PREMISE: A girl named Rose is riding her new bike near home in Deadwood, South Dakota, when she falls through the earth. She wakes up at the bottom of a square-shaped hole, its walls glowing with intricate carvings. But the firemen who come to save her peer down upon something even stranger: a little girl in the palm of a giant metal hand.
I absolutely flew through this book and love the way the story is told via interviews and reports and the odd journal entry. It’s written in a really addictive way and, having now checked it out further, has two sequels which I will doubtless bag at some point. It feels like the literary version of a Transformers film; it’s probably not going to win the Nobel or Booker prizes and probably not even the Arthur C. Clarke award, but…it’s fantastically entertaining, intriguing, has a great premise and takes it in a good direction and is just a fun read. And, like watching a Hollywood summer blockbuster, sometimes that’s all you need.
PREMISE: The Expanse primarily tells the story of the crew of the gunship Rocinante over more than four decades as they navigate criminal plots, solar-galactic politics, wars, and an alien mystery. The book series is made up of nine novels and nine novellas.
Man, I love sci-fi. And yet, relatively speaking, I hardly read any at all. It’s a strange paradox which could easily be dramatised in a sci-fi book or film. The Sci-fi Paradox, it shall be called. One man, alone in the blogging universe with only a handful of readers to hear him, wants to read more sci-fi books but never does, and he just can’t figure out why. It’s got instant bestseller written all over it.
I’ve read some Peter Hamilton and quite a few Iain M Banks and a few other sci-fi books here and there but nothing has comes close to The Expanse books for me. They are pitched absolutely perfectly in terms of story and characters and then all the spacey tech stuff to keep the geeks happy. The good guys and gals are all so likeable, the bad ones absolute bellends. There’s alieny creatures and gore, fast spaceships with big guns, interesting and colourful and dangerous worlds and mind-blowing extraterrestrial entities. These books literally have everything and – most importantly – have a cracking story that runs through all 9 books and within the novellas and finishes just as good as it started.
PREMISE: At 3:15 p.m. on April 29, 1992, a jury acquitted three white Los Angeles Police Department officers charged with using excessive force to subdue a black man named Rodney King, and failed to reach a verdict on the same charges involving a fourth officer. Less than two hours later, the city exploded in violence that lasted six days. In nearly 121 hours, fifty-three lives were lost. But there were even more deaths unaccounted for: violence that occurred outside of active rioting sites by those who used the chaos to viciously settle old scores.
All Involved vividly re-creates this turbulent and terrifying time, set in a sliver of Los Angeles largely ignored by the media during the riots. The novel tells seventeen interconnected first-person narratives with characters that capture the voices of gang members, firefighters, graffiti kids, and nurses caught up in these extraordinary circumstances.
Holy shit, I’m learning a lot whilst doing this blog. Today, whilst doing my usual Goodreads look at what others think about this book (I really don’t know whether it can be considered research or whether I’m now genuinely just looking for people to take the piss out of), I learned about ‘#ownvoices’. Now, I’d not heard of this before but Denise let me in on it with this:
“Book has 17 different POV’s. All of them diverse and most of them dark, raw and hideous. It matters that the author is a white male from Colorado. To be fair my reading experience may have been different a couple of years ago. I would have still found it raw, gritty and disturbingly violent, but now I am concerned about #ownvoices”. Which Google AI explained to me means this:
“OwnVoices is a movement that emphasizes the importance of authors writing about stories that align with their own lived experiences and identities, particularly marginalized ones. It highlights the authenticity and credibility of narratives when authors have a personal connection to the characters and issues they represent”.
I’m not going to add anything new or particularly earth-shattering to the actual debate (and whether I agree with it or not is largely irrelevant). However, my issue is with Denise’s comment “my reading experience may have been different a couple of years ago”. Why? Why does it matter who wrote the book? And if we start taking the stance that a book should only be written by someone who has the relevant life experience, then where the fuck does that leave us? Can a white writer not include a black character? Can a straight black writer not write about a gay Asian? Please explain to me what is wrong with someone taking time to learn about a subject in order to write about it? I’m pretty sure Ryan Gattis didn’t just make all this up? His research must have been pretty staggering and I think – in all his books – his characters are so well-rounded and very much real. In fact, if I hadn’t stumbled across ‘#Ownvoices’ I wouldn’t have questioned the authenticity of this book at all.
