Category Archives for book reviews

Albert of AdelaideAlbert of Adelaide by Howard L. Anderson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To compare the story of a platypus in search of Old Australia to the allegedly deep, profound post-apocalyptic nihilism of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is, it may seem,  an apples-to-watermelons comparison.

But, shave off Cormac McCarthy’s layers of pretentious faux Faulknerway prose, and humans-reduced- to-pronouns nihilism, and you have the story of a journey through the heart of darkness that is just darkness and virtually no story.

With Howard L. Anderson’s Albert of Adelaide, on the other hand, you get a journey into and out of the heart of darkness, as seen through the eyes of a platypus, Albert, escaped from the Adelaide Zoo to search for a promised land known as Old Australia. What Albert finds instead is a pyromaniacal wombat, drunken bandicoots, a militia of kangaroos (bent on preserving the purity and superiority of marsupialness over other species)and various and sundry misadventures in a barren desert settlement known as the Gates of Hell.

Unlike McCarthy’s dark, soulless novel, Anderson has achieved with Albert of Adelaide what few supposedly literary novels do—give readers a story and characters to care about, even as they are committing atrocious acts of violence, and a protagonist worth caring about, as he preserves his humanity (or would that be platypussity?). Something McCarthy’s The Road, his protagonists, fails to do.

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Do Not Ignore this Book

Manuscript Makeover: Revision Techniques No Fiction Writer Can Afford to IgnoreManuscript Makeover: Revision Techniques No Fiction Writer Can Afford to Ignore by Elizabeth Lyon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I rarely give five star ratings, but this book is just that good. It’s not necessarily life-changing or . . . maybe it is, at least for this writer.

As it’s subtitle says, the techniques outlined are techniques that shouldn’t be ignored, although they aren’t new and you’ve probably encountered them in any number of writing books or classes. But, what Lyon gives you is a compact reference for improving writing, for deepening characterization, structure, plot, etc. She also touches on copy editing and marketing, because, as we know from Dr. Johnson, none but a blockhead writes for fun.

Lyon suggests techniques such as “riff-writing” that I, at least, was unaware of. “Riff-writing” is a version of free writing directed at a particular sentence or paragraph in a finished draft of a work. It allows the writer to play, to give depth and breadth to a particular piece of writing. She also suggests common techniques such as imitating other writers to help “see” style, and to help loosen the inner editor and stave off the inner critic when drafting.

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Review of What Dreams May Come

What Dreams May ComeWhat Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Richard Matheson’s What Dreams May Come sets itself up as a memoir of sorts (SNARK ALERT: unfortunately some memoirs deserve that tag, too), a piece of nonfiction dictated from the afterlife. Obviously, it’s a novel, the story of Chris Nielsen, who dies in a car accident, and whose spirit is transported to the afterlife, or a realm of the afterlife known as Summerland.

Before Chris’ spirit goes to Summerland, he finds himself stuck in a sort of purgatory in which he has to accept he’s dead. What keeps him in this state is his wife, Ann, whose grief he witnesses, and his desire to assure her that she’s going to be fine.

Once he finally enters Summerland, he’s guided and acquainted to this level of the afterlife by his cousin, Albert.

Like Dante’s visions of the afterlife, Matheson’s afterlife consists of many levels and Summerland isn’t quite heaven, though it’s not unpleasant–it’s a place of perpetual sunlight and summer where spirits come to work to get to higher levels, a heavenly corporate ladder of sorts.

Though Chris finds Summerland pleasant enough, he never finds it satisfying because he longs for his wife. His love for her seems boundless, and when she commits suicide on Earth, his love takes him on a journey to hell to rescue her, to get her spirit to see life/the afterlife is worthwhile.

The novel is uneven, an OK read.

Matheson’s afterlife is New Age-y and universalist in outlook: Buddhists get Nirvana, Christians get Heaven (eventually, although it’s not an immediate reunification with God), and Vahalla is probably in there, too. He explores several theological/philosophical concepts, in particular the soul’s attempt to move level by level in the afterlife, until reunion with God is acquired. Most often this climb up requires rebirth on Earth, until the soul is perfected.

