PREMISE: A guy suddenly time travels forward 24 hours. And then proceeds to do this every day from then on, with the time doubling each day..
I’m back, bitches. And this book is the reason. Well, that and the relentless onslaught of time and me just not finding enough of it. Which is ironic, given this book’s theme. Man, maybe that’s why I’m back on here? Shit, I didn’t think of that. Whoah…deep, scary stuff. Or maybe it’s because I just stopped fucking around and decided to get back to doing a few things I love doing.
I read There Is No Antimemetics Division (post to follow) earlier this year and was convinced the 2026 Portland Award was all sewn up but this baby is going to push it close. I’ll admit – I’ve struggled a bit the last few months with really getting into fiction but along came this and all is right with the world again.
Well, it’s not, obviously. The world is about as fucked up as it’s ever been at the moment (I’m currently reading One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This…an absolute must-read for any right-minded person…and should be forced up the rectum of every wrong-minded person) but in terms of reading, I’m back in the saddle.
This book is glorious, addictive, inventive and absolutely mind-blowing.
PREMISE: Two kids steal two horses from the town’s local asshole and he and his equally assholey sons go after them.
That’s it. That’s all I’m putting. Well, that probably won’t be true by the time I’ve finished writing this bit. I never plan that far ahead. In fact this very sentence I’m writing now I had no idea at all five minutes ago that I’d be writing it. Although I guess I’ve just summed up the very action of writing. I wonder if Mark Z. Danielewski (MZD from now on) writes that way or whether he knows exactly what each line, sentence and paragraph is going to say. Because man, can he write. And this novel is 1200 pages long and – perhaps strangely for MZD, based on his previous books – aside from one page, this is all solid, full-page writing, so he’s written a lot.
More than any other book I’ve written about on this blog, this is the most difficult to fully elucidate why I recommend it, without spoilers. And without contradicting myself at every turn. Because it’s fair to say that this won’t be for everyone. It’s painfully slow paced, but in a good way. Like the pain you get when you’re having a tattoo done. Oddly addictive. It’s self-indulgent in places but so intelligently well-written that that self-indulgence is so enjoyable. It’s frustrating in a few places too when the story goes off on a tangent that changes the pace somewhat, but you end up just being excited as to where it’s now going. This is a story that most writers would have told in 200 pages. Or 400 pages with a bit of padding. Or 600 pages with a shed load of backstories, plus extra padding. Or 800 pages with a shed load of backstories, extra padding plus a couple hundred pages of inane rambling. Or 1000 pages with all of the above plus pictures every 4 pages. That MZD has told this story over 1200 pages and yet still made it so unbelievably readable is some sort of miracle.
You know what I think this book is? It’s a book that contains a story which you read because you love writing. Or the form of writing, the art involved, the actual act and skill of creating a story, a novel and a book. There’s essentially nothing unique or different about the story itself; it’s all about how the story is told and how, as a reader, you approach and enjoy how it is being told. That’s the bit that I recommend.
In my usual way, I’m going to finish by referencing a Goodreads review – just the one as it’s pretty breathtaking in it’s level of utter dumbfuckery. It’s posted by Roy, who hasn’t included a picture of himself as it’s more than likely he’s got multiple facial features more than the rest of us as a result of decades of familial inbreeding. Here’s a couple of lines from the Royster:
“Every female character is intelligent and flawless, with most of them insufferable with their attitudes towards the male characters, who are all eventually portrayed as pathetic, cowardly and/or terrible father figures. It’s nauseating to see in modern media that the only way female characters can be strong is by putting down and insulting white male characters. The only male character that doesn’t suffer from this is the effeminately written character of Kalin.”
Yep, Roy’s gone the misogynistic, racist route. And incorrect as well. Every female character is not flawless (did you even read the scenes with Allison and Sondra? I’m assuming not as you got one of their names wrong) and quite how you’ve read MZD’s portrayal of Kalin as effeminate I’ve no idea. I’d like to see you do what Kalin did in this story. Still, I’m too mature than to poke fun at a stranger this way so I’ll just finish by saying that Roy is clearly an old white guy with a small willy.
PREMISE: The year is 1873, and a bison hunter named Samson travels the Kansas plains, full of hope for his new country. The year is 1975, and an adolescent girl named Bea walks those very same plains; pregnant, mute, and raised in extreme seclusion, she lands in an institution, where a well-meaning psychiatrist struggles to decipher the pictures she draws of her past. The year is 2027 and, after a series of devastating storms, a tenacious engineer named Paul has left behind his banal suburban existence to build a floating city above the drowned streets that were once New Orleans. There with his poet daughter he rules over a society of dreamers and vagabonds who salvage vintage dresses, ferment rotgut wine out of fruit, paint murals on the ceiling of the Superdome, and try to write the story of their existence. The year is 2073, and Moon has heard only stories of the blue planet–Earth, as they once called it, now succumbed entirely to water. Now that Moon has come of age, she could become a mother if she wanted to-if only she understood what a mother is. Alone on Mars with her two alien uncles, she must decide whether to continue her family line and repopulate humanity on a new planet.
