book reviews

The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Matthew Effect.

· July 25, 2013 · Book Reviews, Musings of a different nature · , , , , , , , · 5 Comments

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Let’s talk about this new JK Rowling book, shall we? Quick summary of events thus far: A new mystery novel is published in April, by “Robert Galbraith”, called The Cuckoo’s Calling. There’s no excitement at its release – according to the nytimes.com the book sells about 500 copies in the US.  And then, last week, the big reveal, in a tweet: Robert Galbraith is JK Rowling. This is leaked to the friend of the wife of someone at JK Rowling’s law firm, who tweeted a hint to a Sunday Times reporter. He investigated, confronted the Rowling camp, and they confirmed. This is the stuff epic films are made of.

And now we’re here, all caught up in this present moment. The secret is out, and it is big news. Bloggers, blogging.  Reporters, madly covering the story.  Readers, reading. And suddenly, this book is hot. I’m reading it – but I’m not alone, because everyone else is reading it. As I’m writing this, The Cuckoo’s Calling is #1 on Amazon.com both Kindle store and book store; it is #1 on Audible.com; bookstores are ordering more copies as they can’t keep it in stock.

And yet – we’re looking at the same book, the exact same work of mystery fiction, that has been in existence since April.  It was there, and none of us took note or cared to read it.

This is an amazing real life illustration of what sociologists call the Matthew effect, name from this Bible passage:  “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.”  – Matthew 25:29, King James Version

The idea here is that success breeds success – the most renowned scientist gets all the credit for the discovery, although the others working under him or her may put in more work.  Researchers have shown that bestseller or top ranking lists influence what we think we like and what we decide to purchase.  If you are already famous, we want to make you more famous.  If you aren’t famous?  We might be a little less interested in what you’re selling, and it might be a little bit harder to break through.

JK Rowling illustrated this for us in a glaringly obvious way.  She made The Cuckoo’s Calling an overnight success, thanks to her existing fame.  The quality of her novel did not change. She is reportedly sad that she was outed so soon, and I am too.  It is now impossible to listen to The Cuckoo’s Calling on my delightful little wireless headphones without some sort of bias in mind.  As I’ve read most of the Potter books quite a while ago, and I read a ton of mystery fiction, I keep thinking of the writing as somehow cartoonish or fanciful.  But is that really there, in the book?  Or is it just in my mind, an association with a children’s author?  I can understand why JK Rowling would want to break away from all the baggage her other tales bring, as they are so stylized.

I think keeping her identity hidden would have been a wonderful sort of social experiment.  What would we all really say, if we never knew it was her?  More importantly, what would everyone not say as we were all too busy reading the other things we were planning to read, before this secret was revealed?  Would the book just fade away, a sequel never published?  The Matthew effect and book sales before the big reveal say yes, it’d be difficult for The Cuckoo’s Calling to gain success without that Rowling glimmer, shimmer, and shine that we all want to touch.

Further reading:

Robert Galbraith’s official page

nytimes review of Cuckoo’s Calling

Robert Merton’s ‘The Matthew Effect in Science”

The Matthew Effect: How Advantage Begets Further Advantage by Daniel Rigley on Amazon

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell on Amazon

Review – The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes.

· July 19, 2013 · Book Reviews · , , , , , · 2 Comments

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This book gets the gold star for over-hyped book of the summer.  I read its glowing review on the NY times, saw that Tana French gave a positive blurb on the cover, and I kindled it ASAP.  I fell in love with the premise, explained as a time traveling murder mystery.  I read lots and lots of mystery fiction and tend to get bogged down with the same old plot (as Beukes says in the NY times review, there are only so many plots in the world), so I keep an eye out for the creative and the bizarre. I don’t like gimmicks, however, and there is a fine line between neat and gimmicky. I think The Shining Girls crossed that line.

I wasn’t sure the non-linear, time-traveling angle brought anything into the story. I’ve mentioned in a previous post that we are in the age of non-linear novels, and this novel was non-linear to the max. The book’s story line travels in time, as does its serial killer. All this resulted in an effect as if I was watching a handful of Law and Order intros – travel in time, murder, go! I didn’t feel emotionally involved in any of it. The murders were gory; the descriptions of the different eras and girls existing in those times were stylized and cute, but too brief for me to begin to care.

The time-travel angle was unique, yes, but the characters didn’t pop for me. A spunky, undaunted, brave journalism intern. The jaded male journalist who used to cover crime, got burned, and now plays it safe with sports. They felt like stock characters, saying stock lines.

