Bunyan and Henry or, The Beautiful Destiny by Mark Cecil

 

I read this novel tonight, it's a weirdly cynical-but-optimistic book of something that's maybe closest to Magic Realism--many of the people, places, and things in it have clear real-world analogues--and it has clear and obvious things to say about the Real World (some of those analogues I mentioned are to things in the Here and Now, not the late 1800s). Mentioning the setting in the 1800s now, there are some anachronisms (electric light seems to exist) and I have to believe that someone who knew the folklore referenced here better than I do would find some interesting Easter eggs. The story feels vaguely like a picaresque, but it does build to something like a structural climax; Paul is the main character here, though his story pauses here and there to allow other characters--John Henry, a Chinese blacksmith, a Native American woman--to tell theirs, which makes for some interesting layering. The prose is solid and has moments of sparkle, the characters stand on their own as well as together (the main villain seems like a cross between Trump and some older-fashioned huckster/snake-oil salesman, with perhaps a whiff of the original Wizard of Oz, before Baum turned into something other than a con man) and Cecil seems to have a real handle on his not-quite-really-historical setting. Ends on a remarkably hopeful note. Not perfect, probably not great, but plenty good enough.

The Cat's Meow by Jonathan B. Losos

 

Look, one of the things about being adopted by a local stray cat is that you develop something of an interest in cats; if you have a brain that works much like mine, this means you end up reading books about cats. I read this book about cats this afternoon. It's more of a read-in-a-sitting kind of book than most books about living with cats are, mainly because it's not a living-with-cats book (though the author does enjoy the company of several cats on a daily-living basis). The author is a biologist and puts some work into unpacking the current state of knowledge on many things cat--everything from which wild species they derive from to how domesticated they are to what they get up to if they're let out of the house to wander to what sorts of shenanigans cat breeders are getting up to. It's a very readable and informative book, it doesn't feel written down to non-biologists, and it's not likely to be completely over many readers' heads.

Liar, Dreamer, Thief by Maria Dong

 

I should have quit maybe seventy-five pages in, when I realized the narrator of this novel was completely unreliable, too mentally ill to be believable about anything. I didn't stop, and it didn't get more believable, the narrator never really became anything like reliable; it was 300+ pages of delusional ranting that never really evolved anything like story bits or tension or really anything to sustain my interest. I didn't notice Alix Harrow's blurb on the cover in the library, it would have been something like an inducement--I hope this novel isn't an indicator I'll have to disregard her blurbs the way I do some other authors I enjoy.

Deception Cove by Owen Laukkanen

 

I grabbed this at the library out of something like hope that it'd be better than the cover copy implied. It really wasn't. It wasn't bad, exactly, just ... mostly bland and predictable and intermittently implausible. The pacing isn't horrible, and some of the action scenes are OK, and there is the occasional neat turn of phrase, but this is a book without a lot of strong attractions for me, and the missteps it makes (the obvious and implausible romantic relationship, mostly) lead me not to look for more by the author.

Food for Thought by Alton Brown

 

Spent the last few days picking my way through this, around doing other things and reading other books--the fact it's a collection of shorter essays makes that an easy prospect. There's good stuff in here, there's funny stuff--hilarious stuff--in here. Most of the essays are about food and/or cooking, shockingly--this is Alton Brown--but this isn't a book for someone who wants to learn how to cook a thing. This is a book for people who learned to cook, or were inspired to learn to cook, watching *Good Eats*, people who probably are substantially nerdy, like Brown is. He's a solid writer, which isn't surprising to anyone who knows he was at least the primary (if not the sole) writer for all those episodes. I don't agree with absolutely everything here (I think his unitasker/multitasker thing is a useful proxy, but I don't think it's the right question to be asking--and you'll take my garlic press away when you pry it from my old dead hands) but he's an entertaining read.

American Rust by Philpp Meyer

 

This was a really blunt and kinda obvious novel, all about Rust Belt despair and depression and all the other bad things that were coming in 2007 or so when this novel was written. There's no real hope for any of the characters in it, anything they do might be the one thing to kick the legs out of their present and demolish their future. Which doesn't seem all that horrific, they mostly aren't people one is inclined to root for whole-heartedly--though in many instances the reasons they're not particularly likeable are clear. Mostly, none of them has the mental bandwidth to spare, to make any good decision that isn't basically an accident. The prose mostly feels ... muffled, I think; there are elements of something like a style, all comma splices and occasionally (intentionally) dodgy grammar, but there's a sense of remove, a failure to connect to (or with, whatever) the characters. Whatever electricity there might be does not convey through the language to the reader, aside from the occasional nifty turn of phrase. The multiple POVs are plausibly necessary to get across all the story (or stories, I guess) Meyer wants to get across, but they seemed to diffuse the novel's focus more than a little. It was not a total waste of my evening, but it wasn't a great read, either.

Whistle by Linwood Barclay

 

This is a kinda paint-by-numbers Horror novel, competently written on at least most levels--the prose is solid and even occasionally sparkles, the characters feel human and kinda lived in--but it kinda feels like a Horror novel written by someone who doesn't read a whole lot of Horror, and probably hasn't written much. Horror does kinda abut Thriller (Barclay's primary thing, I think) as demonstrated by Koryta at least--there are probably others I'm whiffing on--but this isn't really all that great a Horror novel. It feels at points like an extended homage to King's Needful Things, though with less of turning the town so explicitly against itself. Well, except for the fact it's in two timelines, which isn't at all clear from the text itself: You need to pay close attention to get that one timeline is happening approximately now (2025) and the other is happening in late 2001 (I think, it's never really clear). For a while I thought Barclay was playing games about communications and availability of information, but he just wanted some separation, probably because he wanted to say something about lingering bad vibes or something. I'm very distinctly underwhelmed, here, but I might look into one of the Thrillers Barclay's written, just to see how he does on turf he's more familiar with.