Category Archives: book reviews

Your Saturday Book Review on Sunday — Remix, Lexi Revillian

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I’m not normally a big fan of the “accidental detective” school of mystery, but Lexi Revellian makes Remix work. The initially implausible situation — a young woman meets a man and his dog whom she finds camped out on her rooftop terrace and invites them in for breakfast — is somehow made quite believable. The author accomplishes this magical feat by giving us a narrator/protagonist who is real, likable, interesting and layered. The pacing works and the writing never gets in its own way. While there’s certainly a chick-lit quality to this — Caz is single, young, attractive and has more than one character interested in pursuing a romance with her, this lacks the whiney quality of a lot of that genre and should appeal to anyone (male or female) who likes a good mystery. If Caz continues to find herself involved with investigations, I’ll be happy to follow her adventures.

This is a great book to read on a rainy day, plane trip, during your lunch break, etc. It’s a short, quick, easy page turner.

BTW, this is another of those “indie” books available for 99 cents on Kindle. (There’s a paperback as well.) It came out in 2010 and became a bestseller at the Kindle Store in the UK. It didn’t do as well in the US. Some US reviewers complained about the Britishisms. I like that kind of thing, and had no trouble figuring out the meaning of the occasional regionalism based on context. It’s not exactly another language!

Revellian has since published a few other books. Replica the second, was quite a bit darker and a genuine “thriller” with a sci-fi element. It too featured a strong young female protagonist.

The author has developed a loyal following. I haven’t read any of the others. Some are firmly on the fantasy shelf, and I don’t generally read that genre. If you do, you might want to check them out. They’re all easy on the wallet.

(Marion also has some books of her own you might enjoy, but being a shy type, she won’t mention them here.)

Your Saturday Book Review: A Naked Singularity

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Yeah, I’m writing my Saturday book review on a Sunday. And yeah I haven’t written a book review in weeks. But A Naked Singularity is a freaking 700 page novel, and not an easy read.

I’ve never gotten through Moby Dick, or Ulysses, and must confess that although I have referenced him shamelessly, I’ve got a problem with Faulkner. David Foster Wallace has too many footnotes. As for Pynchon, only The Crying of Lot 49. So I am proud that I least got through this massive piece of work.

For those unaware, Sergio de la Pava’s debut novel started out in the world in 2008 as self-published fiction. It gained a following, and some VIP raves and wound up being published by the University of Chicago Press. 2012. In August of 2013, it was awarded the PEN/Robert W.Bingham Prize given to a promising first published novel or story collection.

I probably shouldn’t review it or should as WW (not Walt Whitman) might say “tread lightly,” lest I be accused of venting my extreme envy of the writer’s success. You have no idea what the depth of my schadenfreude would be should it be discovered that de la Pava actually plagiarized the unpublished work of a dying colleague or put it together by cutting and pasting from different classics. While some self-published authors may dream of the commercial success of Amanda Hawking, Colleen Hoover, Hugh Howey etc, – I’d sell my immortal soul for the critical acclaim of those important enough to convince others of their importance.

But as no one outside of a small circle of friends will ever read this post, I’m free to review, however biased my conclusions.

A Naked Singularity is not a great novel, but it has greatness in it. The flaws are in its reach and exuberance. It reads like it was written by someone who read and absorbed everything, but never had the opportunity to sit in a writing workshop and watch his darlings get slaughtered by his peers.

In a dazzling first chapter, we meet our protagonist, Casi, a brilliant young public defender in the City of New York. His pre-court conversations with his clients in which they recount the circumstances that brought them to One Centre Street are at times as laugh-out-loud funny as they are Continue reading Your Saturday Book Review: A Naked Singularity →

Your Saturday Book Review — The Scottish Movie

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There are a gazillion “books” uploaded to Amazon by their authors every year. Ok, I just made the number up because I couldn’t find it on the interwebs, but when anyone can upload anything it’s probably at least a million. I don’t know how much of that is fiction, but let’s say there are 500,000 novels uploaded, and 2% of them are readable, not bad, or even better than not bad. On the one hand that’s still a lot of books – 10,000. More than even the most avid reader could get through in a year, unless she was running some kind of book review scam. On the other hand, readers would have to find those good ones amongst a lot of dreck. You could begin to filter by breaking it down into genres you like, but the proportion probably remains at 2%. So when you do come across one of the good ones, it’s worth giving a shout-out.

Paul Collis’s The Scottish Movie, is a nicely polished gem. It opens with a novel-within-the-novel — the story of a young aspiring actor in Elizabethan England, Henry, whose idea for a play about a murderous usurper gets pilfered by Shakespeare. Henry though powerless wants his revenge and develops a plan to get it. He and his friends will become involved in the production of the play, now called Macbeth, and do their best or worst to see that the show doesn’t go on.

I will confess that this was my favorite chapter. The well researched historical novel that begins the book was superb. (If Collis decided to write the rest of The Scottish Play the novel-within, I’d be happy to read it.) Next we jump to the present and get life-imitating-art when young aspiring actor Harry’s novel is stolen by a slimy producer (no Shakespeare he) in present-day Hollywood. Life imitates art when he overhears young Harry discuss the work with friends, mentioning that it’s uploaded to a “safe” website where it can be read by registered producer-types. Instead of optioning the novel, our villain decides that if he changes things just a wee bit, he’d be on safe legal ground and free to steal.

The concept could get tricky, especially in how closely life might imitate art, but Collis pulls it off which takes considerable skill.

