly despite it actually being well-written (or at least as “well-written” as you can say about a book that’s deliberately trying to challenge readers to put it back down again, one of the biggest problematic side-effects of devoting your entire life to academic scholarly study of creative writing, that the obsessive desire to “out-fancy” your peers results in books that practically scream, “I DARE you to make it to the last page of this novel!”). That doesn’t necessarily mean that you should avoid it, but certainly you deserve to know what you’re getting yourself into before you pick it up....more
2024 reads, #34. It’s summer, which means I’m back to my usual summer reads, a series of easy-to-digest genre novels (also sometimes known as “airport and beach reads”) being done to honor 10-year-old Jason, who used to read the kid’s version of these each year for his public library’s summer reading program. CS Forester’s “Horatio Hornblower” books are a recent addition to my summer completist list, and fall under a category that I call “Grandpa Lit,” which I just recently aged into myself (I’m 55 this year), called this mostly because the books in this category are ones I remember my own grandfathers reading back in the 1970s when I was a kid, and seem like the kinds of books that only grandpas can fully get into (including not only these but old-style Westerns by people like Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour, military technothrillers along the lines of Tom Clancy, and more).
Like with the first one I read last summer, 1937’s Beat to Quarters (my review), I’m tempted to say that you actually need to know a lot less in advance about the intricacies of tall sail ships to enjoy these than you might expect at first (for those who don’t know, these all take place within the British Navy of the late 1700s and early 1800s, as they fight France in the romantically historic Napoleonic Wars); but upon reflection, perhaps it’s more that here in late middle age, I’ve finally picked up enough general information about sailing here and there over the years and decades to be able to follow along with these books in a way a younger person can’t, thus helping to explain even more why these might only appeal to grandfathers and others who have lived long enough a life to actually be able to figure out what’s going on here in these jargon-filled books full of references to “quarterdecks” and “tops’ls” and the like.
And for sure, another reason grandpas gravitate towards these kinds of books is that they’re unabashedly and unapologetically old-fashioned in their morals and culture, which is something important for younger people to understand before picking one up; in the world of the Hornblower novels, men are men, women are mostly pregnant and silent, God has chosen the rich to be the natural masters over the poor (and He has given them happy permission to beat the poor with knotted ropes anytime they put up a fuss about it), and people of color largely just don’t exist at all, with most of the storylines so far revolving one way or another around the idea of the people of southern Europe, in countries like Spain and Italy, being shiftless, lazy ne’er-do-wells, constantly causing trouble for the “True Gentlemen” of northern Europe who are always having to come down with their big impressive warboats and save their incompetent asses yet again.
That said, if you can embrace a milieu such as this, the Hornblower books are undeniably thrilling adventures, giving us a sweeping look at a planet quickly being corralled and mapped by the newest generation of these tech-forward, highly proficient tall ships, a world in which navies are all-powerful because water is the one and only way humans have in these years to move large amounts of goods quickly, meaning that even the largest army in the world is quickly in trouble if their navy can’t get food and ammunition to them regularly. Forester very deliberately packs in just about everything that could possibly happen to one of these naval ships into each one of these books, deliberately to crank up the drama and stakes to a ridiculously high level, where it’s a matter of life or death pretty much every week of their sometimes year-long voyages; in the first book this all happened over on the west coast of Central America, as Hornblower and company help a Nicaraguan general who has declared his independence against invading French forces, while this second book is set in the much more expected area of France’s southern coast and Spain’s eastern coast, with his ship being just one of half a dozen traveling together (the “line” of the book’s title), and whose mission is this time the much more general “try to screw things up for France in as many ways as you possibly can.”
