Take a photo of a barcode or cover
lucian_childs's reviews
239 reviews
The Finder by Will Ferguson
3.0
File this book under the category of a romp/literary thriller, not exactly a who-done-it, but a how-does-this-crazy-thing-end.
I confess up front, this kind of book isn’t really my thing. The short chapters, almost always ending on a button, as screenwriters say, or a cliffhanger, grow wearisome over three hundred plus pages. Ferguson’s wordsmithing, delectably noirish and hardboiled, is, often to a fault, itching to please. Aren’t all writers trying, at bottom, merely to entertain, even us snotty literary types? We hide the vaudeville under our vaunted observational prose, whereas the thriller writer is unabashed, inviting the reader to sit back and revel as the gears turn.
Ferguson is a winner of a Giller Prize, no less, and his stylish, inventive prose powerfully delves into the humanity of his characters, into the particulars of the book’s many exotic locations. It’s just all at the service of so much nonsense.
What nonsense, you say? An international mastermind, a finder of lost, and therefore immensely valuable, things, who will stop at nothing and who at times may not even exist, ensnares a raft of characters in his diabolical schemes.
Still, all the international settings, the insights into the worlds of travel writing and conflict reporting, all the buttons and cliffhangers did their duty, kept me flipping the pages until the end, however hastily. In the middle of a one-hundred-year pandemic with a seemingly interminable amount of time on our hands, a good romp may be just what we all need.
View all my reviews
I confess up front, this kind of book isn’t really my thing. The short chapters, almost always ending on a button, as screenwriters say, or a cliffhanger, grow wearisome over three hundred plus pages. Ferguson’s wordsmithing, delectably noirish and hardboiled, is, often to a fault, itching to please. Aren’t all writers trying, at bottom, merely to entertain, even us snotty literary types? We hide the vaudeville under our vaunted observational prose, whereas the thriller writer is unabashed, inviting the reader to sit back and revel as the gears turn.
Ferguson is a winner of a Giller Prize, no less, and his stylish, inventive prose powerfully delves into the humanity of his characters, into the particulars of the book’s many exotic locations. It’s just all at the service of so much nonsense.
What nonsense, you say? An international mastermind, a finder of lost, and therefore immensely valuable, things, who will stop at nothing and who at times may not even exist, ensnares a raft of characters in his diabolical schemes.
Still, all the international settings, the insights into the worlds of travel writing and conflict reporting, all the buttons and cliffhangers did their duty, kept me flipping the pages until the end, however hastily. In the middle of a one-hundred-year pandemic with a seemingly interminable amount of time on our hands, a good romp may be just what we all need.
View all my reviews
The Pier Falls: And Other Stories by Mark Haddon
5.0
The stories in Mark Haddon's most recent collection are big: frequently long, centering on the subjects of death, mercy killing, violence, suicide and redemption. However much they yearn for connection, his protagonists, isolated emotionally ("Breathe", "The Weir") and physically ("The Island", "The Woodpecker and the Wolf", "The Boys Who Left Home to Learn Fear"), must concentrate on survival.
As such, these stories combine the deep observation of literary fiction with the action focus one typically associates with genre. Indeed, in his mission to spin a good yarn Haddon often utilizes genre-based forms—Victorian adventure/explorer accounts, Greek mythology, space narratives—that veer into the fantastical.
The genre trappings of some of the stories may be tired, but they lend the stories a sense of familiarity in which difficult truths may be plumbed. I'm reminded of the dictum that in stories stereotypes are never the problem. The problem is to get the stereotypes right.
View all my reviews
As such, these stories combine the deep observation of literary fiction with the action focus one typically associates with genre. Indeed, in his mission to spin a good yarn Haddon often utilizes genre-based forms—Victorian adventure/explorer accounts, Greek mythology, space narratives—that veer into the fantastical.
The genre trappings of some of the stories may be tired, but they lend the stories a sense of familiarity in which difficult truths may be plumbed. I'm reminded of the dictum that in stories stereotypes are never the problem. The problem is to get the stereotypes right.
View all my reviews
Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours by Luke B. Goebel
3.0
I'm working through the stack of books I accumulated at AWP17. First up, this from Luke B. Goebel by way of the publisher FC2, a collective that specializes in non-traditional and experimental narratives.
Here, the stories are not so much linked as they are interconnected through repetition of sometimes nonsensical detail from a single narrative voice. This voice is in the tradition of the Beat novelists—drug-addled, non-linear, stream-of-consciousness. Out of the verbal chaos emerges a story of a lost love, the death of a beloved brother and the failure of literary ambition. In the spirit of the Beats, through it all weaves a song of America, from its rusty trailers and Native American peyote lodges to Manhattan galleries and bars.
A difficult read, but worth the effort.
View all my reviews
Here, the stories are not so much linked as they are interconnected through repetition of sometimes nonsensical detail from a single narrative voice. This voice is in the tradition of the Beat novelists—drug-addled, non-linear, stream-of-consciousness. Out of the verbal chaos emerges a story of a lost love, the death of a beloved brother and the failure of literary ambition. In the spirit of the Beats, through it all weaves a song of America, from its rusty trailers and Native American peyote lodges to Manhattan galleries and bars.
A difficult read, but worth the effort.
View all my reviews