"The Girls of Atomic City"

The Girls of Atomic City (Denise Kiernan)



I had high hopes for this book, but I didn't make it past page 40; despite the fascinating story it's attempting to tell, the book is undone by two flaws. The smaller is that the author jumps around too much, attempting to juggle 8 women's lives; limiting the book to 2 or 3 would have been a big help.
But in the end I'm not sure this would have made any difference as what what really dooms the book is the author's inexcusable over-writing. In Kiernan's world, coal can't just be burned; instead the energy inside "could be released in dreamy blue flame and bestow its power on its liberators". The entire book is written like this, and it becomes incredibly annoying extremely quickly. The passage that finally drove me to give up is the author describing someone's hair:

She wore her dark brown hair parted on the left, undulating tousles washing past her prominent cheeks, ebbing again at her gymnast's shoulders, before landing with a final bounce at the top of a spine that exhibited the kind of impeccable posture grown out of a lifetime of grooming and horseback riding.

If you made it through that whole disaster of a sentence without gagging a little bit you're a stronger reader than me. Or as the author might write: The reader's eyes washed past the horribly overdone prose, his interest ebbing at the tiring text, before his desire to continue to read the book landed with a final thud as he tossed the book in the donation pile.
Take a pass on this one.



Grade: F

"The Greenlanders"

The Greenlanders (Jane Smiley)

I feel bad not being able to get into this book; it's got excellent reviews, but when it came time to actually crack it open, I barely made it ten pages. I've read that it's supposed to be in the style of a Norse saga, but for me I just found it to be horribly dry, written in snore-inducing this happened, then that happened style. Here's a little taste (page 233):

Another thing that happened after this hunger was that Bjorn Einarsson Jorsalfari declared his intention of remaining year round at Thjodhilds Stead, which was in Kambstead Fjord, at the back of Hvalsey Fjord, instead of spending part of the year at one farm an part of the year at the other, for he hadn't enough men to make something of both farmsteads, and he preferred the location of Thjodhilds Stead, for it gave his ships easy access to the sea but also to Gardar and Brattahlid. For this reason it happened that Gunnhild Gunnardottir would be within a day's walk of her own home when she went to stay with Solveig for the summer...

Did you follow that? I didn't, because I fell asleep halfway through it. Maybe I've just read too many fast-paced novels, but it takes so long for anything to happen that I couldn't stop my attention from drifting away. I'm sure a more patient reader can find a lot to enjoy here, but for me it's going regretfully in the donation pile.

Grade: D

"The Damnation of Pythos"

The Damnation of Pythos (David Annandale)

I'll cut right to the chase here: This is not a good book. There's enough material here for a middling short story, and stretched out to novel length, it's a real slog; I only finished it out of some misplaced sense of devotion, and it was a struggle not to skip pages as nothing happened for the middle 80% of the book. Most of this is waiting for something to happen, which is exactly as thrilling as it sounds; when it does finally kick off at the end of the book, it turns into a long, sub-par action scene that just kind of fizzles out. I can't even recommend this to 40k superfans; there's much better books to spend your time and attention on.

Grade: D-

"Snow Crash"

Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)

I really hated this book; it has the William Kennedy style of writing where it sounds like an annoying person at a party you can't escape yammering nonsensically at you, with Stephenson's twist being that it sounds like you've been cornered by a 10 year old boy who can't shut up. Here's a quote from the first ten pages, talking about the hero's car, which goes, like, a billion miles an hour:

The Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a pesta.

I made it through maybe 15 pages of this crap before it was hurled into the donation pile with great malice. I don't know that I have much to add beyond that horrible quote. I guess I would say - do not buy this book; do not check out this book; do not recommend this book; do not read this book.

Grade: F-

"Lincoln at Gettysburg"

Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (Garry Wills)

I'm surprised at how little I liked this book. Honestly, I don't know how this won the Pulitzer; it's about a fifth very technical dissection of the Gettysburg Address itself, and the rest is a wandering hodgepodge (I found myself flipping page after page of information about then-contemporary cemetery design philosophy). Some of this is interesting - the author's rundown of the two hour long preceding Gettysburg Oration went into a lot of detail about public speaking in the mid 1800s that was surprisingly interesting.
But this is the exception - most of the non-Address material is both boring and puzzling in that I'm not sure why it was included. I almost muddled through the whole book, but then I started running into this (from pages 116-117):

Psychobiographers, as we have seen, claim that this demonstrates Lincoln's oedipal compulsion to "kill" Douglas as a sibling rival.

I don't really think I need to say any more than that. Don't bother with this book.