This leads us to all kinds of adventures, including lots of daring raids on occupied Spanish forts in the middle of the night (not to mention a little retconned contemporary social commentary from Forester, writing this in the late 1930s, and having Hornblower think about how the Spanish are fated to have a country-destroying civil war in the future if they don’t get their act together), all while he takes an equal amount of time to simply describe what daily life was like on these ships, a harsh martial life where it’s just taken for granted that some humans are naturally the masters over others simply because God made it that way, and where the tiniest infractions can often lead to public beatings while the offender’s crewmates are forced to stand silently and watch. That’s the main reason to read these, because they describe in exacting detail a world that not only doesn’t exist anymore but that never really existed in the first place, taking the events that might happen to half a dozen ships over their course of their entire lives back then and squeezing them all into just one ship over the course of a single year here, then making everything work out great for the British people in charge of things just from their natural can-do spirit and God-given smarts above the rest of those other, lesser European states that surround them. (Not for nothing were these novels written while in the middle of England being bombed back into the Stone Age by an all-powerful Germany at the beginning of World War Two, an attempt by Forester to nostalgically remember the “good ol’ days” when the sun never set on an unstoppable British Empire.) They should be read with this mindset; but brother, if you do, you’ll get a thrilling experience unlike any other in modern literature, and they come recommended in this highly specific, highly grandpa-friendly spirit.
CS Forester "Horatio Hornblower" books being reviewed in this series: Beat to Quarters (1937) | Ship of the Line (1938) | Flying Colours (1939) | Commodore Hornblower (1945) | Lord Hornblower (1946) | Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (1950) | Lieutenant Hornblower (1952) | Hornblower and the Atropos (1953) | Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies (1958) | Hornblower and the Hotspur (1962) | Hornblower During the Crisis (1967)...more
2024 reads, #33. I picked up this book in my ongoing attempts to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kin2024 reads, #33. I picked up this book in my ongoing attempts to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, in order to stay on top of the latest trends so to better help my freelance clients who publish under the same circumstances. In this case you can think of the story as being essentially half-and-half a romance novel and a cozy mystery novel, about a young woman who accidentally reconnects with a man from her childhood who used to brutally bully her (it’s okay -- it was actually his pushy girlfriend at the time who forced him to do it), but who then discovers halfway through the book that her estranged father who she’s never met is actually a serial killer, and is back in town to make her life a living hell.
To its credit, this book has the opposite problem from most quickie Kindle Unlimited reads -- it’s not way too short but rather way too long -- but that nonetheless results in a problematic reading experience, with lots of scenes that should’ve been just summed up in a single sentence (“like Bob had mentioned, the blood test down at the hospital only took ten minutes”) but that instead go in excruciating detail for pages upon pages (“We arrived at the hospital. Bob opened the door. I walked through the door. We asked the receptionist where room 116 was. She told us to go down the hall and take a right. We went down the hall and took a right”...). Combined with a plot that’s pretty easy to guess, and a writing style that’s fairly pedestrian (be prepared for every character to be the ur-archetype of whatever kind of person they represent -- the gay guy’s the gayest gay who’s ever gayed, the villain is the most villainous villain who’s ever villained), that results in a book that was just barely mediocre in this case, which is why it’s getting 2 stars out of 5 when usually I give so-so Kindle Unlimited novels 4 stars so to embrace the lowered expectations of this form of publishing. Go into it, if at all, with this warning in mind....more
2024 reads, #32. It’s summer again here in Chicago, which means it’s time for me to delve back into my usual summer reads, fairly easy-to-read genre titles (often also called “airport and beach reads”) being read to honor ten-year-old Jason, who used to read such books in kid’s form for his public library’s summer reading program every year. Ian Fleming’s original 14 James Bond novels from the 1950s and ‘60s are a great series to add to this, because as we’ve discussed in previous reviews, they turn out to be almost nothing like the bombastic, overly melodramatic movie adaptations that are even more famous by now, but rather are tight little thrillers set much more in the real world than you might expect from this name now so closely associated with expensive action setpieces, futuristic secret weapons, and the gigantic boobs of that year’s Playboy Playmate of the Year (or at least if you came of age during the ‘70s Roger Moore era of the Bond films, like I did).
