Book Blog: April 2009
Titanic’s Last Secrets: Brad Matsen
April 29, 2009
It’s probably a given that at any moment, somewhere in the world, someone is working on a book about the Titanic. Most such books are, at this point, completely superfluous, and this one is no exception; how these guys managed to turn an interesting but relatively minor detail about the sinking into a book-length tome, I’ll never know. Oh wait, I do know: they padded it with a retelling of the entire history of the ship, with several chapters on the history of the company that built it and one on the sinking itself. I am more into the sociology of Titanic than I am its rivets and plates, and I freely admit that my eyes start to cross when I read too many numbers — God help me, I’ve never been good at construction stuff — so this is not really up my alley anyway, but I still say it dragged on far too long. The only bright spot was a paragraph in the chapter notes at the back of the book, where the author cites TitanicInquiry.org and mentions that “navigation on the site is a snap”. Guess who designed the navigation? Oh yeah.
The Silver Swan: Benjamin Black
April 29, 2009
I’d have to really sit down and think hard over all my past reading to be certain, but this might be the best-written mystery I’ve ever read — not the plot, but the prose. Benjamin Black has a way of picking just the right words and mentioning things as if in passing that serve to give, in a very small space, an exact idea of a character, from their looks to their deepest motivations. It all seems effortlessly elegant, the work of a master wordsmith. The plot itself is not as notable as the prose, but it holds together well and turns a commonplace interpersonal drama into a poignant mystery without any gaps of logic or unrealistic twists. A good choice for everyone, mystery buffs and otherwise.
The Reader: Bernhard Schlink
April 28, 2009
The universe must be very sorry about my lousy-movie streak, because it is making up for it with a great-book streak. I wasn’t very into this book at first — could anything live up to the greatness that is Les Liaisons Dangereuses? Probably not, that’s what I was thinking — but within a few chapters I was hooked, and it just kept getting better and better. I did not see the mid-book plot twist coming at all, which would perhaps be more forgivable if I didn’t list A Judgement in Stone among my favorite books. It’s a sad fact of life that most of the world’s evil deeds are not carried out by evil people, but by normal people who have been gradually warped into believing they’re doing a normal thing. For every Hitler, there are a hundred Hannas, and that’s the true horror of war.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses: Choderlos de Laclos
April 26, 2009
So good it broke my brain. Now I am forever spoiled for even the sweetest romance novels, because I have been corrupted by the decadent French nobility.
Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story: Isabel Gillies
April 24, 2009
Oh my friggin’ god, why does everyone have to write a memoir these days?! And why are there so many “divorce memoirs”? Unless your husband left you for a llama or turned out to be a woman or something remarkable and unheard-of like that, I do not want to hear about it. This book is even worse than Split; at least Suzanne Finnamore is a better writer. As with Split, I found myself wanting to jump into the story just so I could slap the author very hard in the face — not that that would put a stop to the whining and immaturity, I suppose, but it might make her sober up long enough to realize why her husband left her. If this woman has any friends left, they’ve probably long since stopped listening to her tale of woe; why she expects complete strangers to give a crap is totally beyond my understanding.
The Lost City of Z: David Grann
April 21, 2009
The great thing about explorers is that they realize the risks they’re undertaking. When some poor schmuck wanders off-trail during a hike and gets lost in the forest and dies through sheer dumb luck, it’s a little guilt-inducing to indulge your morbid interest; when Percy Fawcett, hard-bitten trailblazer and self-delusional obsessive, sets off into the Amazon and never comes back, well… you can speculate to your heart’s content and not feel a wee bit guilty, because everyone else is doing it, too. Maybe Fawcett wasn’t as nuts as everyone thought — at least, that’s what the book’s conclusion leads us to believe — but the guy did bite off more than he could chew, and certainly paid the ultimate price for it. Who knows — maybe he’s still out there somewhere, trapped in an Indian village with nothing but an old guy and a library full of Dickens…
Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography: Nick Rennison
April 10, 2009
An excellent melding of fiction and history — never goes too far over the top, but is never boring either. Nick Rennison even goes so far as to spoil the Game by — gasp! — baldly stating that the Master is no longer with us. I guess I’ll have to accept that, now that I’ve seen it in print… but that might be an assumption, and we all know where guessing can lead you.
Fresh Offerings: New & Updated
- Blog: Weekender #14
- Blog: Weekender #13: Home Sick Edition
- Blog: Weekender #12
- Blog: Weekender #11
- Blog: Weekender #10