Grade: F

"A History of Future Cities"

A History of Future Cities (Daniel Brook)

I knew I was in trouble with this book right from page three:

Orient is both a noun and a verb - the noun means east; the verb means to place oneself in space - but its two meanings are intertwined. An individual lost in the wilderness can place herself in space (orient herself) because she knows the sun rises in the east (the Orient). The disorientation imparted by St. Petersburgh, Shanghai, Mumbai and Dubai results from their being located in the East but purposefully built to look as if they are in the West. Their occidental looks are anything but accidental.

What we have here is a misleadingly titled book comprised of four not terribly well written, hyperbolic, boring histories of "pop up" cities - the aforementioned St. Petersburgh, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai (putting aside that Shanghai is over a thousand years old and Mumbai may have been continuously inhabited since the Stone Age). I'm gonna be real here: This is a book not only without a central premise, but as I hope is demonstrated from the snippet above, soaked in nonsense. The actual histories themselves are, and I know I said this already but it bears repeating, not well written and boring. I can't recommend not reading this book enough.

Grade:
F-

"My Indecision is Final"

My Indecision is Final: Rise and Fall of Goldcrest Films (Jake Eberts & Terry Ilott)

Well, I tried with this one; I made it over a hundred pages without giving up, but bowed to the inevitable put this down to read another Warhammer 40000 novel. In brief, this book suffers from the same problem as The Secret History of MI6: all the most interesting stuff is left out in favor of page after page of turgid organizational detail. In this case we get tons of ink spent going over the boardroom moves and financing deals of putting a picture together, which is interesting for a little bit, but by the time we get to the exhaustive details of setting up four separate credit pools for the company to draw on, I had checked out. It's a shame; Goldcrest was part of some great movies, but The Killing Fields gets maybe three total pages, while there's at least five pages about how the company that owns Goldcrest Films is set up as a personal trust of the so and so family. This book is practically unreadable; there's a good story in here somewhere, but it's buried deep under a layer of thick, soupy financing deals. Might be good to read when you're having trouble going to sleep.

Grade: D

"Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom"

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (Stephen Platt)

I've got two books about the Taiping rebellion, and I think I should have read God's Chinese Son first; I didn't realize from the subtitle that Platt's book is all about the Western view of the Taiping rebellion. This is a very strange choice to make - Platt ends up super fast-forwarding through the entire first half and the last bit of the rebellion, instead focusing on the stretch of the war when the Western powers interfered. This makes for a searing indictment of England's misguided intervention, but as a actual "Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War", well, no, not really. I guess I could recommend this if you've already read a nice book about the conflict and are looking for another perspective on it, or if you're writing a research paper on the subject of foreign intervention in Qing China, but otherwise, take a pass. Very disappointing.

Grade: D
Bonus: Link to Amazon review that sums up my feelings pretty well.

"The Cat's Table"

The Cat's Table (Michael Ondaatje)

I knew this book wasn't going to be for me if the back was anything to go by. Take a gander at this:

In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. [...] As the ship crosses the Indian Ocean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all over the place like freed mercury. But there are other diversions as well: they are first exposed to the magical worlds of jazz, women, and literature by their eccentric fellow travelers, and together they spy on a shackled prisoner, his crime and fate a galvanizing mystery that will haunt them forever. By turns poignant and electrifying, The Cat’s Table is a spellbinding story about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood, and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a spectacular sea voyage.

Doesn't that sound like the most horrible shit you can imagine? Luckily, it's not as bad as it sounds. In fact, the first 100 pages or so sometimes almost raise to the level of entertaining, although it's quite meandering and full of characters who stop just short of turning to the camera and exclaiming "Did you notice how eccentric I am?!". The book really starts getting terrible at the point where the hero and his two buddies go on shore and come back with a small yappy dog who runs into the room of the richest guy on the ship and murders him by ripping this throat out. (Readers are directed to drop the record-scratching sound effect here)
After this bizarre scene, the book goes downhill quickly, flashing forward to a bunch of scenes that try and fail spectacularly to interest the reader in our hero's relationship with the sister of one of his friends (and, in an amazingly tonally deaf turn, one of his 30 year old friends apparently having romantic feelings for the 14 year old he's tutoring). Here the book goes from mildly boring pap to downright painful GUYS THIS IS MEANINGFUL pretentious crap. The 150 pages of text remaining in the book at this point I believe may qualify as a crime against humanity, or at least literature.