This book is fantastic and everyone should read it. Which is what I will also say about Safe and The System whenever I get around to adding them here. Ryan Gattis is an awesome writer.
PREMISE: After three years’ hard time, minding no-one’s business but his own, Ray Klein wins his parole and chances his hand at a romance with prison psychiatrist Juliette Devlin. That same day, tribal war erupts and the prison – and its infirmary – falls into the hands of its inmates. Klein must choose either to claim his freedom and leave the ones he cares for to die, or risk everything and fight.
I’m not entirely sure when I read this so I’m going to assume it was the year it came out, 1994. Man, 1994…the year of the first Playstation and the year Kurt Cobain died. The first U.K. National Lottery was this year too, and having wasted more money only last night on trying to bag the £200m Euromillions, my lottery luck hasn’t changed at all since 1994. I swear it’s rigged.
On the book front, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk To Freedom was published along with – more significantly, for me anyway – Volume 1 of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. An utter classic. Other books published that year: Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor and Denis Lehane’s A Drink Before The War, which I actually read last year and loved. If you ask Goodreads to show you the top 200 books of 1994, Green River Rising isn’t on the list. And this is a list that has (albeit scraping in at number 196) a book entitled “When God Writes Your Love Story: The Ultimate Approach to Guy/Girl Relationships”. A book that I ought never read for fear of breaking my promise to keep this blog negative-free.
My point (if I even have one) is that Green River Rising, for me, was one of the best things of 1994 and although I haven’t read it since (I’m hoping to very soon) I’d imagine it will still be one of the best things of any year. A great book.
PREMISE: When jumped-up reality TV star Buck Nance aggravates the crowd in a Key West bar, he incites a riot and vanishes in the melee. His hapless agent Lane Coolman should have been by Buck’s side, but has been accidentally taken hostage by two petty criminals who now think they can turn a quick profit by ransoming an LA talent agent.
As the search for Buck continues, the mystery draws in a broad cast of characters from across the island including Andrew Yancy, the disgraced cop who now works restaurants on roach patrol; a delusional fan of Buck’s show; the local sheriff who’s desperate for re-election; a shady lawyer and his gold-digging fiancée; the gay mayor and his restauranteur partner; a Mafioso hotelier; and a redheaded con artist named Merry who, using a razor blade and a high-speed car, has developed a signature way of luring in her victims.
I feel like I’m starting to judge these forays into the Goodreads 1-starrers pretty well now. Surely no one can have a bad word to say about this baby? But yes…yes they can.
Kristin got to 70% before calling it quits. You’re so close Kristin and have come such a long way. I get quitting a book early because it’s just not working but why read 70% of a book you clearly hated?
Vio commented “I’m so tired of florida man humor”. Can’t help but think Carl Hiaasen is bearing the brunt of Vio’s failed Floridian relationships here. Hey Vio, it’s not Carl’s fault…
Liz gave us the cryptic, anti-American “Too American, too brash, too strange compared to my life. And it wasn’t”. And it wasn’t what? Don’t leave us hanging Liz.
Clare minced no words at all by simply stating “hate.”. No capital H but a full stop. Curious grammar.
My favourite though is from Sandy, with the insightful “Written by a man, edited by a man…obviously knows zero about shaving pubs” (sic). I don’t even know where to start with this one but if you’re going to knock the editorial work then at least get your own right.
I love Carl Hiaasen’s books and, in particular, his sense of humour. He is one funny man and I laughed out loud so much throughout this novel (as I do with all his books). Hilarious, sharp, stupid, entertaining, very easy to read. What’s not to like?
PREMISE: Evelyn Hardcastle will be murdered at 11:00 p.m. There are eight days, and eight witnesses for you to inhabit. We will only let you escape once you tell us the name of the killer. Understood? Then let’s begin . . .
Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. And some of his hosts are more helpful than others . . .
Here’s another one. Another book with such a great premise that you wished you’d thought of it yourself. It’s kind of like Groundhog Day meets Quantum Leap meets Freaky Friday meets Miss Marple. What a film that would be. And what a book this is. I read somewhere that it took Stuart Turton three months to plan out the book on a huge spreadsheet where he detailed every two minutes of every character’s day and their location in the house at each point and when you read the book you can easily understand why he needed to do this.
This is literally a book to get lost in; a book that needs 100% of your attention every time you pick it up as the term ‘labyrinthine plotting’ doesn’t even begin to describe it. The real genius, however, is that Mr. Turton pulls it off with aplomb. Absolutely perfect reading escapism.