An aside here: I read an interview with Beukes in which she said she wasn’t making torture porn because each girl was a unique character, before getting murdered. I’m just not sure that the “torture porn” debate is something relevant to most mystery/thriller fiction, but more for horror flicks, and if anything I think this book was the most descriptive of tons of chicks getting slaughtered I’ve read in a long time.

The most interesting character in the book, The House, is totally unexplored and unexplained. Lauren Beukes sets up an interesting setting of a magical House which allows for time travel, and then doesn’t elaborate or explain it at all. It is, by far, the most standout and shining object in the novel and the only thing I would have liked to read about. And yet, there’s no there there.

The Shining Girls at Amazon.com

A top 5 list posted at Audible.com.

· July 15, 2013 · Musings of a different nature · , , , , , , , , , · No Comments

From Audible.com  (Original list on Audible)

Change your perspective…  A Top 5 by Kali

“My collection was inspired by audiobooks that allowed me to look at life through different lenses, and books which have opened my mind to the beauty and the bizarre in this crazy world we live in.” – Kali

1. This Book Will Save Your Life
By A. M. Homes, Narrated by Scott Brick

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2. Spin
By Robert Charles Wilson, Narrated by Scott Brick
Series: Spin, Book 1

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3. Osama
By Lavie Tidhar, Narrated by Jeff Harding

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4.  Them: Adventures with Extremists
By Jon Ronson, Narrated by Jon Ronson

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5.  Trust Your Eyes
By Linwood Barclay, Narrated by Ken Marks, Rick Holmes

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Review – Broken Harbor by Tana French/A Case of Redemption by Adam Mitzner.

· July 6, 2013 · Book Reviews · , , , , , , , , · No Comments

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When our shadows showed faintly they were twisted and unfamiliar, turned hunchbacked by the holdalls slung over our shoulders.  Our footsteps came back to us like followers’, bouncing off bare walls and across stretches of churned mud.  We didn’t talk:  the dusk that was helping to cover us could be covering someone else, anywhere.  — Broken Harbor, Tana French

The thrill of a mystery can sometimes be cheap – I just finished a legal thriller, A Case of Redemption, by Adam Mitzner, that reminded me of this.  And that is why Broken Harbor, by Tana French, is so worthwhile.  Tana French has created an experience here, a bizarre world of baby monitors and built up dreams shattered and a development site that seems to be its own House of Usher.  French is a master of language, and although she has written three other books in this series she has chosen this one to reveal herself as such, to come out of the literary closet and really blow us all away with her ability to write a book.  The story is crisply gothic and full of the thinking type of police procedural that makes detective books great; the characters are deep and round and real.  This is definitely one worth reading, as are the first three (In The Woods, The Likeness, Faithful Place) if you haven’t checked them out.

A note on the concept for the Dublin Murder Squad series:  Tana French picks a minor character from the previous book, and focuses on that character for the next book.  And like a chain, the books connect.  French seems such a master at character development, it almost seems a shame to keep running from characters she’s already created, and I wonder if she’ll ever go back to past favorite detectives.  I think it speaks to her skill as an author that she is able to use devices which traditionally frustrate readers, such as ditching main characters and leaving loose ends, and she still has a large fan base.

Broken Harbor on Amazon.com

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It did not bode well for my experience listening to A Case of Redemption by Adam Mitzner, narrated by Kevin T. Collins, that I was reading a hard copy of Broken Harbor at generally the same time.  It really amplified for me the difference in the quality of writing.  Where everything about Broken Harbor had been fresh and bizarre, everything about A Case of Redemption, a legal thriller, was stereotyped so heavily I almost laughed in a few placed.  Even the title was so blatantly unoriginal (A Case of Need, A Case of Conscience, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, A Case of Identity, A Case of Curiosities) it really let me know right what I was getting into.  In a sort of “ripped from the headlines with a twist” manner, a black rapper is on trial for murdering a white pop star he was dating.  I listened to this as an audiobook, and when poor writing is read aloud it starts to sound like bad acting.  The dialogue is strained, the sex scenes could use some lessons from Fifty Shades as they were more awkward than the imaginings of a 15 year old boy, and even the twists near the end couldn’t save what I felt had been a waste of a story.  What it feels like to me happens with Mitzner’s stories is he doesn’t have any sort of original voice.  I hear a story which isn’t quite as full of striking characters as a Grisham or Connelly novel, which doesn’t have that unique page-turning property of a Harlan Coben book.  Nothing special here.

A Case of Redemption on Audible.com

Important book of the day – The Shallows by Nicholas Carr.

