6 - 10
6. Dexter by Design - Jeff Lindsay [***]
Tags: crime fiction
7. The Haunted Hotel and Other Stories - Wilkie Collins [***]
Tags: classic fiction, short stories, supernatural
8. Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome [****]
Tags: classic fiction, humour
9. To Say Nothing of the Dog - Connie Willis [****]
Tags: sci-fi, humour
10. The Slap- Christos Tsiolkas [**]
Tags: fiction
Dexter by Design - Jeff Lindsay
Another adventure for the alliterative annihilator; this one sees Dexter looking rather more confounded and less in control than the other books in the series and suffers for it a bit; maybe Dexter cannot always be expected to be on his game, but this fresh wannabe-nemesis, an artist who likes to sculpt in the flesh, as it were, didn’t seem all that challenging, and yet succeeds in running him in circles. On the positive side, Lindsay still likes to distribute cheerful and disturbing gore over a Miami landscape and Dexter is still hearing the occasional roar from his Dark Passenger, and Deborah is refusing to cut her brother any slack beyond not arresting him - and maybe even reconsidering that - and this book is no less funny and engaging and easy to read than the others.
The Dexter books are collectively becoming almost a rolling satire on crime fiction, and is quite interesting and a whole other level of amusing, when viewed from that angle.
…by Design is not the best of the Dexter books, but nowhere near bad enough to put me off reading Dexter is Delicious and whatever comes after.
The Haunted Hotel and Other Stories - Wilkie Collins
A collection of nine stories with varying degrees of supernatural creepiness. The title story is a neatly unfolding crime mystery with a convincingly chilling atmosphere; although it lacks something of the character of Collins’ better novels, it is easily interesting enough to keep the reader involved. Of the eight shorter stories, several rely on coincidence rather more heavily than Collins’ straightforward mysteries seem to - or perhaps coincidence is simply more obvious in a shorter setting - but there are one or two gems in here that absolutely must be read by fans of gothic, Victorian or supernatural literature. I speak of The Devil’s Spectacles, the last and shortest, most particularly, if only because the premise is so bizarre at the end of a book of straightforward ghostliness, that it made me sit up and gape with that worried happiness that applies when a something gets under the skin of a hardened reader of creepy tales. Mrs Zant and the Ghost is lovely, and The Dream Woman, despite the singularly dull title, is one of my favourite short ghost stories by virtue of having a strongly written, if pitiable, protagonist.
Not the best collection in the genre, but far from being a waste of the reader’s time.
Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
He put his leg into the jam, and he worried the teaspoons, and he pretended that the lemons were rats, and got into the hamper and killed three of them before Harris could land him with the frying pan.
This is the first point in Jerome’s witty travelogue at which I was reduced to slightly hysterical snorting; there were two more, but I forget the bits that caused it. Harris, George and ‘J’ (to say nothing of Montmorency) take to the river with their various ailments, hampers, and reminiscences.
Dryly and deprecatingly humorous, in a soggy setting, this a gentle book to be enjoyed for its language and satirical eye; perfect, in fact, for floating down a river with (with, not on) and a snapshot of an era when people could swear at one another from their respective boats without getting shot.
To Say Nothing of the Dog - Connie Willis
”A Harmless, necessary cat” … William Shakespeare
Lord, what a brilliantly enjoyable book. Funny, clever, likes cats and dogs, pootles about in boats, uses language and quotations nonchalantly, yet to dazzling effect… it occurs to me that my initial summary of this book would make a great personal ad. Let that be an indication of the sort of review I’d like to get across - I want you to take this book home and devote yourself to it, savour it, get to know it. The rewards are numerous.
The plot doesn’t really have much to do with how good the book is… it’s great, as plots go; got good bone structure and tucked in ends, but the personality’s the thing, really. Ned and Verity are time-travelling historians who are rummaging around the Victorian era trying to figure out how Verity’s saving a drowning cat has caused an incongruity in the continuum, and how to fix it, as things spiral hilariously out of their control. Yet only fifty percent of the book’s charm is the slapstick dashing about rearranging events; the other half is the good-natured narration and adorable characters. The reader could easily overlook the wealth of historic research and well-disciplined time-related plotting, in all the glorious goofiness.
