Christopher Moore “Fluke”

This was my first book by this author, about whom I have heard many good things. Looks like this wasn’t the best one to start with, because it didn’t exactly turn me into a raving fan.

I’m not saying it was a bad book. It certainly had its funny parts and the story had a good pace and was reasonably interesting, even though the sickly sweet happy end was not quite to my taste (are they ever?). But it didn’t exactly blow me away, either. Then again, even though I kind of like whales on the whole, I am not terribly interested in them. So reading a whole story about them can hardly be expected to overly excite me.

In this entertaining adventure-in-whale-researching Nathan Quinn, a prominent marine biologist, has been conducting studies in Hawaii for years trying to unravel the secret of why humpback whales sing. During a typical day of data gathering, Nate believes his mind is failing: the subject whale has “Bite Me” scrawled across its tail. Events become even stranger as the self-proclaimed “action nerds,” Nate, photographer Clay, their research assistant Amy, and Kona, a white Rasta (a Jewish kid from New Jersey), encounter sabotage to their data and equipment. They also observe increasingly bizarre whale behavior, including a phone call from the whale to their wealthy sponsor to ask that Nate bring it a hot pastrami and Swiss on rye, and discover both a thriving underwater city and the secret to what happened to Amelia Earhart.

I quite liked most of the characters, especially the old broad. (But, honestly: Amelia Earhart? Was that necessary?) There also were some interesting and inventive details that amused me. One thing that kept distracting me a great deal, though, was that as soon as the story came around to the whaley-boys and Gootown and all this, it reminded me a lot of Frank Schätzing’s “The Swarm” (which I loved). That was an unfortunate connection, because Schätzing’s novel is very different and darker in tone (well, up until the bloody happy end, but I tend to blend that one out in my recollection). So even though the basic idea of the 2 books is pretty much the same, the resulting stories are very different. I liked them both, but for re-reading one of them I would give precedence to Schätzing’s.

I have signed up for one more bookring of a Christopher Moore book: “Practical Demonkeeping”, but it will be a while before I get that one. I will keep Moore on my list of writers worth giving more chances to excite me, though.

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This is one of those books I had on my wishlist for a long time, ever since I developed a taste for dystopian fiction. I understand this story is one of the classics of the genre, written in the “paranoid fifties” when everyone was afraid of the world being blown up by a nuclear war. It’s strange that today we don’t waste a thought on that possibility anymore - the bombs are still there after all. Probably we have so many other things to worry about nowadays that we just don’t have time for worries about this anymore. Or we just got used to the threat.

However, in the fifties people apparently worried a great deal, judging by the staggering number of novels dealing with this topic. And since I am working on building my very own library of dystopian fiction, I had to read this one, too.

The plot is easily told: There has been an accidental nuclear war and most people in the world are dead (yeah, I know, not the most auspicious start to a story). The only ones still alive are the Australians, because this war took place in the northern hemisphere and the radioactivity will take a couple of months to drift southwards and kill them, too. Interestingly, the australian government chose to tell the people the truth and so everybody knows that they all will have to die soon and there is nothing anybody can do to change that fact. They even have an approximate date for it. The whole book is about the different ways people try to deal with this knowledge.

So far, so good. It does sound like it would be gut-wrenching to read this? That’s what I thought, too, before I started it. Unfortunately, I am either too cynic and hard-hearted, or else the story really is too simplistic and unrealistic. The concept had so much promise as a study of human behaviour in an exceptional situation, but the execution fell far short of my expectations.

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Now here we have a book that gripped me from the beginning and deserves to be called unputdownable. At 830 pages it is not a story to be read in a couple of hours. It took me the better part of 2 weeks to read it, even though I am not especially busy right now. Truly a book of almost Dickensian proportions that deserves to be savoured, if only to be able to spend some more time with its gripping cast of characters.

Interestingly, contrary to many other really long books (“The Historian” comes to mind), it doesn’t feel like half of it is superfluous and could have been edited out. The story is so detailed, and involves so many people and places, that nothing can rightly be sacrificed.

