Book review – The Uncrowned King
Journalism is my first love. While I never did focus on writing when I was in school, I enjoyed my time at the campus newspaper. So anytime I can pick up a book that focuses on the newspaper industry, I’m always interested. With that in mind, I picked up this book which focused on the newspaper battles between William Randolph Hurst’s paper The New York Journal and the New York World owned by Joseph Pulitzer.
For the first 50 or 60 pages I was loving it. The book was intriguing. I couldn’t put the book down. But then when the author started focusing in more and more on how Hurst was supporting this US president or that congressman, and how Hurst believed that if he backed the winning president his paper would topple Pulitzer's, (the author) lost me.
There was way WAY too much bullshit talk about US presidential elections and US presidential history than was need. And when I say way too much, I’m talking 100s of pages too much. Seriously. Hurst might have been a great man, building a paper up from nothing, but the author certainly didn’t have to expend as ink as he did on presidential elections to get his point across.
This book is extremely well researched. But also extremely boring. Read it at your own risk.
Book review – Reamde
I think Neal Stephen reached his zenith with Cryptonomicon. Now that was a kick ass book. I read The Baroque Cycle, which I enjoyed and gave up completely on The Mongoliad: Year One. When Reamde came across my account at the library I was looking forward to giving it a read.
The premise of the book deals with a fictional on-line RPG game similar to Warcraft. A virus sweeps through the world, encrypting personal information on the user’s hard drives, and if they want their information back, the user through his or her RPG game character must pay the ransom.
Of course the virus encrypts the data of the game’s creator’s niece and from there a whole slew of things take place. This book drags. And drags. And then just when you think it can’t drag anymore, it drags again. We’re talking over 1,000 pages of dragging here. That’s a heck of lot of a slow moving plot.
Stephenson, I’m sure, could easily have narrowed this book down to the 500 page mark had he tried. Many times I found myself skipping pages because what was being presented in the story really wasn’t relevant to the overall plot.
Then, when the end came I found I was more relieved to be finished the book than happy to have finished a good novel. If you’re dying to read something good from Stephenson, give Cryptonomicon or Snow Crash a read. Those novels are not huge tomes that will flatten your foot if dropped on it and are truly worthy of your time.
Book review – The Sentimentalists
How this book won the Giller prize I will never know. Where to start with how awful this book is...
- the writing style is terrible. And I do mean terrible. The book could have really benefited from a good editing. For example Skibsrud thinks it is acceptable to continually nest sentences with comma and after comma of comments. While this might be acceptable in poetry, it is not in a novel.
- the plot, while sounding interesting on the jacket of the book, moves extremely slow and Skibsrud does a good job of ensuring that it stays that way.
- the characters are hollow. At no point did I feel any connection to them.
In short I want the time back I spent reading this book. DO NOT READ THIS BOOK! You've been warned.
Book review – Forensic Detective
I have read many different books on the topic of forensic pathology, so I was looking forward to reading this one. I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.
The book is written by Robert Mann ,a forensic anthropologist. Each chapter is dedicated to a different case that Mann worked on, and while some of the cases are interesting, many of them focus on the work Mann did to identify the remains of US soldiers. And this is why I did not like this book.
If I had wanted to read a book dedicated to the recovery of US soldier remains, I would have tracked down a book on that topic. What I wanted to read about was a variety of cases, covering a wide variety of topics. Topics dealing with everyday homicides, to freaky scary cases, to those one where you’re left scratching your head in disbelief at how they determined who the killer was. This book definitely does not achieve that goal.
So. If you’re looking for a book focusing on US military dead body recovery and identification, then this book’s for you. If you’re looking for a book focusing on a wide variety of forensic cases, then take a pass on this one.
Review – Moon Palace
Paul Auster is one of my favourite authors. So when I came across this book of his at a used book store I was quite happy to learn there was another Auster book out there that I hadn’t read yet. I dragged this book with me on a recent trip to Australia, saving it until the very end of my trip. Although by then I was burned out from reading and just couldn’t be bothered to pick the book up.
