This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger

 

My plan for a weekend-long Reading Project were torn asunder by a complete crash of my circadian rhythm this morning, so I wasn't able to start at the coffee shop--I wasn't doing much of anything until basically noon--and I figured this would be a good book to read this evening. It's not part of Krueger's mystery series, it's a stand-alone novel which has obvious (and acknowledged in the afterword/acknowledgments) roots in *The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*, among other novels, set in the Great Depression and connecting to the USA's mistreatment of the Native Americans, especially the Indian Schools ("Destroy the Indian, save the man.") and sending a foursome downriver from Minnesota to Saint Louis. There are strong hints of the supernatural in this novel, one of Krueger's near-constants, one character can apparently see the past, and one can apparently see (and possibly even change) the future; oddly, those little bits of the fantastic make the realism elsewhere in the novel grab a bit harder, the tension seems to give the novel some extra grit. The authorial voice is someone explicitly telling a story of his youth (not Krueger, he's not that old, but maybe someone his dad's age) and the power of story and the power of music are among the themes, here. Neat stuff, well worth reading.

Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz

 

Another interesting book about old places, some more forgotten than others, less interested in frontiers and fringes than The Far Edges of the Known World, much more interested in cities and how they grow and shrink, live and die, and what lessons we can take from history as the cities more of us live in than ever are threatened by climate and other natural disasters. The clearest throughgoing point is that leaving a city--and mass abandonment is in the end how most cities that die, die--is a political choice, especially at a population level. It's not exactly a fix-up, but the four cities were clearly four different experiences for the author, and probably not in the same order they're in the book. Not so scales-from-the-eyes enlightening as the Rees, but very readable and worth reading, especially if you live in or near a city (and probabilistically, you do).

A Small Town by Thomas Perry

 

After a couple of mediocre-ish novels, I was grateful to past me for picking this up last time I was at the library, Perry is usually a fun thrillerish read. This is pretty typical for Perry, dry and almost clinical, with a main character who manages to be both methodical and opportunistic as she pursues her well-justified mission of revenge. This isn't the most-satisfying Perry I've read, there's less in doubt almost from the start than there is in some of his others--the primary question is what it's going to cost the main to kill all the bad men she's after, her success seems inevitable pretty quickly. Still a good read, but it is interesting to me how "watch the person pursue inevitable revenge" is so much more satisfying to me than "watch the sociopath kill people pointlessly," even when the relevant body counts are about the same.

Listen to Your Sister by Neena Viel

 

This looked like a horror novel when I saw it in the library, and after last night's sub-awesome book by a horror author I figured I'd give it a shot. It's not a very good novel. It's disjointed and kinda tips more surreal than the author really has chops to pull off, and even for supernatural horror it has some ... plausibility issues--though they're mostly around how people behave more than the supernatural-ish stuff. The prose is occasionally a little awkward and flat, but the dialogue mostly rings true (though there's not a lot of distinction between the three main characters). The story seems to want to say things I'm inclined to agree with about family and its value, especially Black family, but there's a lot of clutter and cruft that gets in the way of saying it. Oh, well.

The Little Sleep by Paul Tremblay

 

Found this in a book store a few months ago, and I'd read some Tremblay and enjoyed it--and the thought of a riff on Chandler kinda appealed, too. Alas, it turns out that Tremblay is much better when he's writing horror, which this is not. The choice to have a narcoleptic narrator is, er, tiresome; he never really seems to figure anything out, solutions just seem to land on him. Maybe that's not far from Chandler, but this is at best a pale shadow of that. The prose seemed almost lifeless, and the characters all seemed blurry and vague. If I didn't like Tremblay's more recent horror so well, this would just about put me off him.

Last Exit by Max Gladstone

 

This is a fantasy novel that has, that I can see, bits of stuff like Zelazny's Amber books and King and Straub's The Talisman (and of course King's Dark Tower) in it. Multiple worlds that share what one might call architecture, or landmarks, all of them under some sort of threat. Apparently. At least, the nature of the threat is not what it seems--which is fundamentally fine, it allows a happier ending than seems possible for most of the novel's length, without seeming cheap or as though the author is wimping out or something. There are elements of Horror (unsurprising, really) and some interesting textual and subtextual commentary on society and tech--the latter, refreshingly, not in a "magic-versus-tech" way--and the implication that the main characters find the other worlds they find is because their imaginations are so limited is ... interesting. There are also hat-tips and allusions (and probably Easter eggs) to other Fantasy, much of which I probably didn't entirely get. Probably the best novel I've read in a while, huzzah.

