Smoke Kings by Jahmal Mayfield

 

Finally DNFed a book, which given some of my recent reads is saying something. It's a crime novel that hinges on the mains (or at least one set of them) making bad decisions, then making bad decisions on top of those in a death spiral. I'm not in a place to dig that, and I'm really not in a place to dig that happening at a fucking snail's pace, in thudding slow prose, with so many POV characters it's nigh-impossible to keep them straight (there are at least seven). Also a slow-motion flashback in-between some of the chapters adding literally nothing to the story. Took like almost half of the 380+ pages for the murder to happen, it didn't look as though the pace was going to accelerate, I bailed.

Tornado Weather by Deborah E. Kennedy

 

I grabbed this because it seemed like a small-town mystery thing that might be interesting. Of that description, the only thing accurate is "small town." While there's a crime that happens, it barely registers for more than a hundred pages, as the people in the benighted small town go on about their small and mostly unexamined lives, chapters in different barely repeating POVs--just to maximize that scattershot feel. Most of the people in the town barely care about the missing (later dead) girl except as a stone they can grind their various axes on. It felt as though Ms. Kennedy had spent time in a town a lot like the one in the novel, and hated it, and this is her writing that hatred out: The people are all some combination of tiring, unlikeable, and despicable. There's nothing to care about in this novel, and nothing worth reading--the stolid thudding inert prose included.

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.