Fast forward a couple of weeks and on a business trip I picked this book to pass the time on a trip from Vancouver to Toronto. The end result? As Auster’s books go I was disappointed in this one. Yes, the book had all of the trappings of his regular novels. Stories within stories. Complex characters. Interesting stories. Yet there was something missing from this book. Something that prevent it from being a kick ass Paul Auster book.
What was it you ask? What was that one thing? To be honest I think it was the fact that the book was kind of depressing. While it could be argued that some of Auster’s other novels have a sad component to them, and so I shouldn’t be surprised by this, nevertheless I was disheartened in reading this novel.
Am I glad I read the book? Of course. I think Paul Auster is one the great authors of our time. However if anyone is looking for some of his work, I would recommend The New York Trilogy or The Brooklyn Follies before this one.
Review – Cockroach
I decided to read this book for two reasons.
1. It was a finalist for the Giller Prize
2. Hage's first novel DeNiro's Game was fantastic
So with those two reasons in mind, it is safe to say that I had high hopes for this novel. And, as much as it pains me to say it, I was disappointed in this book.
The novel moves very very slowly. The novel focuses on a recent immigrant to Montreal and his struggle to 'make it'. In this sense make it means not having to go to bed hungry, having enough heat and hot water to take a shower, and of course having a clean place to live. However because the protagonist often struggles with this, he ends up living in substandard living conditions. Where, when the time is right, cockroaches emerge from the kitchen drain.
It is through the cockroach that the protagonist sees parallels between their lives and his, and from here out story is drawn out.
And drawn out it is. There are many MANY internal dialogues that go on in this novel and many, what I think to be, pointless descriptions of streets, people, and food. In short, the novel drags.
Whereas Hage's other novel, DeNeiro's Game had a fast pace to it that kept the reader turning pages, there was none of it in this novel. Would I recommend this novel to someone? No, probably not. However I would certainly recommend DeNiro's Game. Here's hoping that Hage's next novel is more like his first.
Review – It’s so easy and other lies
Being a huge fan of Guns N' Roses back in the day, I was of course saddened when the band decided to pull the plug. So now that the former band members are all starting to sober up and write books, I've been rabidly devouring each book that comes out by former band members. Therefore it should come as no surprise that I picked up Duff McKagan's book when I saw it at the library.
I liked this book. It was very easy to read and the whole book came across much like a conversation with an old buddy than a book from this guy who was, at one point in his life, a member of the world's most famous rock and roll band.
Short and sweet. If you're a GnR fan, then give this book a read. You might not learn anything you didn't already know, but it will be time well spent!
Review – Ghost in the Wires
I have to confess my feelings about this book are kin of mixed. As someone who really enjoys computer hacking stories and who has many books written about (and by) hackers, I was looking forward to this book. I mean come on, it was written by Kevin Mitnick. This guy is like THE most famous computer hacker out there. So, it was with great excitement that I picked his book up and dove head first in to Kevin's world...
And Kevin's world it was. This book was more or less a collection of Kevin's memories about the hacks he perpetrated. In reading the book I felt more like I was sitting with Kevin, having a beer, and he was telling me about "how this one time, at band camp..." only in his case it would be more like "this one time, at hacker camp...". There was no real story.
Sure, there was a bit of a hacker chronology, but as for any kind of unifying thread that would tie the story together, there was nothing - aside from Kevin's undying love of social engineering and hacking.
Give this book a read if you're interested in Kevin's life and times. And more importantly how he was shafted by the US justice department.
Now reading – Reamde
So Neal Stephenson has to be one of my favourite authors. While it is true that I have strayed away from the whole SciFi genre as I've grown older, there are still some SciFi authors that I do read. And Stephenson is one of them.
I have to confess that I'm only 200 pages in to this 1,200 page tome, but so far so good. The premise? Well without getting in to too much it deals with computer hackers, encrypted information/data, and a virtual world. It kind of reminds me of Snow Crash only updated for 2012.
I'm looking forward to this book, that's for sure.
So many books…
There are many, many more book reviews to come. Yes, I have been busy reading. What I have not been as busy doing though is writing reviews....
Soon though. Soon.