The Last Policeman

Sep19 by Anna

By Ben Winters

The Last Policeman is a murder mystery set in a pre-apocalypse Earth – an asteroid has been discovered that will hit Earth and most likely destroy all of humanity in six months. Lots of people commit suicide (which I don’t understand; maybe this is my laziness speaking, but why bother if the Earth is going to shortly do it for you?) and lots of people have abandoned their homes and jobs in order to fulfill their bucket lists. Our protagonist, Henry Palace, however, was a beat cop who was promoted to detective after enough of the detectives quit or died. He has always wanted to be a detective, and so is very dedicated, driving everyone else crazy with his scrupulous attention to detail and his eagerness to actually investigate a death that he claims is suspicious and everyone else says is yet another suicide.

There are spots of humor (all the McDonald’s and Duncan Donuts have closed, but Panera is still running strong, albeit as a religious organization), but the overall tone of the novel is definitely dark. The world is completely topsy-turvy with internet and cell service collapsing, most major corporations shutting down, and just about every other job, including the government, depending on a skeleton crew of dedicated employees. Inflation is through the roof, of course, though I was confused that there was any monetary economy at all, actually. The people, too, are all different levels of crazy, with depression and drug use way up, naturally, making tracking down motives and following rational clues particularly difficult.

One of my favorite things about the book is that, through showing instead of telling, I am fairly sure that both the detective and the victim are on the milder side of the Autism spectrum. It is cool to see that (possible) representation laid out so matter-of-factly. Separate from that aspect, however, there were the occasional times when I wondered about an unreliable narrator. He isn’t unaffected by the coming doom, either, and there are definitely times when I wondered whether he purposefully twisting the truth to make his case better match the cases he’d hoped he’d be working on as a detective.

This is the first in a trilogy, and I definitely plan to read the next two, so I’ll report on those when I get to them. Rebecca asked me how there can be three if the world only has six months to go, but this book only spanned a month. I wondered, though, if something unforeseen happens and the asteroid does not hit, how do you rebuild after all of Earth’s societies have been living as though it is the end of times?

—Anna

Lost at Sea

Sep12 by Anna

By Jon Ronson

Christ. I don’t know how Jon Ronson does it, but he made me feel sympathy for the goddamn Insane Clown Posse in the very first chapter.

After my last review on a book that I discovered through an article by Jon Ronson, I remembered that I hadn’t checked up on his works for a few years, and he had published twice since then. Lost at Sea is made up of dozens of short chapters, each a standalone essay describing Ronson’s interaction with a wide variety of people and groups. (I believe they were actually originally articles for the London Guardian.) It made me laugh several times, but it also made me kind of sad, as each group seemed to be simply looking for connection and meaning in life, and having to go to some extreme lengths to find it.

It took me far to long to realize this, but the title is actually very apt – these are all stories about people who have lost their way in one way or another. The stories get progressively grimmer, too, starting with stories of roboticists attempting to create artificial intelligence and parents raising “indigo children,” thought to be the next evolutionary stage with psychic abilities, to a planned school massacre in Christmas, Alaska, and suicides over mounting credit card debt.

One of the more powerful essays for me, though, was one where he takes the general income disparity in the United States, and divides it into 6 sections, each one five times the income of the previous one. So, the first he talks with a dishwasher earning $10,000; then a family that lives paycheck-to-paycheck on $50,000; then Ronson himself is $250,000 (this is also the briefest section); a high-level executive in the entertainment business who wished to remain anonymous and earns roughly $1.25 million; one of the first investors in Amazon, who earns roughly $6 million, and finally at the top, a man who helped establish the storage unit industry and is worth billions at this point (at this point it is almost impossible to establish an annual income). I have read a lot of articles on income disparity and what it means for our society and economy as a whole, but this was the first that broke down what it means for day-to-day living and helps explain why it is so difficult to understand the lives of people that make significantly different amounts of money.

Several of the stories included the subjects expressing anger at Ronson’s writing style, saying that he including snarky lines like “I’m met with silence” in order to connote something underhanded without actually state it outright. And while I enjoy his style and his snark, I could see their point, that he does offer his own interpretation of pauses and body language in ways that certainly influence readers’ views. I’d mentioned before that one thing I like is how much his own presence is included in his writing, which is unusual in journalism, but after the third or fourth subject lashes out at him, I began to wonder about it. While he is often self-deprecating, he does vary how much he is present in writing in ways that are complimentary to him, so I could certainly see how his subjects felt manipulated and their personal crises used simply to showcase Ronson in one way or another.

