Category Archives: book reviews

What Is a Book?

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With everyone now doing at least some of their reading on devices, it may be a little late in the day to go back to the early arguments against e-books, yet Amazon itself has recently begun to point out some of the limitations of the format.

Seven years ago when the Kindle was introduced, there was a lot of talk about whether e-books and e-reading devices would even catch on at all. Kindle launched with a video of Toni Morrison – writer, editor and literary grande dame – speaking about her love for the new tschotke. She hit several important talking points that would be repeated mantra-like through the years – you could travel with a lot of books, you could read trash without other people’s knowing, you could set the print large enough so that you wouldn’t need glasses. There was other stuff too. Continue reading What Is a Book? →

About My Picks

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This will be a short update. I just want you look above this post at “My Picks.” All of these are books that can be purchased in digital versions for 99 cents to $3.99. These are all books that I think are swell. The genres and styles vary. More than a couple I wrote. Most I didn’t write. They have another thing in common. They are all “indie” books. By indie I mean self-published, even if the writers listed their own personal “imprints” as the publisher. If you’ve never (knowingly) read or purchased a self-published book before because you think they are all crap, any of these books will prove your assumptions wrong. Just click on a couple till you find one with a description that interests you. Then read the sample and decide for yourself if it’s worth investing less money than you spend on Starbucks. It’s that simple. If you don’t own a Kindle machine, you can read it on a device you do own. If you still hate reading fiction electronically, most are available in paperback (although print versions will cost more.) You are a smart cookie. You don’t need any filters beyond my recommendation and a sample to decide if a book is for you. I’ll change up my picks periodically, but I’m committing to only listing sp books because I keep reading online that they suck. 99.5% of what people put up on the Kindle is pretty awful, but it’s not difficult to find the fraction that is actually good. Just check out my picks.

Full disclosure: In addition to the royalties I get if you actually pick a book I wrote, I will get some loose change from Amazon through their Associates Program if you buy anything from them within 24 hours of clicking “my picks”. This does not mean they own me. It’s more like the relationship you have to the homeless guy who hangs out in front of your favorite bodega. Sometimes you give him a dollar, but he still may rant about how you are the devil from time to time.

Schrodinger’s Telephone is the Indie Book of the Day

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I gotta start checking my e-mail more. Just found out that Schrodinger’s Telephone has won this little badgy thing. I have no idea what this means, but desperate attention-whore that I am, I’ll take it, but frankly what really makes me feel that I am not screaming into an empty cave is when readers “get it”. This week I got a new 5-star review for my novel, Loisaida, which has been out for three years. In September it got its first review in over a year, so thank you readers.  Readers don’t “owe” writers anything, and I’m not sure how much difference reviews make in sales, but a positive review is a great way to tell a writer, “I get it. Keep going.” In today’s crazy world where anyone can publish anything but only some can afford to promote, writers need readers to be the buzz, so I’d ask anyone coming across this who has enjoyed the work of a writer to tweet a link to a book, post something on facebook. RAVE to your friends. I’ve heard lots of discussion about the “lack of filter” for indie books. Many readers dismiss customer reviews on Amazon, but you know what people don’t dismiss? Their friends. So be the buzz and be the reliable filter. Make today, “Use-social-media-to-tell-your-friends-about-a-great-read-day.” Actually, everyday can be Use-social-media-to-tell-your-friends-about-a-great-read-day. And to those of you who already do that, thank you. Thank you for participating in the publishing revolution by bringing great books that might get lost in the slush to the attention of your friends.

Happy Saturday!

Thursday Book Review — Will You Love Me Tomorrow? Danny Gillan

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(This was originally posted in October of 2013. In honor of the upcoming vote on Scottish independence, I am repeating my review of this novel, and will keep this on the front page for at least a couple of days.)

Danny Gillan is one of those indie writers I’d heard good things about. Where does one hear good things about indie writers the uninitiated may ask? In this case, the Amazon and Amazon UK forums where every once in a while readers-who-aren’t-writers will mention good reads or promising authors. Gillan also participates in some threads (as do I) and always comes off as intelligent and not an asshole. So when I discovered  a free Kindle promo for Gillan’s 2011 novel, Will You Love Me Tomorrow, I went for it.

(For the 99.9% of Amazon users who were unaware of the existence of the forums, you can find them by clicking the word “Discussions” from any book’s Amazon webpage.)

Will You Love Me Tomorrow is the story of what happens when an obscure, forty-something (or very close to it), Glasgow rocker is “discovered” by a London record producer, three days after his suicide.