Matheson also plays with the fiction/nonfiction them by adding a bibliography of book about death and the afterlife at the end of the novel.

Its weakness: the idealistic, overly sentimental relationship between Chris and Ann. It’s almost too perfect. Granted the novel is fantasy, but their relationship lacks in realism, though Chris protests it wasn’t perfect—like most couples they fought over money, they almost got divorced—his protests are unconvincing. They always make up and smoothe things over perfectly, even in their most difficult journey—guiding Ann into the afterlife to be reborn.

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The Barest of Beginnings

Almost Human: Making Robots ThinkAlmost Human: Making Robots Think by Lee Gutkind

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It may be a long time before we have robots as sophisticated as R2D2 or C3P0, but roboticists get closer every day as they work toward making robots think. Lee Gutkind’s Almost Human: Making Robots Think tours through contemporary robotics research — largely at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh — and gives readers a glimpse of where we are going with this particular technology and reveals that getting to the point of making independent thinking machines is at “the barest beginning.”

Gutkind focuses heavily on researchers involved in trying to find out whether robots could traverse the rugged extraterrestial terrain of Mars and perform independent experiments to discover signs of life on the Red Planet.

One intriguing concept Gutkind follows briefly is the idea of human/robot interactions — that humans will have to learn to adjust to almost-human machines in the same way we are having to adjust to the rapid advances in computer technology.

But most of all Gutkind puts a human stamp on the machines, potraying in depth the scientists and engineers behind the robots. We find out these researchers are driven, willing to put in long, grueling hours into designing and testing their machines. Gutkind’s portrait is reminiscent of Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine, an examination of the computer revolution in the ’70s and ’80s.

What Gutkind finds, I believe, is that the soul of these new machines is human.

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Chronicling Texas’ Hill Country

Hill Country Chronicles
By Clay Coppedge
The History Press (2010, $19.99)

Texas’ Hill Country covers about 25 counties in the central part of the state, including Travis County, home to Austin. It’s a region as thick with legends and characters as it is with Ashe junipers, better known as cedars to those who live here.

The region, its legends and characters, and even the cedars get covered in Clay Coppedge’s Hill Country Chronicles. Coppedge, a journalist and freelance writer, has put together a collection of essays that tell the story of this rugged and sometimes forbidding land, an area pivotal to Texas’ history.

Coppedge is a storyteller at heart, and some of the best pieces in the collection are those in which he tells the stories of the region’s characters, such as outlaw Johnny Ringo. If the name rings a bell, that’s because Ringo is associated with the Clanton Gang and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Ariz. Although Ringo gained notoriety as an outlaw, some sources claim he never fired a shot in Tombstone.

Ringo did fire a shot or two, as Coppedge writes, while making a stay in Burnet, Texas, where he was arrested Christmas Day for firing a shot across the city square. Texas’ Hill Country was also where Ringo probably earned his reputation as an outlaw during the Hoodoo War, a bloody feud over cattle between recent German settlers and their American-born neighbors.

Ringo, Coppedge writes, shot and killed Jim Cheyney, a resident of the area, after Cheyney had invited Ringo and his partner Bill Williams in for breakfast.

Coppedge also delves into Texas heroes such as Jim Bowie, telling the story of how Bowie may have come into possession of his namesake knife. “A good bit of evidence suggests that the real Bowie knife of legend and lore was designed and made in Arkansas blacksmith named Thomas Black . . . . Black’s design was long and heavy and was distinguished by an evil little upturn at its tip and scooped top blade.”

Coppedge’s stories range far and wide through the region. He writes about its people, its places — Luckenbach,  for instance, the blink of a town made famous by Waylon, Willie and the boys — and its critters: from armadillos and unappreciated mules to the state dinosaur, the Pleurocoelus. And he does it often with dry humor and insight, which makes the book worth a read.

Review of China Mieville’s The City & The City

The City & The CityThe City & The City by China Miéville

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

China Mieville’s Hugo award-winning The City & The City poses as a noirish murder mystery set in two fictional Eastern European cities, Beszel and Ul Quoma.