To Say Nothing… is a book for people who love literature and words and war history and sci-fi and gentle humour and time travel philosophy and dearum darling doggies and nonsignificant objects and think they should all be rolled up together and not taken too seriously but just seriously enough to tell a good story.
The Slap - Christos Tsiolkas
A child gets belted and a social circle implodes for about 500 pages.
A two-star rating is pretty harsh for a book that made me think so much for the first half (maybe even the first two-thirds), but unfortunately the vileness really overshadowed this one. Not the slapping of a child in or of itself (hard to consider that a spoiler), or the unpleasantness of some of the characters, but the real cynicism that the author seems to feel about life. It’s a hefty book, too, so that’s a lot of wallowing in meanness and arrogance, anger and ridiculously over-done casual drug use. I won’t say it might not be real for the culture, but it makes for one boring read.
The best thing about this novel - and it’s a double-edged ‘best’ - is that it’s a novel of opinions. Even the reader gets to have one, and this is the bit I enjoyed - that opinion can change a hundred times during each of the eight narrator’s chapters. Each character is worth of a good deal of thought but, unfortunately, my conclusions were not in anyone’s favour. One of the themes seems to be control within relationships; everyone seems to be adamant about how everyone else should react. After a while, the question of whether the slap was a warranted response or the act of a monster ceases to be the point of the story and instead it becomes about unhappy people bitching at one another, mostly in the author’s voice and with the author’s vocabulary. It’s tedious. I made it to the end on pure curiosity, which is another reason this doesn’t get the ‘worst book I’ve ever read’ label. The author’s bringing of his own Greek-Australian culture was interesting, too. The ‘happy’ ending tacked on for my favourite - and last - of the characters actually felt jarring by the time I got there, that’s how humourless this book was.
I won’t read anything else by this author, and I wouldn’t recommend this book, unless you’re such a fan of relationship fiction that you feel it might be worth the angst.
Tags: crime fiction
7. The Haunted Hotel and Other Stories - Wilkie Collins [***]
Tags: classic fiction, short stories, supernatural
8. Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome [****]
Tags: classic fiction, humour
9. To Say Nothing of the Dog - Connie Willis [****]
Tags: sci-fi, humour
10. The Slap- Christos Tsiolkas [**]
Tags: fiction
Dexter by Design - Jeff Lindsay
Another adventure for the alliterative annihilator; this one sees Dexter looking rather more confounded and less in control than the other books in the series and suffers for it a bit; maybe Dexter cannot always be expected to be on his game, but this fresh wannabe-nemesis, an artist who likes to sculpt in the flesh, as it were, didn’t seem all that challenging, and yet succeeds in running him in circles. On the positive side, Lindsay still likes to distribute cheerful and disturbing gore over a Miami landscape and Dexter is still hearing the occasional roar from his Dark Passenger, and Deborah is refusing to cut her brother any slack beyond not arresting him - and maybe even reconsidering that - and this book is no less funny and engaging and easy to read than the others.
The Dexter books are collectively becoming almost a rolling satire on crime fiction, and is quite interesting and a whole other level of amusing, when viewed from that angle.
…by Design is not the best of the Dexter books, but nowhere near bad enough to put me off reading Dexter is Delicious and whatever comes after.
The Haunted Hotel and Other Stories - Wilkie Collins
A collection of nine stories with varying degrees of supernatural creepiness. The title story is a neatly unfolding crime mystery with a convincingly chilling atmosphere; although it lacks something of the character of Collins’ better novels, it is easily interesting enough to keep the reader involved. Of the eight shorter stories, several rely on coincidence rather more heavily than Collins’ straightforward mysteries seem to - or perhaps coincidence is simply more obvious in a shorter setting - but there are one or two gems in here that absolutely must be read by fans of gothic, Victorian or supernatural literature. I speak of The Devil’s Spectacles, the last and shortest, most particularly, if only because the premise is so bizarre at the end of a book of straightforward ghostliness, that it made me sit up and gape with that worried happiness that applies when a something gets under the skin of a hardened reader of creepy tales. Mrs Zant and the Ghost is lovely, and The Dream Woman, despite the singularly dull title, is one of my favourite short ghost stories by virtue of having a strongly written, if pitiable, protagonist.