All Hallows by Christopher Golden

 

I am a genuine oddity among Horror fans, in that I really don't much like Hallowe'en. I am also an oddity in general in that I have approximately zero nostalgia for my teenage years, and I'm furthermore an oddity among Gen Xers in that I have like no nostalgia for the 1980s. So this novel about Hallowe'en, 1984, was always going to have an uphill battle. The fact it's not all that well-written--especially its weirdly gauzy anachronistic nostalgia for 1984, and its awkwardly miraculous knack for interrupting any narrative momentum to jump to a different POV (there were like six or seven, in the 97 pages I finished, and the chapters tended to be little three-to-five-page things)--eventually ground me to a halt. DNF, and probably just as well.

Somebody's Daughter by David Bell

 

This is one of those modern thrillers that confuses interminable twists and a surfeit of variously unreliable narrators for cleverness. Somewhere in the back half I was finally able to turn off the part/s of my brain that were trying to figure out what was going on and just read; the book didn't necessarily get better, but it got less unpleasant. It's a little harder to pull off unreliable narrator/s when you stick to third, but the tight third here enables the decision--there's one narrator who's a little more reliable, and they're also the character acting less stupidly than just about all the others. So many people with so little in the way of redeeming characteristics, it's vaguely amazing I finished the novel. I picked this up at the library because I remembered reading another book by the author, I remember being ambivalent about it, but liking it more than this. Oh well.

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut

 

A collection of short stories, mostly from the 1950s into the early 1960s (*Slaughterhouse-Five* was published in 1969, so at least most of these would have been before he broke big (ish). Some of them are, of course, better than others--it was a pleasure to renew my acquaintance with "Harrison Bergeron," others did much less--but Vonnegut is always Vonnegut, his voice and his concerns and his viewpoints remain clear throughout the lot of them, in all their various absurdities (and even the most mundane of them are at heart absurd). I should probably read more Vonnegut as I come across him.

The Far Edges of the Known World by Owen Rees

 

A really interesting book, lots of information in it. It's amazing how vast trade networks were in antiquity--and maybe technically earlier. The idea that Han dynasty China and the Roman Empire were trying to exchange messages in the second century CE is ... astonishing. The point overall is that just about anyplace can be the center of life, or a lifestyle, or trading, or learning, or whatever; and that can be orthogonal to larger centers of political power, especially when there are empires around. The book does a convincing job of arguing that the interstices between established polities need more examination by historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists. I don't have enough stuff in my head about the various cultures to feel confident what's in this book will stick, at this point, but it's very worth reading if the subject matter interests.

Head Cases by John McMahon

 

Apparently this is book one of a series, possibly a trilogy instead of something indefinite (the author has done a trilogy before, though I don't know how planned). This is a decently-written procedural-ish novel, a bunch of FBI agents matching wits with a very smart serial killer (which has a specific meaning in law enforcement, and is used correctly in the novel despite a putative psychologist apparently refusing to accept it as a term) but it's all told from the point of view of an agent who is somewhere on the autism spectrum, though he apparently functions at least mostly OK in society; he's an interesting narrator, both as a character and as an authorial decision. The other characters are pretty clear and relatively believable (given the inherent plausibility problems with the sub-genre); most of the twists and reveals were adequately foreshadowed, so it didn't feel like endless "no it's another twist" thinking it was clever. Pretty decent, but not anything I feel a need to read more about.

Zer0es by Chuck Wendig

 

This is a kinda older Wendig novel--it predates his recent turn to more purely Horror subjects--and it's a little ... weird. There are some real body-horror moments in it, and some bits about loss of control and/or self, but it plays mostly as like a technothriller.  Wendig apparently has a past dealing with people on the technological fringes, and he seems to have enough of a grasp of what the hackers in the novel are doing to convey it without getting supertechnical about it. There's at least one moment that had me smacking my forehead (Wendig should have done a little research ...) but I got past it. I think he's gotten better as a novelist, but this is pretty good.

Killer on the Road by Stephen Graham Jones

 

I found this while I was on vacation a few months ago--it's two short novels in one book, each with its own front cover (the mutual back is in the middle) and I read this side of the book tonight. It's a decent slasherish horror novel--slasher isn't my main jam, but this one works, though some of what happens seems more like something that'd work better in a movie, where there are actual visuals. It's a kinda goofy novel--slasher is often goofy--but there's some stuff going on it, things about being Native American, things about loss, things about friendship and family. There's a little weirdness in the beginning as the POV character/s persist in making things worse for themselves, but bad decisions are also a part of slasher. The ending does kinda grab, and resolves a lot more than one might expect a slasher story to bother with. This is well in Jones's wheelhouse and he delivers well.

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.