PREMISE: It’s 1962 and physics student Grace Pulansky believes she has met the man of her dreams, Robert Jones, while serving up slices of pecan pie at the local diner. But then the FBI shows up, with their fedoras and off-the-rack business suits, and accuses him of being a bomb-planting mass-murderer.
Finding herself on the run with Jones across America’s Southwest, the discoveries awaiting Gracie will undermine everything she knows about the universe.
Her story will reveal how scores of lives – an identity-swapping rock star, a mourning lover in ancient China, Nazi hunters in pursuit of a terrible secret, a crazed artist in pre-revolutionary France, an astronaut struggling with a turbulent interplanetary future, and many more – are interconnected across space and time by love, grief, and quantum entanglement.
Yeah, I know…what a premise. That’s exactly what I thought. Man, when I stumble across books like this on Goodreads or Amazon I swear a little bit of ‘man wee’ leaks out. This is my reading sweet spot, my narrative nirvana. I love stories with multiple strands, narrators, viewpoints etc that all come together (and sometimes don’t) at the end. And this one is an absolute beauty. His first novel, I believe (I should really research and confirm that but that sounds like something a more professional blogger would do) and hopefully the first of many. It’s such a fantastic book.
PREMISE: When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency.
Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public.
What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.
The Exalted Bellendage of Goodreads once again delivers for The Circle. Some great 1-star reviews (which, as we know, are rarely accompanied by anything objective and, when we’re lucky, contain some fantastic bile and profanities). Brad wrote 1400 words (broken down into 8 subsections) on how much he disliked it and then at the end provided a link to his review of the sequel! Jarrod simply stated “The worst handjob I’ve ever had” (his accompanying picture suggests a person who gives himself shit handjobs on a nightly basis). Kate goes with the one-word, one-emoji “Frown 😦 “. Useful. Sera stated “I didn’t feel satisfied when the book ends”, presumably writing this while she was driving her DeLorean. Nick just went with “Sucked buttfarts” (made me laugh) and Juliette H weighed in with “Wat een kut boek”, helping me learn the Dutch word for ‘shitty’. There’s also an alarming amount of people mentioning 50 Shades Of Grey in their review, which probably says a lot.
Is it the best book in the world? No, not at all. But it’s an intriguing story, definitely an interesting subject and it’s well-written and entertaining. That’s good enough for me.
PREMISE: A resident of the fictional Los Angeles suburb of Dickens, the narrating character, Me, a black man with an impoverished upbringing, is hauled before the Supreme Court of the United States for attempting to re-segregate a local school and bring back slavery. What follows is a biting attack on racism in America.
What a premise for a book. Obviously difficult for a white man to pull off, but in the hands of someone as naturally funny and gifted as Paul Beatty, it’s a belter. I would imagine there’s a thousand-odd reviews of this book on the net that use the term ‘biting satire’. In fact, any book blogger worth his salt would research this and find out exactly how many, but I just can’t be arsed. My time would be better spent contacting Mr. Beatty to ask him for another book (this being his last one, published in 2015). In fact, I’m going to do that right now. Although with that said, I don’t seem to have his contact details in my phone. Any book blogger worth his salt would research this and find out how to contact him or his publisher, but I just can’t be arsed. Mr. Beatty…if you’re reading this (??!!!!) please give us another one…
PREMISE: The Six Stories series by Matt Wesolowski is a collection of interconnected thriller novels that focus on true crime investigations, often with a dark, folkloric or supernatural edge. Each book follows a central case where six individuals connected to the event share their accounts via interviews on a podcast hosted by journalist Scott King.
In my blog manifesto (copies available by request) I state that I don’t write anything negative on here. Not because I’m a good person or that I’m trying to attract sponsorship from the Church (the constant swearing may have put paid to that) but mainly due to the fact that who am I to judge someone’s work? All book reviews (you’ll find none here) are completely subjective and ultimately one person’s view on whether they liked the book or not. One man’s Dr. Zhivago is another man’s Dr. Shipman. Or something.
Anyway, with all that said…sometimes to explain how good something is you have to compare it to something shit. And there are two authors I’ve previously read who are insanely popular but whom I will likely never read again who could benefit from reading Matt Wesolowski’s books and see how proper plotting and pacing, twists and reveals, suspense and pure page-turning addictiveness is done. All six of these babies are top notch.
Portable Wonderland 