Not the best collection in the genre, but far from being a waste of the reader’s time.
Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
He put his leg into the jam, and he worried the teaspoons, and he pretended that the lemons were rats, and got into the hamper and killed three of them before Harris could land him with the frying pan.
This is the first point in Jerome’s witty travelogue at which I was reduced to slightly hysterical snorting; there were two more, but I forget the bits that caused it. Harris, George and ‘J’ (to say nothing of Montmorency) take to the river with their various ailments, hampers, and reminiscences.
Dryly and deprecatingly humorous, in a soggy setting, this a gentle book to be enjoyed for its language and satirical eye; perfect, in fact, for floating down a river with (with, not on) and a snapshot of an era when people could swear at one another from their respective boats without getting shot.
To Say Nothing of the Dog - Connie Willis
”A Harmless, necessary cat” … William Shakespeare
Lord, what a brilliantly enjoyable book. Funny, clever, likes cats and dogs, pootles about in boats, uses language and quotations nonchalantly, yet to dazzling effect… it occurs to me that my initial summary of this book would make a great personal ad. Let that be an indication of the sort of review I’d like to get across - I want you to take this book home and devote yourself to it, savour it, get to know it. The rewards are numerous.
The plot doesn’t really have much to do with how good the book is… it’s great, as plots go; got good bone structure and tucked in ends, but the personality’s the thing, really. Ned and Verity are time-travelling historians who are rummaging around the Victorian era trying to figure out how Verity’s saving a drowning cat has caused an incongruity in the continuum, and how to fix it, as things spiral hilariously out of their control. Yet only fifty percent of the book’s charm is the slapstick dashing about rearranging events; the other half is the good-natured narration and adorable characters. The reader could easily overlook the wealth of historic research and well-disciplined time-related plotting, in all the glorious goofiness.
To Say Nothing… is a book for people who love literature and words and war history and sci-fi and gentle humour and time travel philosophy and dearum darling doggies and nonsignificant objects and think they should all be rolled up together and not taken too seriously but just seriously enough to tell a good story.
The Slap - Christos Tsiolkas
A child gets belted and a social circle implodes for about 500 pages.
A two-star rating is pretty harsh for a book that made me think so much for the first half (maybe even the first two-thirds), but unfortunately the vileness really overshadowed this one. Not the slapping of a child in or of itself (hard to consider that a spoiler), or the unpleasantness of some of the characters, but the real cynicism that the author seems to feel about life. It’s a hefty book, too, so that’s a lot of wallowing in meanness and arrogance, anger and ridiculously over-done casual drug use. I won’t say it might not be real for the culture, but it makes for one boring read.
The best thing about this novel - and it’s a double-edged ‘best’ - is that it’s a novel of opinions. Even the reader gets to have one, and this is the bit I enjoyed - that opinion can change a hundred times during each of the eight narrator’s chapters. Each character is worth of a good deal of thought but, unfortunately, my conclusions were not in anyone’s favour. One of the themes seems to be control within relationships; everyone seems to be adamant about how everyone else should react. After a while, the question of whether the slap was a warranted response or the act of a monster ceases to be the point of the story and instead it becomes about unhappy people bitching at one another, mostly in the author’s voice and with the author’s vocabulary. It’s tedious. I made it to the end on pure curiosity, which is another reason this doesn’t get the ‘worst book I’ve ever read’ label. The author’s bringing of his own Greek-Australian culture was interesting, too. The ‘happy’ ending tacked on for my favourite - and last - of the characters actually felt jarring by the time I got there, that’s how humourless this book was.
I won’t read anything else by this author, and I wouldn’t recommend this book, unless you’re such a fan of relationship fiction that you feel it might be worth the angst.