I have been slacking on writing these book reviews. In honor of this website's makeover, here are quickish reviews of the 5 books I've read since the last one I posted. I put the same reviews on Goodreads if you wanna follow me there.
B-
Written five years before American Gods, Neverwhere shares a lot of ideas and plot points with its more famous younger brother. Everyman Richard Mayhew saves a bleeding girl on the sidewalk and is thrust into a magical world of grime and violence in tunnels under London, featuring an Earl whose court is on an abandoned train car, a society of Rat-Speakers and an angel called Islington. As far as speculative fiction concepts go, this is a pretty great one. On the whole, however, I found it to be inferior to American Gods. If you like that book and Gaiman’s style in general, this may be worth reading for you. I would not recommend it as a starting point for anyone into Gaiman’s work; read American Gods or The Sandman series instead. For one thing, the cultural references to various London locations didn’t carry much meaning to me--I understand the whimsical, modern-Alice-in-Wonderland tone Gaiman was going for, but as a non-Brit, I often felt I was missing something. That something was meaning. Despite the feel-good ending, I closed the book and found myself asking, “What was the point?”
As a side note, I did not realize until just now (after reading it) that this is a novelization of a Gaiman-written TV series of the same name, released the same year. Perhaps why he wrote Richard to be so…boring? I understand he’s the everyman, but does he have to be so featureless? It often felt as if he was being tugged along by the other characters and general plot events, with his only contributions being occasional snippy comments. That's not a formula for a relatable character. Maybe one explanation is that Gaiman was simply adapting his lines from the show?
To counterbalance my harshness, I will say that I mildly enjoyed this book the whole way through. It’s not awful by any stretch of the imagination. The premise is great, the change in Richard at the end of the book is satisfying, and I admire Gaiman's abilities in coming up with creative metaphors to make otherwise boring descriptions come to life. The execution just doesn’t really fulfill the promises of the concept.
A
A friend group of classics students at a quiet New England liberal arts college get involved in some dark activities. This novel is chilling, dreamlike, and written with a beautiful precision--something like a modern Tell-Tale Heart. It also appeals to the academic's desire to think of their studies as adventurous, exploratory, with a dangerous undercurrent. The story could only take place before the Internet Age; there's something about poring through old books in a dim-lit library that's far more romantic than doing work on a computer screen. The characters are memorable, especially Bunny, who is realistic enough to suspend your disbelief, but enough of a caricature to seem like a sort of archetype for...American values? I don't know. Anyway, the second half drags a little, but the whole book is spellbinding enough to keep you reading anyway. Great stuff, Donna.
A-
It feels a little silly to give a rating to one of the masters of 20th century literature, but that's exactly what I'm here to do. Dubliners is 15 short stories portraying life in Dublin around the turn of the century. Joyce uses his slight, mundane portraits of everyday people to reveal deeper insights about his country and the spirit of the time. They all leave you thinking rather than provide answers, and the simplicity of the prose belies a mastery of language. Reading this, I got the sense that Joyce placed every sentence, maybe every word, with great consideration and intentionality. It does kind of feel like it exists to be analyzed in English classes, which speaks to its enduring influence on literature. I also didn't fully relate to/understand some of its Irishisms. That said, neither of these are faults of the book. This is clearly a masterpiece. I'll get around to reading Ulysses someday.
B
Awesome concept. Apparently part of an early 2000s speculative fiction movement that called itself the New Weird. I was not familiar but it's a fitting name, because this book is successfully weird. Four scientists are sent by some--government? organization? thing?--called the Southern Reach into Area X, an abandoned wilderness with strange, seemingly supernatural properties. These phenomena include mysterious disappearances, a tower/tunnel appearing out of nowhere, and plants forming the shape of words. This novel takes natural landscapes and makes them alienating, foreign. Actually, everything about this world is alien--the dialogue is cold and distant, the facts we're given may be unreliable, and we don't even know any of the characters' names. It's unclear if the story even takes place on planet Earth, elsewhere in the universe, or an alternate reality entirely. This is a book teeming with questions but reticent with answers. I would not recommend it to people who like closure or satisfying conclusions. About halfway through, I realized the book would not answer most, or any, of the puzzles it presented, and that killed a lot of its momentum for me. This is a pretty quick read, and it was definitely intriguing. I don't know if it was intriguing enough for me to read the three sequels. Maybe those have more answers. Major props, though, to Pablo Delcan, the guy who designed the cover, which was so cool I had to check out the book.
A
A triumphant work. There's enough depth here that I definitely missed some, having only read it through once. Its thunderous, biblical prose and its symbolic violence make it feel like an attempt to create a mythology of the Old West. It is brilliant and definitely worth a read.
Next book on my list is Don Delillo's Underworld, which is already off to a really good start, so stay tuned for that review. But that's neither here nor there. Til next time.