It’s a great example of taking a situational premise and running with it. There’s a perfect tag line on the cover – “Some musicians wait a lifetime for a record deal. Bryan Rivers waited three days longer.”

The story opens with Bryan’s suicide. As we don’t know Bryan yet, it’s not heartbreaking or too maudlin for the reader to bear. What it is, is perfectly clinically accurate, and I say that as someone with an MSW who spent years working with people in crisis. This was a really well done rendering of how someone who has been clinically depressed for years and just wants it all to be over would think and act.

Opening with a character who will be dead by the end of the chapter is a bold gambit. I wondered as I read on whether or not we would get Bryan from beyond the grave looking in on any of the action that follows. Thankfully, we don’t.

What we get instead are those he left behind, including his widow, Claire, his dog Toby, the best friend who’d sort of given up on him and now feels very bad about it – Adam, and assorted members of Bryan’s family. Those are the Glasgow characters. We also get London, mostly in the form of the rock and roll journalist turned record producer, Jason, who happens to hear the demo Bryan sent in shortly before his death. Jason falls in love with it without knowing that the writer was a tortured soul, recently departed.

The narration is close third person from different characters’ viewpoints – mostly Claire’s, Adam’s and Jason’s. Gillan writes women well. Claire is fully realized. Gillan’s technique of shifting point of view allows us to see Claire as she sees herself and also as others see her. She’s strong and beautiful and smart, but it’s a hard-won strength, and it can push others away.

Being a New Yorker, I appreciated the Glasgow setting. I’ve never been there, but feel I know something now about what it’s like that I wouldn’t have gotten from any one-day tour.

I wouldn’t classify this as either chic-lit or lad-lit, but there is an undercurrent of romance, a feeling early on that Claire will wind up falling into bed with either Jason or Adam. That’s not to say it’s predictable. There’s very little certainty about which one will win the prize or if anyone will really win in the end.

It’s easy to imagine this book as a movie or even a play, an intelligent full-bodied drama (with a little bit of comedy) about mostly likable characters. Gillan is not a sentimentalist, and deals realistically with Bryan. Tortured geniuses do not make the best husbands, friends or brothers. Suicide adds a great burden of guilt for the survivors – add to the mix that the deceased has suddenly become posthumously famous with adoring fans romanticizing his pain. Characters need to come to terms with their feelings, and Gillan gets us there.

This may not be a great work of literature, but it’s fine intelligent story for grown-ups. After spending a couple of months (at least) trying to slog through A Naked Singularity, it was a great relief for me to pick up a book I could devour greedily in less than a week.

The only thing I wasn’t crazy about it, I can’t tell you as it would be a spoiler. I will say that there is a climatic moment for one of the minor but important characters which involves a very sad thing happening. I won’t call it contrived, but I wish the writer had come up with another way.

You can’t get it “free” at the moment, but it’s regularly only 99 cents, and that’s quite a bargain.

(You know who else has written a thing or two? Check out a novel that’s mentioned on a wikipedia page.)

But What about ME?

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The Kay Gardella Memorial Blog and posts are starting to develop a following, and soon it will be time for the classy and classical Idiots at the Opera, but do any of you go check out my work? Apparently not.

What gives?

You do realize if you aren’t at least looking at my books, then I have no justification for wasting time on this blog when I could be writing more books that nobody will look at, or maybe even looking for paid work?

So take a look below, please, and pick whichever you find least noxious, and at least go check out the reviews — if only to snigger and mutter how they must be fake because that’s what Jonathan Franzen thinks, and you still take him seriously, despite his obsessive hatred for cats, and women, and the Internet, and the world in general except for boids, dirty, disgusting lice-ridden boids.

You’ve got The Death Trip,, only 99 cents on Kindle. It’s a quick read novella as cool as its cover. Simple premise — What if a pharmaceutical company came up with a way to make death the ultimate trip?

Or you might prefer Schrodinger’s Telephone, set in New York City between 1990 and 2001, a story about grief, hope, faith and the thin line between madness and vision. It’s also a quick read and only 99 cents.

And if you’re ready to commit to an actual novel, check out Loisaida, a story inspired by true events, including a murder so grotesque it became a neighborhood legend. You got gentrifiers, artists, anarchists, devil worshippers, drug addicts, potheads, and failed revolutionaries all vying for space in a city where people kill for cheap rent (literally). That one’s actually available in paperback as well as on Kindle.

Oh and if you do buy something, and you actually read it, and it turns out you are stunned, or even mildly surprised by the quality of the work, please say a few words on facebook or the twitter or Amazon or Goodreads or someplace else, or all of the previous.