"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-

"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-

"STFU Parents"

STFU, Parents: The Jaw-Dropping, Self-Indulgent, and Occasionally Rage-Inducing World of Parent Overshare (Blair Koenig)

Time for me to engage in some hypocrisy! I've given more than one book a hard time for being nothing but the content of a website in book form, and here comes the content of a website in book form I quite enjoyed. In my own defense, there's a considerable bit of original writing in the introductions of each chapter, and the book has a further advantage over the website of not having any pictures (as much as I enjoy the website, it's a real appetite-destroyer). Even better, since the book is organized by theme, you can just skip the gross chapters (which I highly recommend as there's some real gut-churning nastiness contained within), which isn't always possible on the website. Plus, it was only ten bucks, and I'm going to tell myself that's a fair price for a book based on a website I've been enjoying for free for years. Oh, and, uh, the book's very entertaining, too.

Grade: A-

"The Infinite Wait"

The Infinite Wait and Other Stories (Julia Wertz)

When this blog started waaaaaay back in April 2011, Wertz's previous book Drinking at the Movies was the sixth review published. I only wish I'd started this blog before reading her first two books (the wonderfully named "Fart Party" volumes 1 and 2). Drinking at the Movies is a fairly straight narrative, and I think The Infinite Wait suffers slightly in comparison to it, both because some of the material is re-hashed, and because it's separated into three non-connected sections of Wertz's life. I enjoyed this book, but given its re-telling of some of the same parts of her life, I almost wonder if Wertz either needs to have more stuff happen to her before her next book, or start doing non-biographical work. In any case, I don't want to give the impression that this book is bad; it's merely got a few issues holding it back from greatness. It's also the best comic book I've read in 2013 (disclaimer: only comic book I have read in 2013).

Grade: B+

"I Am Better Than Your Kids"

I Am Better Than Your Kids (Maddox)

This is probably the meanest book I've ever read - it's a treasury of children's art getting mercilessly critiqued, and really, if you read that sentence and thought it sounds funny, you can just stop reading here and  go out and buy it. For those of you recoiling in horror, let me just say that the book is so mean that it circles around to being hilarious, with my absolute favorite parts being the author highlighting drawings (for example, by making a hideous crayon drawing of a superhero into a mocked-up comic cover for "I will catch you in my web man"). I could not stop laughing while reading this book. Highly recommended.

Grade: A+