Grade: D-

"Knights of the Sea"

Knights of the Sea: The True Story of the Boxer and the Enterprise and the War of 1812 (David Hanna)

I'm gonna cut right to the chase here: This book is a mess. From the title, you'd probably guess it's about a naval battle in the War of 1812, but what it reads like is a panicked high school history paper desperately trying to meet a minimum word count; Hanna seems unable or unwilling to hold on to a narrative thread, so instead he keeps going into non sequitors, quoting big parts of poems or songs, or quoting Jane Austen or Shakespeare. The result is a bizarre, tedious frakenstein of raw, puzzling little scenes that never seem to have anything to do with each other or, heaven forbid, what the book's actually supposed to be about. Hanna needs to get his shit together and hire a tougher editor.

Grade: D-

"Straight Man"

Straight Man (Richard Russo)

I really don't know what to make of this book. I think that it's supposed to be funny, but the jokes were so feeble that I honestly couldn't even tell when the author was trying to make me laugh. Russo's picked out an area that should be full of comedic potential (our protagonist is an aging literary professor struggling with his colleagues), but does nothing with the concept; The author's other characters are paid a compliment if they are described as being barely one-dimensional stereotypes, and we just end up following our hero around on a boring, lifeless, pointless, tedious journey filled with boring, lifeless, pointless flashbacks and asides. At least this book isn't filled with the sad flop sweat of a truly painful unfunny comedy book, so it's boring instead of actively repulsive. Not much of a compliment, I know, but I'm trying to say something nice, and at the end of the day, this isn't repulsive, just a boring and forgettable lump of mediocrity.

Grade: D+

"John Dies at the End"

John Dies at the End (David Wong)

I didn't know what to feel when reading this book, which is not a good sign. Honestly I'm not really sure what the book is going for; am I supposed to feel scared, amused, grossed-out, suspenseful, excited? The only one of those I really felt was grossed-out, which is not a terribly difficult feat. I guess that there's also supposed to be horror and humor in here, but none of this ever really landed. Mostly, I felt confused; why does throwing coffee on a demon made out of meat hurt it? Why does playing music from a boom box hurt it? (There's some guff in here about how a boom box is a modern "David's harp," and I guess I need to go back and brush up on my Bible, because I don't remember David fighting any demons, let alone destroying them with harp music.) The best books can draw a wondrous range of emotions from a reader, but this one just conjured up a slightly confused, annoyed yawn.

Grade: D-

"The X-President"

The X-President (Philip Baruth)

Is there anything more frustrating than a book with a good idea that has no idea what to do with it? That's the case with this novel, based around the idea that Bill Clinton - through no fault of his own - sets in motion a chain of events that leads the world to unite against America, and his biographer is recruited to go back in time and steer him away from this path.
At least, that's what the back cover and reviews say. I got to page 80 (out of 369), and not only has our heroine not yet traveled back in time, she doesn't even know time travel is possible, having farted around for 80 pages getting nothing done. I could forgive how long this takes to get going if the writing was excellent, or if interesting things were happening, but neither of these is the case. The most egregious example, to me, is a clutch of pages wasted showing the heroine returning to her house that she's sublet and breaking up a party that her tenant's teenage daughter is throwing. What do we learn from this? That our heroine doesn't like having keg parties thrown in her house? Why should I care? Why are you showing me this? When is something exciting going to happen?
Urgh. Baruth either needs a more forceful editor, or to have more respect for his readers. This leaden brick is going right in the donation pile.

Grade: D-

"Billy Phelan's Greatest Game"

Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (William Kennedy)

I was not impressed with the last William Kennedy book I read, but I was not prepared for how truly terrible this one is. I think this may be one of the worst-written books I have ever read, no small feat considering the compitition. I hardly even know where to start with this; within the first five pages, we are told that someone "lived with his bowling ball as if it were a third testicle". Guys, if you keep your bowling ball down your pants, you are both very strong, and probably should see a mental health worker; also, if your testicles are so big that a bowling ball would plausibly be a third one, please consult a medical professional.
Amazingly, it gets worse from here. I'll just pick out one of the passages that had me scratching my head, rolling my eyes, and sighing in annoyance:

Men like Billy Phelan, forged in the brass of Broadway, send, in the time of their splendor, telegraphic statements of mission: I, you bums, am a winner. And that message, however devoid of Christ-like other-cheekery, dooms the faint-hearted Scottys of the night, who must sludge along, never knowing how it feels to spill over with the small change of sassiness, how it feels to leave the spillover there on the floor, more where that came from, pal. Leave it for the sweeper.

