Books in Brief, Part 3

If you’ve been reading the blog regularly, you know that I devote full reviews to only a small number of the books that pass through my hands each week. Here are three novels that I abandoned after a few chapters or just skimmed through. They may have qualities that engage you more!

In the Name of the Family     Sarah Dunant     (2016)

You’d think that the inclusion of the famously conniving historical characters Niccolò Machiavelli and Lucrezia Borgia would spark up this novel, but I found the 40 pages that I read to be lackluster. I’ve liked other Sarah Dunant novels set in the Italian Renaissance (eg, The Birth of Venus), so perhaps with In the Name of the Family Dunant is trying too hard to redeem the reputation of Lucrezia. Or perhaps I’m weary of the slimy Borgia brood and their confederates from too many books and television series.

My Italian Bulldozer     Alexander McCall Smith     (2016)

I’m a big fan of several of McCall Smith’s series of novels, especially the 44 Scotland Street Series, which I’ve reviewed on this blog. Sadly, McCall Smith’s stand-alone novels tend to be weaker narratively. My Italian Bulldozer is a lightweight romance/comedy, in which the main character is forced to accept a rental bulldozer instead of a rental car on a business trip to Montalcino, Italy. McCall Smith can usually pull off ridiculous plot twists, but this one didn’t work for me.

Six Four     Hideo Yokoyama     (2012/2016)  translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies

The international bestseller from Japan is finally available in an excellent (British) English translation. The central character of this police procedural murder mystery is Yoshinobu Mikami, a former detective who now heads media relations for the police. The title refers to the year of the emperor’s reign when a notorious child-murder occurred. In addition to solving this cold case, dealing with the press, and fighting police corruption, Mikami is dealing with the disappearance of his teen daughter. The insights into Japanese culture are fascinating, and the extended dialogue is well done. But I just skimmed this one, simply because I don’t care for police procedurals. If you do, Six Four is a winner.

Books in Brief, Part 2

I haul eight or ten books home from my local library every week. About half of those don’t get my attention past the first few pages. A couple of others may get a cursory scan through selected chapters. The remaining two or three books I read, relish, and review fully. Some of the books that don’t make the cut for a full review end up in a Books in Brief post. Read on!

Idaho     Emily Ruskovich     (2017)

The terror in this novel lurks deep within, and it is revealed ever so slowly. The novelist is highly skilled in describing the rugged landscapes of northern Idaho and in exploring the perspectives of multiple characters at multiple time points. In short, this is an excellent novel. But the crime that sets the plot in motion is so horrific that I simply had to stop reading about a third of the way through. If you don’t have problems with nightmares from scary books, you may like this one.

Here I Am     Jonathan Safran Foer     (2016)

This novel is exasperatingly self-referential, long (571 pages), and long-winded. I can see the brilliance of much of the writing, but the author swaggers with his own importance too much. For example, Foer constructs many descriptive lists. When Michael Chabon employs this device, he illuminates his subject. When Foer does it, he suffocates his subject. There’s a lot of discussion of the politics of Israel, and I hoped that would redeem the story, but it didn’t. I gave up less than a quarter of the way through.

The Sleep Revolution     Arianna Huffington     (2016)

I’ve read a lot of books and blog posts on the subject of insomnia, and as I paged quickly through The Sleep Revolution I recognized all the standard assertions:  lives too fast-paced, blue screens too ubiquitous, dinner too late, snoring too loud, pills too dangerous. If you need to be convinced that you should seek more healing sleep, you might want to read this entire book. Otherwise, turn to chapter 9, “What To Do, What Not To Do.” Among the many sleep tips summarized in this chapter I found one I may try: extended bedtime meditation rituals. Huffington helpfully lists guided meditations for sleep in her Appendix B. Her Appendix D, on mattresses, doesn’t mention the best resource I’ve found: sleeplikethedead.com

Books in Brief, Part 1

I start reading about twice as many books as I finish, and that’s after I’ve narrowed the list of books that I even start. (I eliminate thrillers and science fiction, for example.) I like a plot that I can hang on to, and I don’t like extreme violence. A few years ago I swore I’d never read another novel set in World War II because they were all so grim. Then along came All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr in 2014, and I decided that extraordinary novels set in World War II would be okay.

My Books in Brief posts are about books that I gave up on or just skimmed through. These are not necessarily badly written books! Many are bestsellers that got stellar reviews from reviewers whom I respect. But I did not read these titles in their entirety, and in my posts, I’ll tell you why. You may decide that you want to dash out to your nearest library or book shop to get a copy!

The Mortifications     Derek Palacio     (2016)

This complex tale about a Cuban-American immigrant family, set in the 1980s, has well-drawn characters and some lovely language, especially when the author is describing Cuba, to which some members of the family return. Palacio commingles realistic and mythic elements in an odd way in this novel, but that was not why I stopped reading. At about the halfway point in the 308 pages, the deep sadness of the story was making me too miserable. I skipped to the end to see how the plot tied up. The ending was sad, too. I should have guessed this from the title.

Pond     Claire-Louise Bennett     (2016)

Bennett positions her book somewhere between prose poetry and stream-of-consciousness. After the first few pages, I jumped around in the chapters (are they chapters?) trying to find threads of a cohesive plot, but I failed. The dust jacket says that Pond is “suffused with the almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world as we remember it from childhood.” I like descriptions of everyday experience, but I could not stick it out inside the brain of the young woman narrator for 195 pages. I prefer poetry that’s more distilled.

Vinegar Girl: The Taming of the Shrew Retold     Anne Tyler     (2016)

I’ve enjoyed several of Tyler’s past books, most recently A Spool of Blue Thread (2015), but Vinegar Girl was a disappointment. The book is one of a series of novels, by different modern novelists, based on the plots of Shakespeare plays. I was fine with a modern adaptation or rewriting of Shakespeare, who himself reworked the stories of other authors. What caused me to send this book back to the library after two chapters was the lifeless dialogue. Tyler usually spins out highly believable language, but the characters in Vinegar Girl were not coming alive for me through their words.

The Vacationers     Emma Straub     (2014)

Emma Straub gets a lot of press for her breezy novels and is held up as comparable to Anne Tyler. I don’t see it. In 2012, I tried a couple of chapters of Straub’s Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures but found the reconstruction of 1920s Hollywood unconvincing. Giving Straub another chance, I quickly skimmed The Vacationers. It reads like the script of a sit-com, with a few witty zingers but not much depth to the plot or the characters, who are New Yorkers on vacation in Mallorca. Despite some glowing reviews of Straub’s next offering, Modern Lovers (2016), I don’t plan another foray.

A Great Reckoning     Louise Penny     (2016)

This is the twelfth book in the Canadian mystery series starring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. I’ve read a couple of the previous titles in the series. I loved the setting (present-day Québec, Canada), the well-developed characters (especially Gamache and his family), and the plots (intricate). I gave up on this series solely because Louise Penny’s style of writing in sentence fragments drove me crazy. If you can handle that herky-jerky movement in every paragraph, these are terrific mysteries.

The Book That Matters Most     Ann Hood     (2016)

I didn’t make it past page 40 of this 358-page book, about a middle-aged woman joining a book club to get over her divorce. I’m not opposed to books about book clubs or books about people who read a lot of books. I read a lot of books myself, and I did read and review the Swedish novel The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend. However, in those first 40 pages of The Book That Matters Most, the dialogue is strained and the interior monologues are trite. I can’t imagine that it gets better.