Faber’s bawdy, brilliant third novel tells an intricate tale of love and ambition and paints a new portrait of Victorian England and its citizens in prose crackling with insight and bravado. Using the wealthy Rackham clan as a focal point for his sprawling, gorgeous epic, Faber, like Dickens or Hardy, explores an era’s secrets and social hypocrisy. William Rackham is a restless, rebellious spirit, mistrustful of convention and the demands of his father’s perfume business. While spying on his sickly wife’s maid, whom he suspects of thievery, he begins a slow slide into depravity: he meets Sugar, a whore whose penetrating mind and love of books intrigues him as much as her beauty and carnal skills do. Faber also weaves in the stories of Agnes, William’s delicate, mad and manipulative wife, and Henry, his pious, morally conflicted brother, both of whom seek escape from their private prisons through fantasies and small deceptions. Sin and vice both attract and repel the brothers: William, who becomes obsessed with Sugar, rescues her from her old life, while Henry, paralyzed by his love for Emmeline Fox, a comely widow working to rescue the city’s prostitutes, slowly unravels.

Funnily, a lot of the important characters are either dead or unaccounted for at the end of the book. When I read the last couple of pages, I kept expecting to learn about the fate of the vanished women, but they are not mentioned anymore. When I reached the end, I kept looking for an epilogue or something, because I wanted to find out what happened to them and if they were safe. And that from me, who despises happy ends! Luckily, Faber resisted the temptation to tack on one of those. Or maybe he is just too good a writer for this temptation to even arise. Now that I had time to think about it, I am very happy that he left the women’s fate open for intepretation.

The whole story is a masterpiece of characterization and shows a deep understanding of human beings and their intentions and secret fantasies. With all the quite explicit sex scenes and descriptions of the goings-on at whorehouses and such, it surely is not for the prudish. But if you forego the pleasure of letting yourself be embraced by this story just because you blush when you read the words “cunt” or “cock” - well, then you probably don’t deserve any better. *shrug*

In any case, Michel Faber has earned himself a spot on my “to look out for” list and I have added his other books to my wishlist. I wish all the books I have read so far would have been this enjoyable.

Can a book with such a wonderfully quirky title be in any way bad? I’m sad to say, yes it can. This one certainly is. Bad, that is. Abysmally so, in my eyes. This book is by far the most un-funny and boring book I have read in quite a long while (and with the “luck of the pick” I had this year so far, this says something.)

I wanted to read this book, only because there is an audio version of it and its 2 sequels read by Hugh Laurie. The audio version of another book (Three Men in a Boat), read by Hugh Laurie, is one of my all-time favorites and was one of the reasons I developed a taste for audiobooks at all. And P.G. Wodehouse’s wonderful, fantastic, extremely funny Jeeves & Wooster novels I discovered through a recommendation from Hugh Laurie, so to speak (he is a huge fan). So I had high hopes for this book as well.

Sadly, they were dashed to pieces within the first couple of pages. Luckily the book has only 126 pages in total, so my suffering didn’t take all too long. If it wasn’t for a doctor’s appointment and the inevitable wait involved in it, I wouldn’t even have bothered finishing those paltry 126 pages.

Hugh Laurie might have enjoyed the story because he went to Cambridge himself once upon a time, but I just found it tedious in the extreme. There are certainly many ways to poke fun at academics, at Germans, at pretty much everything - and there probably are loads of books that manage to do this admirably. This one? Not at all.

The plot is ridiculous (and not in a good way), the characterization is none-existent, all the characters are cardboard cutouts, the dialogue is cringe-worthy and the overall writing style is just … well, sleep-inducing is one way to put it. It’s just as bad as this Ladies Detective Agency drivel by the same author.

That’s a pity, because usually I enjoy nothing more than people making fun of Germans. And academics in their ivory towers. And university politics. Well, actually politics in general is a topic I can’t take seriously at all, so making fun of it is the only thing to do with it, really. But this book, though it had two or three single lines that were marginally funny, is definitely not at all my kind of humor - maybe it’s just so subtle that it went right over my head or something.

If I want to laugh out loud, I better go back to P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves & Wooster books. Now that guy actually knew how to write funny. I’m done with McCall Smith for good - there are just too many better books out there.

“A masterpiece” — Stephen King

I don’t know how it is with you, but I am often peeved by overly enthusiastic reviewers’ praises for a book printed on the cover (or even on the first couple of pages inside). Mostly, the books with the most over-hyped praises turn out to be the dullest tomes imaginable. So, normally, I tend to ignore this.

If, on the other hand, somebody like Stephen King endorses a novel, I do pay attention. Not only because I like his own books, but because I have come to trust his opinion on such matters. I have yet to be disappointed in any of the books that I have come across that had an endorsement by Stephen on the cover. So, if he calls this one ‘brilliantly written and scary as hell’ how can I not pick it up? (And just to spare you the suspense: I think he was damn right with this description.)

