To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

 

Part of my occasional intermittent project to read books from the literary canon that I missed for one reason or another on my way through the American educational system. I gather from like cultural osmosis or something that the setting here is closely derived from Ms. Lee's childhood, it certainly bears a strong odor of familiarity (and of familiarity's direct descendent, contempt). Telling it from the POV of a young girl makes for some naivete-based unreliable narration, but because Scout is approximately never intentionally deceptive it's pretty easy to suss out what the people around here are really doing or talking about. There some elements that probably show the novel's age--something over sixty years as I write this: It starts out really slowly, the inciting event is like a quarter or more into the book; there's--in spite of the whiff of contempt I mentioned above--maybe a bit of "good whites in the Jim Crow South" in the attitude toward the characters, arguably some White Savior stuff that's a little thin. The story wraps a little obliquely, a little suddenly, and some of the other pacing is occasionally a little odd by modern standards. It's a good novel, though, at moments Lee's prose crackles and sings, and certainly American schools are doing well to include it in their canon.

The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton

 

This is a strange murder mystery, told in something that looks like a post-apocalyptic version of *R.U.R.* (look it up, it's where the word "robot" comes from) but below the surface is probably not quite as post-apocalyptic as it seems. At a minimum, there's something like hope, once the humans are dead and just the robots remain. Of course, it turns out the apocalypse isn't really one for the robots, that's been a lie the whole time (and I never trusted it, not even from the start) and the nigh-omniscient narrator is about as reliable as Humbert Humbert, but plausibly less moral. Also, of course, the author plays some Dame Agatha-ish games by having the "murder" being solved turn out to be a suicide. The writing itself is pretty good, though the characters tend to blend together into either the "elders" (the humans who survived and are the rulers of the island) and the "villagers" (who are mostly subservient to the elders, as they've been designed to be) with a couple of exceptions among the villagers. For a moment I thought I was catching stray whiffs of E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," but that was mostly not right, I think.

The Boyfriend by Thomas Perry

 

This is a mostly-standard thriller novel with a pretty interesting twist--there's a cop after a serial killer, who he thinks is just a guy killing high-end escorts. Turns out he's a hired hitman who lives with high-end escorts while he's doing pre-killing work, then kills them on his way out of town; he lives off the grid while he's sharing their home, then he removes the only witness. Of course, he's leaving extra dead bodies around, which turns out to be the flaw in his plan. Perry does his typical good job of conveying the various sorts of mundane--sometimes even tedious--things people do to get into the position of being the characters they are in his novels, and he does a really good job with the characterizations in this one--all the escorts are treated as people, and there's one who's given some interesting depth and extra nuance. The story moves with Perry's typical excellent rapid pace. Very much Perry at the top of his game.

Mina's Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa

 

This was about as radical a change of pace from last night's novel as I could plausibly manage. I wouldn't say it's not dark at all, but the darkness is very much lurking in the background, a sense that the narrator is recounting people she has lost, experiences she can never really get back to, perhaps a self she can never be again. It's a charming novel on the surface, all the characters here are remarkably likeable, if perhaps sometimes exaggeratedly quirky, even those se later see as deeply flawed or maybe worse (though I think actually evil isn't in the range, here). The language is crystalline, the alchemy of translation has done good work, here. The dialogue all rings true. The ending, the actual falling apart of things, unfolds really late and kinda suddenly, though there are ample precursors. It's a really bittersweet novel, almost as nostalgic as some of Bradbury's; I have a sense there's some intended thematic point, but I'm not really sure what it might be, other than apparently perfect surfaces hiding very imperfect depths. There are a lot of things I'm really not sure about, about this book, but that's very plausibly me. Beautifully written, if kinda puzzling.

The Hatching by Ezekiel Boone

 

So, this is a book of apocalyptic fiction. The apocalypse here is kinda ludicrous, well past my own limits for suspension of disbelief; the writing otherwise is actually quite good: the pacing and the characterizations are excellently handled and acute, the authorial voice is just laden with neat turns of phrase, I kept reading well past the point where I'd given up on what the novel was trying to do because so much of the writing was so fun. This is Book One of a series, though, and the writing was not fun enough to make me want to read more.

Malice House by Megan Shepherd

 

This might be as quickly as I've bailed on a book in a while--not even twenty pages. At least four things wrong enough about reality that my suspension of disbelief came crashing to the metaphorical floor. The voice wasn't inspiring great confidence, either, all kinda short sentences with occasional fragments, but I might have been able to deal with that. Oh, well, yet another author to remember to avoid.

The Other Side of Night by Adam Hamdy

 

This isn't a crappy horror novel. It's mostly a bad science fiction novel disguised as a mediocre crime novel. It has the latter's addiction to twists and revelations instead of plot, and it has the former's gee-whiz attitude to the impossible. It's not a very good novel, it's too British for me to know if the characters or dialogue or setting hold up, but the prose itself is kinda stolid and occasionally clunky. The story itself kinda maunders around between various timelines, only settling down in the second half when the science fiction emerges from the shadows and things go wildly off the rails. I guess if I'd seen that Hamdy had ghostwritten for Patterson I'd have left the book on the library shelf. Oops and oh well, at least it wasn't so bad I didn't finish it.