What the fuck is happening in this paragraph? What is Billy leaving on the floor for the sweeper? Is he so overjoyed at being "devoid of Christ-like other-cheekery" that he's shitting his pants? Is he throwing up, like I wanted to reading this book? Was someone really paid to write "the small change of sassiness"? How did this happen? Why was this allowed to happen??
This book fucking sucks.

Grade: F-

"Dragon Keeper"

Dragon Keeper (Robin Hobb)

I tried with this book, I really did. This is another free Kindle e-book, a genre which I have not exactly enjoyed in the past. In this case, I tried to make it 50 pages (this is not easy to measure with the Kindle's "location" system), and after three and a half chapters I just couldn't stand it anymore. Reading this book is like wading through hip-deep mud: It's slow, heavy, turgid, and your mind constantly wanders to something more interesting. The book opens badly, starting with a bunch of dragons cocooning themselves, but they're all weak and dazed and half of them die, and it's so ham-handedly GUYS THIS IS SAD that it becomes silly; I couldn't help but imagine these dragons drunkenly bumbling around to comical music.
Then we switch to focus on a deformed harpy girl and her dad, and nothing happens, and while reading this part I was missing the dragons stumbling around. After a bunch of pages of nothing of interest happening we switch to focus on Alise, our mary sue who LOVES DRAGONS GUYS, and while reading this I was somehow missing the earlier parts about nothing happening to a deformed harpy girl. At this point (I was reading the book in the bathroom) I would have rather just listened to the various gross sounds coming from the next stall than continue reading this book, which I guess is very mean to say, but there you have it.

Grade: F

"The Founding"

The Founding (Dan Abnett)

This is a omnibus containing three Gaunt's Ghosts novels, Gaunt himself being a Commissar in the 40k universe. Collected here are First and Only, Ghostmaker, and Necropolis. Since it took me so long to read, I don't feel bad reviewing each novel one by one. Suck on it, libs!

First and Only: According to the introduction, at one point this was the best-selling book published by Black Library. I get the sense this book came out quite early in the Black Library's run. It's entertaining enough, but it's marred by some weird issues - The Guard is all male, Chaos Space Marines are killed with single shots from a Guardsman's laser rifle (!!), and there's a deformed psyker commissar (!!!!) who "atomizes" an entire city when he dies (?!)
There's also just weird careless details: Gaunt's bolt pistol becomes a laspistol becomes a lasgun becomes a boltgun. On top of that, some of the writing is, put charitably, clumsy (a character's reaction when he realizes he's just been decapitated: "Only when his headless body fell onto the deck next to him he realized that... his head... cut... bastard... no.")
So with all that, is this book worth reading? Well, it's not bad, but the above mentioned issues make it rather difficult to recommend. I'd probably only suggest this book if you either love military-style novels (which this is at heart), or are looking for a friendly introduction to the 40k universe. Otherwise, it's perfectly serviceable, but I can't really recommend going too far out of your way to track it down.

Grade: B-

Ghostmaker: This is a short story collection that meanders around giving different Ghosts some time in the spotlight. I applaud the idea - up until now they've basically been cardboard cut-outs whose personality is no more fleshed out than "medic", "scout", "heavy weapons guy". In fact, the Ghosts themselves have less personality than the Team Fortress 2 characters who are literally named Medic, Scout, and Heavy Weapons Guy. So giving them some personality is a very welcome idea, but the actual execution unfortunately sinks the entire enterprise. What do we learn from a spotlight on Mkoll, the silently-moving scout? Turns out he's a scout, and that he can move silently. The author seems either unwilling or unable to flesh out characters  If they're good, they're tough, blue-collar, gritty heroes, and if they're bad, they're either deformed chaos monsters or blue-blooded elitists sipping coffee while our heroic, blue-collar, gritty heroes get the job done. Maybe I've been spoiled by other w40k novels. I'm bumping the grade up because I appreciate Abnett's efforts to imbue the Ghosts with a personality, but it's a cringing failure, and I only got like an eighth of the way through it.

Grade: D+

Necropolis: I was hoping that these novels would improve with time as Abnett became more familiar and comfortable with the setting he's working in, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case. Although the writing isn't as clumsy in this book, it's still full of distracting, careless errors. On page 669, a character is Trygg in the first paragraph and Trugg in the second. A character is hit by a lasrifle shot and bleeds out in a matter of minutes, even though the author has pointed out numerous times that lasrifle wounds are self-cauterized because of the weapon's heat. At the book's climax, Gaunt himself is shot by a bolt in the heart, but lives because he's wearing a steel rose on his shirt. This is dumb and cheesy enough as it is, but is nonsensical because a "bolt" is basically a rocket-propelled explosive. This is like surviving a hit from a RPG because you have a steel plate in your chest pocket; Gaunt would either be a mess on the floor or have had his steel rose punched straight through his body, but then I guess there couldn't be any sequels. Oh, and people also use "gak" as a swear word, and all I could think of was Nickelodeon Gak.
In short, this is not a good book. Some of the military action is exciting, but combined with Abnett's carelessness, lame characters  and annoying habit of cutting away from the actual important parts of the book to follow needless sideplots that don't go anywhere, this is a slog far more often than it is an engaging story.