While the premise goes back to the superstitions that have grown around Macbeth, you don’t have to have prior knowledge of the Scottish play or the legends surrounding it. Collis manages to tell the story in a way that makes it enjoyable to those already familiar with some of the history, and accessible to those who aren’t. He also offers a very entertaining “insider” view of the less glamorous side of Hollywood — working and struggling actors, set designers, directors, etc. While some are “types,” none are stereotypes. The pacing is good and there’s even a bit of suspense, and just enough sense of danger (Could Harry’s plans go horribly wrong?) to keep you turning the page.

Possibly another reason for the story’s appeal is that while it reminds us that plagiarism has always been an issue, it also deals with the contemporary fear that putting your ideas, writing, photos, pets’ names or anything else out in the digital world is a risky endeavor.

To be clear, this is an entertainment, not literary fiction. While some readers might have hoped for more play between the 16th century and the 21st, this is not John Fowles. (That may come as a relief to a few of you.) However, it is the type of book that if you are reading it on a plane and the flight attendant comes around to remind you to turn off your electronic reading device because you’re about to land, you might just hide the Kindle between the covers of a magazine (much to chagrin of your better-half) and keep reading.

And by the way, it’s only $2.99 on Kindle.

Your Saturday Book Review: Pagan Babies — Not the Band

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I am now 14% (per my Kindle) done reading A Naked Singularity.

I so want to love this book — a self-published long-shot by a first time novelist that became an authentic underground hit — but so far it’s mostly working as a soporiphic. The sound of it is brilliant. De La Cava doesn’t just have an ear, he is an ear. The characters are colorful, and while many are from the lower-depths, none feel stock. The protagonist a likeable enough sort. But so far I’m not compelled by the narrative itself. I keep waiting for it to start….

So meantime because I promised (myself) to write about a book every week, this week will be another that I’ve read some time ago – Elmore Leonard’s Pagan Babies.

I can hear the groans now. Elmore Leonard??? Really? Isn’t he a little low-brow, and not low-brow in a high-brow way like Patricia Highsmith or Cornell Woolrich?

The fact is that Leonard, even in his weakest books (and a couple read like he was just riffing for an hour while someone typed) is still unmistakeably Leonard. He may rehash characters (sometimes with different names) and similar schemes come up again and again, but the man has skills. He knows how to “leave out the parts that people skip.” The prose is always in motion, and however thin the plot, it is always in plain sight, propelling the action.

If you’ve never actually read Elmore Leonard’s work, but have already decided you won’t like it, just because, think again, and if you don’t start with Get Shorty, Out of Sight or Rum Punch, all of which were made into fine motion pictures, than you might start with Pagan Babies, Leonard’s sort of foray into Robert Stone territory.

The babies in the title are Rwandan orphans and the book gives a quick and accurate account of the genocide, which takes place prior to the events in the novel. Terry Dunn is a priest in a village, having taken over from his uncle the previous priest who died. Like many Catholic priests in the developing world, he lives with a woman, and drinks. He heads to America to raise some money for the orphans, and also because it might be a good idea for him to get out of town, and finds himself drawn into a scheme involving a lot of types particular to the Leonard-verse.

It’s an entertaining, quick read (even at 334 pages) and the only book by Leonard I know of which takes on anything as serious as Rwanda, even though most of the action takes place stateside, and is not in any way serious.

(Marion has more book reviews on this blog, and you can check out her fiction here.)

Your Saturday Book Review — Moses and Monotheism

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Since I’m slogging through A Naked Singularity and won’t be ready to review it for at least another week or three, I’m stuck writing about a book I read previously. So this week, it’s Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud, which I think I last looked at sometime before the birth of a niece who just graduated college.

You may have already bounced from this blog, or you may be asking yourself, “Why? Why the hell would I want to read anything by that discredited, misogynist fraud?”

Here’s why: No matter what you think of psycho-analysis, Freud was a hell of a writer. He may have been clueless about women. His take on “penis envy” was likely his own projection based on his being a circumstanced Jewish guy with maybe not the world’s largest genitalia, in the land of the uncut German uber-schwanz. And some of the other stuff may also have been personal, more about him than about a theory that explains everything, but even in translation, his prose is sharp and his voice distinctive. He’s got skills!

Moses and Monotheism is an essay written toward the end of his life (1937) when he was on a crap-load of morphine for the oral cancer that was torturing him, and maybe chasing it down with a little of his old favorite — cocaine. There’s an urgency to the writing that makes it easy to imagine Freud composing it the wee hours of the morning, when even doped up, he desperately needed to distract himself from both the physical pain of his cancer, and the spiritual pain of exile as he watched the world he knew come to an unimaginably horrible end.

It’s a short, tight, highly-accessible work — an essay in which he retells the biblical story of Exodus through the lens of psycho-analysis. It’s a great example of taking a hypothesis and running with it over hills and into valleys, cul de sacs, and labyrinths.

Freud goes through the “baby floating downriver in a the basket” fairytale and posits early on that Moses was an Egyptian, and the myth was needed to hide his Egyptian heritage. Then he follows through with much further speculation based on “If Moses was an Egyptian then ….” He writes of Judaic-monotheism’s being rooted in the proto-monotheism of ancient Egyptian worship of the sun god. Because that was primarily a cult of the royals, Freud further concludes that Moses was not just any Egyptian, but indeed a “prince” of Egypt. He further posits that “if Moses was an Egyptian” of course he would introduce the nomadic people he had decided to liberate,  lead and civilize to the Egyptian custom of circumcision.

He continues to (psycho) analyze biblical passages for their hidden meanings, using his Oedipal theory to conclude that at some point Moses’ “people” rebelled and killed their (father) leader. He sees in the story of Exodus, the cover-up of a great crime.

In terms of how to how to deconstruct a text, create and solve a puzzle, and impose an original new text – it’s a masterful job, and one from which we can all learn. Whether or not any of it is “true” is another matter entirely.