It starts out, as most mysteries do, with a dead body, a woman brutally murdered and dumped in a Beszel skate park. Assigned to the case is Inspector Tyador Borlu of Beszel’s Extreme Crime Squad.

His investigation is complicated by the nature of the two cities—Beszel and Ul Quoma go beyond being neighboring, though somewhat antagonistic cities, they exist in the same space. The murder victim, an American student, it turns out was murdered in Ul Quoma.

Though the cities are crosshatched, their citizens do not coexist; under threat of severe penalties administered by an Orwellian organization known only as Breach, the two cities’ citizens must refrain from interacting in every way imaginable: they practice “unseeing” each other; each city is treated as a separate entity, having its own airports, its own communications.

To complete his investigation, Borlu must get permission to enter Ul Quoma, and can only do so as an advisor to the Ul Quoman detective Qussim Dhatt. The two get caught in a strange web that may or may not involve a third city Orciny that also shares the same space Beszel and Ul Quoma, and catches the attention of the all-seeing Breach.

Mieville’s novel is intriguing, in particular the idea of two cities sharing the same space, though their citizens are forbiden to interact.
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Book Review: Steal Across the Sky

Steal Across the SkySteal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you’ve paid any attention to the History Channel lately, you’ve seen (or have skipped over it puzzling why such a show is on the History Channel) the series Ancient Aliens. Its premise is that aliens have meddled in humanity’s past, influening history, religion, technology and perhaps even DNA. It’s the stuff of science fiction.

Nancy Kress’s Steal Across the Sky takes up a similar premise. The aliens have come. They have meddled in humanity’s past. They have returned and have established a base on the moon.

These elements have the makings of an alien invasion novel. The aliens, calling themselves the Atoners, however, have other purposes in mind, at least according the ad they’ve posted online. Acoording to the ad, they are here to apologize to human species for interfering with its past stealing off with humans at various times as part of their unfathomable experiment. Now they have come to atone for their sins.

To do this, they recruit 21 humans to serve as Witnesses to their crime. They send the Witnesses to various planet to see how these experiments with the species have turned out.

The Witnesses come back with extraordinary information, species-changing information. At the same time, in what seems a just-in-case measure, the Atoners continue with their experiment.

The novel isn’t hard science fiction, it’s speculative science fiction satire, somewhat in the tradition of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It plays with a great “what if”? premises, and pokes gentle fun at ancient alien theories, while at the same time poking fun at human reactions to the unfamiliar. The reactions vary from a teen suicide cult that evolves once the Atoners’s secret is revealed, to a fundamentalist Christian group bent on convincing humanity there is only one Atoner and that Atoner is the Anti-Christ.

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Book Review: Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory

The Wasp FactoryThe Wasp Factory by Iain M. Banks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In 1991, Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho stirred-up a hornet’s nest of outrage from critics and feminists before it was published. The novel was scorned for its graphic depictions of violence, especially against women.

In the novel serial killer Patrick Bateman describes his murders in excruciating detail. He also describes his daily life in the same excruciating detail, in flat atonal first-person prose.

From brushing his teeth to eating meals, all of Bateman’s is life is ritualized, and disturbing. His frame of mind is eerily like that of Frank Cauldhame, protagonist of Iain Bank’s The Wasp Factory.

Like Bateman, Cauldhame’s life is ritualized: he’s developed a fantasy world that often involves torturing and killing animals (apparently a common trait of serial killers). Within that fantasy world is the Wasp Factory, an old clock Cauldhame uses to kill wasps in an labyrinthine torture chamber.

Like Bateman, Cauldhame, 17, has also murdered — in his case family members: one cousin with an adder, another cousin with a giant kite, and a younger brother with a bomb that had lain unexploded since World War II.

As sinister as Cauldhame is, what makes this novel palatable is the language and voice of its narrator. The flat tone of American Psycho makes it almost impossible to read without experiencing the overwhelming desire to pluck your eyes out.

Cauldhame has a voice. He’s almost pleasant to follow as he tours the reader through his darkly comic fantasy world.

You actually sort of care for Cauldhame. You want to know what happens to him and what caused his need to kill and torture.

And Banks reveals this with a twist that even Ambrose Bierce would have been envious of.

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