And indeed, this fourth book in the series, originally published in 1956, continues that trend, with Bond this time doing a police-style investigation into a black market ring that has risen up among the African diamond industry, and with not a single gadget from Q in sight besides a hidden compartment in Bond’s luggage to hide a gun’s silencer. This time the action is mainly set in the US, and it’s easy to see why so many people consider this book to be the very first time in the series that everything really clicks in a satisfying way; fresh off an excursion to America himself, Fleming gets his across-the-pond setting very, very right here, and also finally balances Bond himself out from the cruel sociopath territory he’s dipped far too much into in the previous books.
To remind you, Fleming started the Bond novels in the first place not because he necessarily wanted to write secret agent stories, but rather that he wanted to write stories about gambling, a favorite pastime of his in his personal life (back when gambling was still largely illegal in the UK, part of what made it so thrilling for Fleming), and made the main gambling character a secret agent simply because he thought it’d be more interesting than writing a book about a dentist gambler or a truck-driver gambler. That led to a first book, 1953’s Casino Royale (my review), that got all the details about casinos and the game baccarat exactly right, but gave us a 007 who was unnecessarily mean, openly misogynistic, and who could barely function in normal society. After all, as Fleming explicitly states in that first book, the main reason various members of MI-6 were handpicked to become “00” agents was because they were people no one else at the agency could stand, and so were put in a special division where they basically stayed out in the field 365 days a year so that no one else back at the home office ever had to deal with them.
After finding much bigger success with the books than he was expecting, though, Fleming started toning down and rounding out the character in subsequent titles, until we have a Bond here who’s now a regular habituate of the Special Service office in London, with a healthier if not still sexist attitude towards women (in this book he has the closest thing he’s had yet to an actual romantic relationship, making it clearer here that it’s not that he hates women in general, but that he only likes particularly complicated women who happen to come from dark, interesting backgrounds). I mean, sure, he’s still haughty and arrogant (he basically spends the entire book dismissing both the CIA and the American mafia as worthless soft pansies), and he engages in the same casual racism as pretty much every other white male did in the 1950s (get read to hear Bond use the n-word a number of times here, to which his exasperated CIA buddy admonishes him, “Now, James, you can’t use that word in the US anymore -- in fact, you’re no longer even allowed to order a jigger of liquor in a bar, but must call it a ‘jigro,’ ha ha”); but when all is said and done, this is a more enlightened and certainly a more vulnerable Bond than we’ve seen in the previous three books, much to the series’ benefit.
What really sells this book over the previous ones, though, is that Fleming picks such interesting milieus in which to set his story, and then writes out these milieus in such exacting, memorable ways, based mostly on him having just finished visiting these places himself in real life a year before writing this. So after first flying in to New York on the brand-new “jumbo jets” of the age, he’s then off to Saratoga Springs for the first major plot point, which Fleming fascinatingly describes as still basically a backwoods village whose one and only thing going for it is its famous racetrack (and if you’ve ever wanted to see James Bond drink Miller High Lifes while having a country-fried steak at a highway-exit diner, then brother, you’ve picked the right book); then he’s off to a pre-gentrified Las Vegas, which as Fleming interestingly reminds us, New York didn’t even have direct flights to in the 1950s, visitors basically having to fly to Los Angeles first and then take a rickety propeller plane from there to Sin City; and then eventually he heads back to England on the RMS Queen Elizabeth, the same luxury ocean liner Fleming himself took during his own trip home from America, where we have basically the most exciting action scene of the entire novel, one that involves Bond climbing around the vertical outer skin of the ship using nothing but a makeshift ladder made out of his cabin’s bedsheets.
That’s really what saves these novels, is that the action itself is much more of the realistic Jason Bourne type, versus the “jumping out of helicopters while wearing skis” nonsense of the Hollywood movies; and that combined with the more well-rounded, easier to injure, and easier to root for Bond makes this fourth novel of the series easily the best one yet, and definitely the place to start if you’re going to be only a casual fan of this series and not a completist like me. (That said, get ready for yet more ridiculous descriptions of what British people considered “fine dining” in the 1950s; there is not one but two separate times here, for example, when characters say with a lot of admiration that their dinner beef “was boiled for so long, it can be cut with a fork,” which I guess is something people found pleasurable about red meat in the ‘50s?) Today it becomes the first Bond book of the series to get a full five stars from me, and I’m now eagerly looking forward to the next title, 1957’s From Russia, With Love, come this time next summer. I hope you’ll have a chance to join me here again for that one.