But, you see, the thing is, even though I usually rarely tend to read thrillers I wouldn’t even have needed Steve’s encouragement in this case, because the author is none other than Michael Marshall Smith. Ever since finding him through Bookcrossing I have been a fan of his dark and twisted imagination. The books he writes under the name of Michael Marshall are less science fiction and more the thriller kind, but if this one is anything to go by, they are just as fantastic.

The story starts with two guys gunning down 68 people in a fast-food restaurant in Pennsylvania. We have a teenage girl that gets abducted from a busy street in the middle of L.A. And then there is Ward Hopkins, who tries to make sense of the accident that apparently killed his parents in Montana - then finds a note in his father’s favorite chair, reading: “We’re not dead.”

At first, it is a bit puzzling to figure out what all these events are supposed to have in common, but as the story unfolds it becomes ever clearer. Behind everything there are The Straw Men. Nobody knows who they are, and why they kill. But Ward, with the help of some friends, is doing his best to find out.

That probably doesn’t sound all that scary or captivating on first glance, but I can assure you that impression is deceiving. As I said, as a rule I am not much of a fan of thrillers, so I don’t have all that much experience with the genre, but as far as gripping stories go this one is definitely among the best I have read lately (and I don’t just say that because I have already loved the author before!).

You know, there is another pet peeve of mine concerning book reviews. It is the overuse of certain words that get bandied around just because the reviewers are too lazy to think of an original description. One of these words is “unputdownable” - actually, I’m not even sure if that is a proper english word, but nevertheless you find it in every second book review. As somebody who reads a lot of books I have come across many stories that I love and that I can’t wait to finish eventually, but a really unputdownable book in the literal sense of the word is a very rare thing for me.

This novel, though, does qualifiy for that description in my opinion. I literally was glued to my armchair and refused to even acknowledge anybody talking to me until I had finished it.

Incidentally, Marshall wrote a sequel, named “The Upright Man”, a title that makes sense if you read the first one. At my next shopping spreee on Amazon, this one will be on the top of the list of books to get.

I’m on a bit of a reading binge of books about writing lately. This one is just a slim volume of about 130 pages, so I didn’t expect any deep insights from it.

Turns out, I got pleasantly surprised. Not only does Mr. Card have a very engaging style of writing, he also clearly knows what he’s talking about (he is a very successful author himself, after all) and he’s got the knack of getting his points across in a concise and understandable manner. What more can one expect?

I very much enjoyed this book and was only sad that it was over so quickly. The best thing about it was definitely the fact that Card writes from his own experience with what works and what doesn’t. If an author, who has written dozens of books and sold millions of copies, tells me how to approach writing, I am much more inclined to actually listen than when I hear the same stuff from somebody who never actually published a book in his/her whole life. After all, how can you try to teach something you’re not able to do well yourself?

The book is divided into 5 sections:

1. The Infinite Boundary (defining what is, and isn’t, science fiction and fantasy)
2. World Creation
3. Story Construction
4. Writing Well
5. The Life and Business of Writing

I found all of them immensely interesting and learned a few things that were new to me, even though I have read dozens of writing books before. Funnily, this book not only made me want to check out Card’s own novels (of which I know only “Ender’s Game” so far) and his other book about writing, “Characters and Viewpoint”, but it also caused a few new additions to my wishlist by mentioning some books by other authors he recommends.

This book left me decidedly underwhelmed. In fact, so much so that I didn’t even bother to finish it. It is not really a novel as such, but consists of several separate stories (my guess would be 11, but I didn’t really check) that are only very tenuously connected by the mention of woodworm and/or Noah’s Ark - don’t ask me why, I didn’t get it either.

The first story, which tells about what went “really” on on board Noah’s Ark, told from the standpoint of one little passenger, was quite funny. If you’re an atheist that is. It doesn’t leave a good hair on any aspect of the nonsensical story as told by the Bible, and as such I obviously enjoyed it a lot.

I really wanted to like the book based on that first story, but sadly it all went downhill from there. The following chapters ranged from the downright silly (as in “stupid” and not funny at all) to the plain boring. I couldn’t muster any interest in any of them, except maybe “The Survivor”, but even that one got too confusing and pointless in the end.

In fact, most of the stories seemed kind of pointless to me. Probably I just didn’t get the point, but they all left me wondering why the hell I should be interested in those people. Very, very dissatisfying.

The most puzzling aspect of the whole book, though, was the to my eyes absolutely exaggerated praise for it on the back cover. All those reviewers praising it as a masterpiece, as funny and moving and whatnot - they all must have read a totally different book and I want to know which one.