I absolutely loved this book. So much so, that it’s made it into my Hall of Fame. But before I get to why and spurt a load of superlatives to back it up, let’s hold hands and have a quick skip through the Goodreads 1-starrers’ garden. Some corkers for this one:
Torza couldn’t be arsed to finish the book but wanted to add a one-star review anyway, and said, “didnt finish it. idk, maybe it was good, but the multiple child pregnancies was kinda putting me off.” There was one and it was fairly important to the plot. Colleen Carroll (4 lots of double letters in that name…lazy-ass parents…there’s plenty of other letters out there) continued with the ‘let’s make up some bullshit about this book’ by referencing the “obvious/probable forced alien impregnation of a 14 year old”, which didn’t happen. At all. Anywhere in the book. Two reviewers mentioned the term ‘TERF’, suggesting that the author, Erin Swan has an issue with transgender people. Where the fuck they got this from I’ve no idea as there are no transgender characters in the book. Unless that was their problem, in which case they can fuck right off. Why does every author who doesn’t include a trans character get accused of being anti-transgender? For fuck sake.
My favourite review, however, was this baby by Coastalshelf (obviously has an even more embarrassing name than my middle one): “Found the focus on women as vessels for childbirth extremely off-putting”. Ho-lee-shit. This is a book that spreads across centuries and features characters that are related to each other. The only way for that to happen is for women to give birth. That’s not my opinion, that’s just a fact. You know, Coastalshelf, like your mother did to bring you into the world. Women ARE vessels for childbirth, thankfully. Otherwise none of us would be here. Coastalshelf, you’re a fucking moron.
This book is staggeringly good. Absolutely beautifully written, a complex, inter-weaving story with a gargantuan scope. And this is the author’s first book. Mind-blowing…
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: 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: On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert, gunmen stormed his house, machine guns blazing. The attack nearly killed the Reggae superstar, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Marley would go on to perform at the free concert on December 5, but he left the country the next day, not to return for two years.
Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters—assassins, journalists, drug dealers, and even ghosts—A Brief History of Seven Killings is the fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time and its bloody aftermath, from the streets and slums of Kingston in the 70s, to the crack wars in 80s New York, to a radically altered Jamaica in the 90s.
I know I said I’d never write anything negative on here but in my defence, this isn’t about books. And it’s very difficult to sustain a holier-than-thou stance across so many posts before my natural childishly sarcastic tendencies kick in. Anyway, I hate reggae music. Well, hate is a strong word. But if I’m ever jailed at Guantanamo then my captors should eschew Megadeth and Slayer, plop a red, green and yellow bobble hat on my head and torture me with Jimmy Cliff and Aswad. I’d turn snitch and spill the beans on everyone.
What I do like, however, is a fictional story based around factual events and containing real-life characters (see American Tabloid for the ultimate example of this). Particularly when there’s an air of the unknown around the specific details. I love the speculative aspect of it. The ‘this-could-easily-be-the-truth-you-know’ of it. The idea that you’re somehow learning something additional about a piece of history, whether it’s ultimately true or not.
This book, very much like American Tabloid, is pretty mind-blowing in terms of its scope and ambition and what it ultimately achieves. It’s the sort of book that leaves you so grateful that people as smart and eloquent as Marlon James are out there and devote so much of their time to writing something as breathtaking and gargantuan as this.
Oh, and it’s the 2018 Portland Award winner. ‘Nuff said.
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: Harry August is on his deathbed. Again. No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, when death comes, Harry always returns to where he began, a child with all the knowledge of a life he has already lived a dozen times before. Nothing ever changes. Until now. As Harry nears the end of his eleventh life, a little girl appears at his bedside. “I nearly missed you, Doctor August,” she says. “I need to send a message.” This is the story of what Harry does next, and what he did before, and how he tries to save a past he cannot change and a future he cannot allow.
Claire North is a genius in my eyes. Not only is she a fantastic writer and storyteller but she comes up with just the best story ideas; a man who lives multiple lives, a person who can move between bodies just by touching them, a girl who nobody can remember, the Harbinger of Death. She also has such a ‘smooth’ way of writing, which I realise is just a fancy way of saying that she’s a really good writer. I mentioned it in a previous post; some writers words you can just swallow like soup whereas others might contain a few small croutons or large chunks of Ryvita. Ultimately tasty but might take a bit of work to get there. Claire North to me is the Heinz Oxtail of writers. Gloriously good.
PREMISE: Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby’s glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients’ accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.
I had no idea what this book was about going into it. I read it because I’ve read Station Eleven and Sea Of Tranquility and I adore those books. Like listening to Led Zeppelin II because you’ve previously heard IV and Physical Graffiti.
To keep the musical analogy going, some writers are like Michael Bublé’s vocals; silkily smooth, it all just works effortlessly. And then others are like that guy in the B52’s. ESJM’s writing is Bublé-smooth…SO good…
PREMISE: One book. Two readers. A world of mystery, menace and desire.
A young woman picks up a book left behind by a stranger. Inside it are his margin notes, which reveal a reader entranced by the story and by its mysterious author. She responds with notes of her own, leaving the book for the stranger, and so begins an unlikely conversation that plunges them both into the unknown.
Check out the pictures below. Yep, that’s this book. And yes, that’s a map, postcard and some sort of navigational device (I think). There’s shitloads of things like that in it. The book itself is aged to look ancient and somehow manufactured to look like people have actually written in it. As a piece of art it is pretty staggering. Absolutely worth the experience of reading it.
The kicker: there’s a Kindle version. A question of how more than why, surely…