Ian Fleming books being reviewed in this series: Casino Royale (1953) | Live and Let Die (1954) | Moonraker (1955) | Diamonds Are Forever (1956) | From Russia, With Love (1957) | Dr. No (1958) | Goldfinger (1959) | For Your Eyes Only (1960) | Thunderball (1961) | The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) | On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963) | You Only Live Twice (1964) | The Man With the Golden Gun (1965) | Octopussy and the Living Daylights (1966)...more
2024 reads, #31. I picked up this book in my ongoing attempts to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kin2024 reads, #31. I picked up this book in my ongoing attempts to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, in order to stay on top of the latest trends so to better help my freelance clients who publish under the same circumstances, in this case a paranormal cozy mystery novel instead of the romance titles that usually make up my KU bread and butter. As far as that’s concerned, this is a perfectly fine one; but brother, author Cielle Kenner leans hard and heavy on the “cozy” part of “cozy mystery” here, the kind of book where someone doesn’t just run a cupcake store but literally the greatest cupcake store in all of human history, and where someone doesn’t just own a B&B but literally the most delightful B&B that’s ever existed, and the villains are not just normal baddies but literally the most cartoonishly evil, mustache-twirling animals you’ll ever meet in your life. This particular style of Mary-Sueism (i.e. Mary Sue as an entire geographical location, not just one person) runs rampant in the cozy mystery genre, I’m coming to realize as I read more and more of these kinds of books, where the small town that makes it “cozy” is not just any ol’ regular small town but the Platonian ur-example of the ultimate most absolute perfect small town that has ever existed on planet Earth and that ever will exist until the end of time. That’s just fine as far as meeting the expectations of what many fans of this genre are looking for, which is why for this book I would normally give 3 and a half stars to, I’m rounding up instead to 4 stars; but it’s nonetheless going to grate on the nerves of those who prefer a more realistic and natural tone to their small-town mystery stories, which is why I can’t in good conscience give it any higher of a score than this. If the idea of ghost kittens delights you, by all means pick this up; but if you’re already finding that concept alone to be too treacly for your tastes, then you should probably skip this book altogether, because it starts with ghost kittens in Chapter 1 and just gets more and more sugary sweet the farther it goes....more
2024 reads, #30. This was my latest attempt to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, in 2024 reads, #30. This was my latest attempt to read widely and deeply within the world of quickie genre novels published through Kindle Unlimited, in order to stay on top of the latest developments and help out my freelance clients who write and publish under the same circumstances. I would consider this book a textbook example of what I typically expect from such novels, by which I mean it’s aggressively mediocre, the kind of book that deliberately chooses to not expend even one ounce more of energy than absolutely needed to qualify as A Book That Exists And That I Suppose You Can Read In A Single Day If You’re Super Bored Without Necessarily Becoming Infuriated At The Author. As such, it of course features cardboard-cutout characters, an easily guessed plot, the absolute minimum amount of pages needed to count as a “novel” while ironically featuring a storyline that’s much too slow, and a prose style that maddeningly adds a new paragraph break after every single freaking sentence in the entire book, which makes me want to go to the author’s house and give her a high-school tutorial on “How to Write Narrative Prose When It’s Not a Twitter Update, Sheesh, Enough Already.”
I mean, I suppose all this is acceptable, which is why it’s getting three stars from me -- Lord knows, Kindle Unlimited is now filled with millions of these kinds of lowest-common-denominator books, and they’re apparently delivering just enough to keep their always-grinding readers satiated through their book-a-day habits; it’s just always disappointing to me to see authors who don’t even try to be even a little bit better than the absolute minimum required of them to break even with their latest title and thus afford to live another day. I always try to push my clients to be better than this, and books like today’s are a good reminder of why that’s so important for anyone who aspires to something more than “eh, I guess this will do.” Inhale it on your next bored Tuesday with this warning in mind. ...more
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