· July 3, 2013 · Important book of the day · , , , , , , , , , · 2 Comments

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No doubt the connectivity and other features of e-books will bring new delights and diversions. We may even, as Kelly suggests, come to see digitization as a liberating act, a way of freeing text from the page. But the cost will be a further weakening, if not a final severing, of the intimate intellectual attachment between the lone writer and the lone reader. The practice of deep reading that became popular in the wake of Gutenberg’s invention, in which “the quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind,” will continue to fade, in all likelihood becoming the province of a small and dwindling elite. We will, in other words, revert to the historical norm. As a group of Northwestern University professors wrote in a 2005 article in the Annual Review of Sociology, the recent changes in our reading habits suggest that the “era of mass [book] reading” was a brief “anomaly” in our intellectual history: “We are now seeing such reading return to its formal social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class.” The question that remains to be answered, they went on, is whether that reading class will have the “power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capital” or will be viewed as the eccentric practitioners of “an increasingly arcane hobby.” —The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr

A young acquaintance who had been an English major, when I asked her what she was reading, replied: “You mean linear reading? Like when you read a book from start to finish?”  –Jonathan Franzen, Why Bother? an essay from the book How to be Alone

Some books have a tendency to haunt.  They stick to me long after I’ve read them, and I compulsively begin to tell people the anecdotes they contain at dinner tables and in cars.  “But taxi drivers have a larger part of the brain that visualizes the road!”  “Did you know deep reading hasn’t always been a part of various societies’ popular cultures?”  These tidbits of info floating in my mind are thanks to Nicholas Carr, who has some serious business with our brains and the internet.

I’ve felt the internet’s impact on novels, and especially been aware of it as of late.  I realize it is partly just a trend, but so many popular fiction novels aren’t linear anymore.  As with the internet, they’re hopping from place to place or time to time or narrator to narrator.  Some non-linear novels are great, but I do want to pause and ask – why are we, as a society, writing like this?  Why do we all want to read books which use this single literary device, the non-linear narrative?  What about settling in with a more traditional book, which plays out start to finish and beginning to end, has lost its appeal?  Nicholas Carr has the answer to this question in The Shallows.

The Shallows website

Review – The Dinner: A Novel by Herman Koch.

· July 1, 2013 · Book Reviews · , , , , , , , , · No Comments

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This was a novel of beautifully slow pacing. A husband and wife out to a painfully slow, grotesquely upscale dinner which they admit dreading from the morning of. The drinks, the appetizers, the meal, the desserts, and all the life in between. The novel matched the meal in time – dragging in a way that was purposeful and neat. The lines that finished each chapter were crisp and the chapters themselves were timed beautifully, each chapter ending with a cut that left an absence, a statement in itself with the words unsaid.

I listened to the audio version of this book, narrated by Clive Mantel, and he took the time with the story that it deserved. Each time he spat out the family name I felt all the emotions boiled up underneath “Lohman”, I heard the contempt broiling up in way that is hard to do in a narration without sounding overdone.

I was surprised to read other reviews that compared this to Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. Every book I’ve read since Gone Girl has been published, there’s a required comparison. I don’t see too many similarities. I would compare this to the film There Will Be Blood by Paul Thomas Anderson, for its slow crawl through the story, and its emphasis on family, social expectations, and violence. Or another comparison here, without giving too much away of either book, would be to Defending Jacob by William Landay.

I loved this book and it helped me get through several loads of laundry and many commutes. If you dislike a book that drifts before it reaches its conclusion, however, I’d skip it.

The Dinner on Audible.com

Why hello there!

· June 30, 2013 · Musings of a different nature · , , , , , , , , , · 2 Comments

I’m a lover of books. I can’t stop reading them, telling people (who aren’t asking) about them, buying them, selling them, browsing them, adding them to wishlists, checking them off my lists, reading reviews of them, listening to them. I’m creating this little site to share my love with you – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

I mainly read mystery (currently Broken Harbor by Tana French, just finished Red Dragon by Thomas Harris), popular fiction (on my to-read shelf: the first four Game of Thrones novels by George R. R. Martin), literary fiction (trawling through 2666 by Roberto Bolano, just started and then sort of put off Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, listening to The Dinner by Herman Koch), memoir (currently in the middle of In the Body of the World by Eve Ensler), and non-fiction and essays (on the to-read shelf: The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and currently in the middle of How to Be Alone by Johnathan Franzen). Oh, and I love a good science fiction or speculative fiction story but for some reason these aren’t in my spotlight right now.

This site will be full of reviews that I won’t insist to be unbiased, chock full of my own opinions. I like to take into account our current cultural climate while considering the medium and the message of the books I read.

All for now.

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