A Spot of Bother, by Mark Haddon (2006)
Normally I am not a fan of books in which a person slowly loses his or her mind. I find that kind of plot claustrophobic, the written equivalent of the camera operator playing with all the funny special effects that make things look all wonky and 1960s-ish.
This book, which does indeed include a person slowly losing his mind, knows just when to quit with that stuff. George is recently retired and going a little more than a little nutty, but we only hang around with him for short periods before having a break: we follow around his wife as she has an affair, his daughter as she wonders whether or not to marry a man I'm going to marry if she decides she doesn't want him, his son as he tries to get his boyfriend to come back to him. The grimness is cut with enough comedy--and enough other plots--to keep it from getting oppressive.
The Family Tree, by Carole Cadwalladr (2005)
One of my very favorite kinds of book is the kind that pulls in a bunch of family members while mainly telling the story of one. This book succeeds in doing this without being a soap opera.
The Other Side of You, by Salley Vickers (2006)
Why oh why did I keep reading? I should have put the book down the moment I was startled to find that the narrator was supposed to be male. I'd been assuming the narrator was female for pages, and indeed, the narrator makes a very poor male. Only a few special authors are able to write in the voice of the opposite sex, and this author is mistaken in thinking she is one of them.
I would have stopped reading there or shortly after, if I had not had such an unfruitful library trip last weekend. I came home with only ONE book--this one--and so I persevered long after I would have otherwise abandoned it. I should have abandoned it anyway and watched TV instead.
The writing style is pompous and indulgent. This is the writing of someone overly impressed with the beauty and depth of her own prose and insight. An example? Why, certainly. "In all exchanges there must be one who listens and one who speaks, but there can be no revelation without someone to whom it is revealed."
More examples? "The desire to be loved is as basic a need as the desire for food or drink. But to take delight in being loved requires nerve. For where life is most ardently awakened it can be most excruciatingly extinguished and the fear of that possibility can tragically become the wet blanket which smothers the sacred flame." "Beware, beware of those who care! I, who cared so little for myself, had by way of compensation cared too much for others and they were the losers thereby."
Could you just barf all over those lines? And the love stories! So dumb. The author has to tell us repeatedly about the "congruent spirits" and "irresistible affinities" and "natural rapport," because otherwise we would never see the relationships as anything but perfectly ordinary.
By the end I was shout-thinking, "WRAP! IT! UP!" at the author. I'm not sure I officially read the last 30 pages or so, though my eyes went across them.
The Angel and the Jabberwocky Murders, by Mignon F. Ballard (2006)
Perhaps this is an excellent mystery, with a creative "solved by an angel" element and an ending both satisfying and clever. I couldn't read the whole thing: it was too Southern-mother-in-law for me.
It's the sort of book where people don't say something is sad, they say it'll make you cry more'n a bucket of onions. The narrator has a gentleman friend, thinks the police officers are too young, objects to clerks having telephone conversations, and thinks her daughter-in-law exercises too much and cares too much about healthy food.
I gave it a full 100 pages because I felt as if I wanted to like it--but I didn't like it.
Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States, by Pete Jordan (2007)
The author is a total asshole. His only charm, if you consider this a charm and I don't, is that he is so frank about it. Every time he deliberately slams into a customer because he thinks the customer is stuck-up, pads his time sheet, or quits for no reason except that he feels like it that day, he just writes that right down. Here he is, he seems to say; rejoice with him in his solid rudeness. He lists no redeeming qualities, and apparently has none.
He seems to intend to celebrate the grand old tradition of dish-washing, and I was ready to go with this idea. It's a profession with its own rules and jargon like any other, and I can see the satisfaction to be found in doing a good job at it. But since he doesn't do a good job at it, it's hard to see what his point is. He tries to say that the way he slacks off as much as he can and then quits after a few weeks is part of the grand old tradition, and perhaps it is, but if so he is losing me on the celebration concept. He only made me feel sorry for his employers.
According to the back cover, he is eventually going to get married and change professions. I didn't get that far, and perhaps the love of a good woman is going to change him right up. But as of page 122, he's still revolting, and insufficiently entertaining about it.
Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris (2007)
The rhythm of the writing is "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"--but on and on and on for pages. Even though I was interested in reading about the employees of a marketing firm, for the first maybe fifty pages or so, I was thinking, "I can't stand it. No, I can't stand it. No, I can't read one more sentence like this." Why I kept reading is anyone's guess; it wasn't the magic of the plot. Some books just keep you reading "one more page to see if it gets better."
It did get better. The rhythmic prose got less ploddingly rhythmic and dully descriptive and turned into an actual story. The characters were fun to read about, and there was a nice assortment of them, and I found them easy to imagine. The dialogue was good. The various storylines were good.
By the time I finished the book, I was wishing there was more of it, and I was ready to recommend it. But you may need to get over the hurdle of those first pages.
Rollback, by Robert J. Sawyer (2007)
I am very, very picky about science fiction. It must not have the "space butter" problem (i.e., just because it takes place in the future or on another planet doesn't mean every single object would have a future- or other-planet-related name); it must not say--even one time--"As everyone knows..." in order to set the scene; it must not be written by a man who thinks ideal human evolution includes women getting over the whole stupid monogamy/jealousy thing (Robert Heinlein, I am looking in your direction); it must not have on the cover a woman clad only in a metal-studded leather bikini and flowing knee-length red hair; it must not go on and on and ON as if it were a science textbook and not a novel.
I don't think these are unreasonable requirements, and yet it is difficult to find science fiction books that meet them. I was pleased, back in June of 2000, to read what I considered an excellent sci-fi-meets-courtroom novel by Robert J. Sawyer. I can't imagine why I didn't look for more of his books at the time. Perhaps I did and my library didn't have any, or perhaps I couldn't remember his name. In any case, I'd read nothing of his since then, and when I checked out this book it was without realizing it was by the author of Illegal Alien.
I liked this book just as much as the first one I read. Rollback is a story about successfully contacting alien life, and it's also a story about what could happen to a marriage in which one person is given a second chance at youth and the other person isn't.
I have one thing I didn't understand, and I wonder about this whenever I read a book about a correspondence that takes many years between the time a message is sent and the time that message is received: why wouldn't both parties then send many messages at regular intervals, rather than waiting for a reply before writing again? In this book, it takes 18.8 years for a message to go between Earth and the other planet, so Earth sends a message and waits 37.6 years to receive a reply and send another message. Well...wouldn't it make more sense to send a message, say, once a year? Then you'd keep receiving a message every year, and you wouldn't have so much catching up to do in each one.
The Society of S, by Susan Hubbard (2007)
If you were sitting around one day thinking to yourself, "I wonder if Kristen Voskuil likes vampire books?," my guess is that you would conclude "No." Perhaps you would be remembering my January 1998 review of Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire, in which I could barely stop gagging and rolling my eyes long enough to review the book. Or perhaps I've mentioned in passing that Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot is the only book I've ever read that made me seriously consider wetting the bed so I wouldn't have to walk past the dark window between me and the bathroom.
This book, however, I liked. It's a little melodramatic, but so is the whole vampire concept. There is blessed little in the way of erotic neck-sucking. In fact, this is more of a book that makes a person wonder what it might be like to be a sensible vampire with basic vampire needs in a modern, non-swishy-cape world--rather than a book that makes a person wonder what's on the other side of that dark window, or why vampires apparently lose the ability to use contractions.