The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons by Lawrence Block

 

After my Weekend Reading Project turned out to be such a garbage pile, it was a refreshing change to read a novel that actually managed to be worth reading. Block is witty in a natural and unaffected way, and while he might be somewhat past his peak he can still turn a phrase or three without mangling his otherwise perfectly readable prose. While there probably aren't any deep meanings or messages in this novel, there are some of the typical Mystery things about wealth and power, and probably some NYC-specific things I'm missing. The characters are all distinct, and many of them are charming in their own offbeat ways. Maybe a little padded through the middle, but nothing like bloated.

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

 

For my sins, I guess--I dunno what the sins are or were or will be, I hope they're worth it. Pynchon doesn't write: He bloviates, he blathers, he sometimes uses erudition as a barrier to communication, he writes about sex with the enthusiasm and vocabulary and class of the average seventh grader; mercifully, he eventually stops--there isn't anything like a point or a climax or anything like that, he just stops. There is nothing here worth reading, especially not anything like slogging through 775-ish pages of puerile, at best borderline-unreadable slodge.

The Management Style of the Supreme Beings by Tom Holt

 

Sara enjoyed this and her description of it sounded kinda up my alley, so I decided to read it before it ended up being returned to the library. I'm really glad I did, it's a very English funny novel, strong whiffs of Adams and Pratchett (and probably Osman, though that's maybe less an influence than a contemporary) but also some of Moore, a wacked-out premise followed through to its illogical conclusion. What if being a deity was something like a business, and what if YHWH decided to sell Earth to the most corporate deities imaginable? What if Santa Claus saved the day? Moments of laugh-out-loud funny wrapped around an actually interesting story, characters that feel distinct even if they're completely impossible (though strangely not implausible on the page). Remarkably warm for a novel that has such satirical angles--though I dunno if it's exactly satire, or aimed at it.

The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne by Ron Currie

 

In the library, this probably seemed to me like an interesting crime novel; it's much more than that. Currie's authorial voice sparkles and dances and laughs, even as the people in the novel are fighting and suffering and breaking and dying. It's a remarkably grim novel--Babs Dionne dies hard, even if the narrative of it ends before the event, and the setting is remarkably grimy in a badly-governed small-town way (probably because it's a badly governed small town). The characters are mostly doing the best they can, the ones that aren't tend to die less well--less easily, less meaningfully--than the rest, and all of them seem like themselves. There's a touch of magic realism around the edges, one of the POV characters can apparently see and communicated with the spirits of the departed, but much of the novel reads as depressingly plausible. The novel begins with almost a recitation of an ancestry, it ends with something like hope. It's a starkly beautiful novel.

Mister Magic by Kiersten White

 

This novel at least seemed at first to have a lot in common thematically with last night's aborted read, but that eventually seemed not to be entirely the case. Sure, the POV character (and her circle of friends) were stuck in a reliving their past trauma/s thing, same as last night's book, but *Mister Magic* is Horror--really really noisy Horror, not at all subtle--so the traumas end up being more monstrous and somehow more believable for being less plausible. There's some real murk in the middle, really rough going, I almost stopped reading several times, but the novel pulls itself together around the ending (not enough to justify the slog, but somewhat) and then the acknowledgments make the subtext clear that this really is a novel about growing up in a religion that insists on strict conformity; this is not a shock, when I said it was a noisy novel, I meant it. The prose is at best nothing special, the characters other than the primary POV tend to blur into like a couple of tags each without much depth. Ms. White has written a number of YA novels before this, I have to wonder if the lack of subtlety is a carryover from that. Not a DNF, but barely; not a particularly good novel.

We Had a Hunch by Tom Ryan

 

I picked this up from the library in the hope--maybe something like the expectation, based on the cover copy--that it was going to be a light-hearted and witty inversion of Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys books, in the vein of what *Meddling Kids* did with Scooby-Doo. As it turns out, this is not that kind of book. There's no sparkle here and hardly any wit, and practically nothing to care about after 180-ish of 330-ish pages, when I stopped reading. The main thing I was taking away was that none of the non-POV characters seemed remarkably trustworthy, and that none of the POV characters were particularly interesting or likeable.

The End of the World As We Know it edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene

 

Spent the past few nights working my way through this--it's 700+ pages--and it's full of excellent stories. I tended to prefer the ones set during the plague to those set after, but that's probably a personal preference. Some of the authors took more liberties than others, but the entire range was mostly fine in that regard; the stories set after the events of the novel tended to be darker and more depressing, mainly because they tended to take very dark views of both humanity and the future of it in the setting. Of course, it's been ages since I've read the novel, and at this point I'm not doing anything like as much re-reading as I used to, so my memories of *The Stand* are probably kinda blurry and shouldn't be entirely trusted. My ambivalence about some of the very downbeat endings some of the stories bolted onto the novel notwithstanding, there are no bad stories in this anthology.