Grade: C-

So in sum, I can't really recommend this at all. Even if you're looking to dip your toe in 40k, I'd suggest the much better Caiphas Cain omnibuses, which not only actually get the details right, but are actually, you know, enjoyable to read.

Grade: D-

"A History of the Roman World"

A History of the Roman World: 753 to 146 BC (H.H. Scullard)

What do you say about a book that devotes as many pages to neolithic and pre-historic Italy as it does to Rome under its seven kings? Well, in my case, I say that I didn't finish it, and that I didn't like it very much, and that everything in the book I either knew already or had a hard time caring about. The consensus seems to be that this is an old but good book, whereas I just found it unreadable - not only because of the author's weird choice of what to cover, but also because it's devided up by theme instead of chronologically. Sometimes this works, but here it doesn't. I guess all you need to know was that I was already skimming within the first ten pages of how the old stone age turned into the bronze age. Skip.

Grade: D-

"At Winter's End"

At Winter's End (Robert Silverberg)

I have a rule that books I read have 50 pages to give me a reason to keep reading; by the time I hit page 20 on this book with nothing interesting happening I knew I wasn't going to finish it, and the next 30 pages just draaaagggggeddddddd. The book's premise is that the Earth was devistated by falling meteors 700,000 years ago, and as it opens, one of the surviving tribes of humans prepares to leave its cocoon. I say "prepares" because this is one of the most slow, boring, ponderous books I've ever read. Maybe Silverberg wants us to really feel that 700,000 years as he meanders around, stopping in to visit with various groups of charecters as nothing happens to them. It's a bad sign when a book you're reading is less interesting than watching your wife play Skyrim, and this book's pacing is so glacial that she asked me to stop reading it to her, preferring to just listen to the grunts and groans of her shooting arrows at bandits. Do not read this book.

Grade: F

"Darwin's Radio"

Darwin's Radio (Greg Bear)

This book bored the shit out of me. According to the back cover, the book is about a guy named Christopher Dicken (yes, really) who's on the hunt for a disease hiding inside human DNA. That sounds interesting. The first fifty pages of the book are about a guy poking around an ice cave with two frozen Neanderthals in it and a lady from the UN being asked to look at a recently dug up mass grave. This is not interesting. In fact, our man - who, again, is seriously named Christopher Dicken - doesn't show up until page 40. And it's not like these previous 40 pages were exactly burning up with action; they could be cut down to about six pages max without losing anything except word count. In reading Amazon reviews, I was horrified to see the sentence "After page 40 or so, there is nothing more to be learned"; I can only imagine the endless tracts of lifeless text following the point where I gave up. I feel like the guy at the beginning of the horror movie where the viewer's yelling "Get out of the house!" who gets out of the house and drives out of the movie alive. That being said, if you're intensely interested in reading about fictional frozen Neanderthals, mass graves robbed of all drama by having pages of sparse details and boring dialogue, or if you just need a good book to put you to sleep, I highly recommend it; otherwise, stay away.

Grade: D-

"Snow Flower and the Secret Fan"

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel (Lisa See)

I'm just gonna cut to the chase right here: This book is really bad. It's sold as a touching story about two women in China who become friends and go through life and love and stuff. Unfortunately, the writing is absolutely horrible, in multiple ways. First off, the author is trying way, way, way too hard to drive home that this is taking place in CHINA, so nobody ever just gets sick, the monkey spirit within them falls ill because the ancestors blah blah CHINA blah blah. I wouldn't have batted an eye if I'd read "Then I put on my Chinese clothes because I was in China and went outside and stood on the Chinese ground since we're in China and walked down the Chinese path in China to the Yangxi River, in China, which is where I was, China". It's just too much, and it's downright painful to read. On top of that, the book's weird, disconnected writing style means that nobody in the book feels like a real actual person so much as a exposition robot here to remind everyone that we're in China, and also, China, and BTW, China, because that's where we are, China. For spice, add in the fact that the author has farmer's daughters getting their feet bound, which I'm pretty sure only happened to upper-class ladies, and it all adds up to a really terrible book.

Grade: F-