So, I guess by the end of the book, I remain a big fan of Ronson’s writing, but perhaps not quite such a fan of Ronson himself.

—Anna

I’m Not A Terrorist, But I’ve Played One On TV

Sep6 by Anna

By Maz Jobrani

I first read an article in GQ by Jon Ronson (who I love) about Maz Jobrani and other actors of Middle Eastern descent, and about how they are only offered roles as terrorists. The actors describe all the different ways they are killed by the heroes, over and and over again, and how frustrating it is to get no other roles, not to mention feeding into negative stereotypes of your culture in order to make a living. Because it is Jon Ronson, too, it is depressing, but also a bit funny.

I thought it was a really interesting piece on something I had literally given zero thought to before, so when the article mentioned Jobrani’s memoir, I checked it out from the library that day. Jobrani, an Iranian-American, started as an actor, but turned to stand-up comedy when he decided that he didn’t want to play terrorists any more, which I think was a good move since his book made me laugh out loud several times.

Jobrani is an extremely positive person, disappointed by the anti-Middle-East sentiment in the US, but focused on creating a more positive presence. For my own part, I like humor that is a bit angrier and more biting, especially when it comes to social justice issues. However, even his light-hearted jokes revealed how little I know about Iran and the rest of the Middle East and this is a very easy way to learn some very basic truths about Middle Eastern culture. Jobrani has a lot of videos up on YouTube and is a semi-regular on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, so check him out!

—Anna

Interesting eBooks

Aug31 by Anna

First of all, I’d like to concur with Kinsey’s statement that we are not the sort of people that read a lot because we don’t watch TV; people are amazed at how many books and how much TV we are able to fit into our schedules, as well as our fair share of internet browsing.

Speaking of the internet, I bought a couple of very unusual e-books online over the last month based on Tumblr recommendations that are both absolutely ridiculous and sort of weirdly complementary.

Inspector Pancakes Helps the President of France

By Karla Pacheco and Maren Marmulla

Inspector Pancakes is a picture book based on those old-school Golden Books in which Inspector Pancakes, a dog detective, helps the president of France track the thief who has been stealing his breakfast croissants. Or at least that’s the regular text. The really ingenious idea behind this is that it is two stories; each page has large bold text for the children’s story, and then much smaller italic text for the adult side, in which Pancakes is actually tracking down the brutal murderer of Parisian prostitutes.

The idea is just brilliant, and the pictures are adorable! The problem is the writing. For this type of thing the writing has to be as tight and spot-on as possible in order to work, and it just isn’t. The connection between the two stories is extremely tenuous and the pictures correspond with the children’s story without any winky reference to the adult story that would help tie them together.

Rebecca and I were brainstorming ways of correcting this problem, and we both agreed that the adult section has to be much more complex. It could be longer, of course, which would help, but theoretically at least, a skilled author could make an extremely powerful short story in just a few sentences. Rebecca thought that the author relied too heavily on ultra-violence to make the adult half stand out, and while I agreed that she needed more to it, I thought the violence was a funny contrast to the pictures.

Sextrap Dungeon

By Kurt Knox

On the other hand, there is Sextrap Dungeon, which had a promotional free download day a little while ago, so I figured what the hell. I have to say now that I highly recommend it (for adult audiences)! It is a choose-your-adventure book where you play a pick-up artist out to get some action on a Saturday night. (You are asked to select male or female at the beginning, but if you select female, you are told that’s ridiculous, and to try again. You then also have the option of how many dicks you’d like.)

The whole thing is super tongue-in-cheek, with a pretty surprising feminist slant, and mostly ends very poorly for your character. There are three “levels” and you graduate up levels by getting some action. Spoiler(?): I graduated up one level by getting a blow job from a Nazi stripper. It truly is a joke book, and not intended to be erotica at all, so there are no graphic descriptions of the sex (the violence is slightly more graphic, but still not extreme) – it is basically at the level of an extremely dirty joke. Think of a choose-your-own-adventure version of The Aristocrats, though actually a bit cleaner than that.

—Anna

Moving Pictures

Aug27 by Kinsey

While this is a book blog and we are all book people, we are not anti-TV. We love TV! (Basically, we are just indoor kids.) None of the books I am reading at the moment lend themselves to blogging, but I have watched some GREAT TV this summer* and look, I have a blog! So here are my summer TV recommendations:

UnREAL–This Lifetime drama is set behind the scenes of a fictionalized version of the Bachelor. Did every element of that sentence just make you roll your eyes? Listen, this is not a typical Lifetime show and it’s not really about reality TV. It’s a drama about the trade-offs people make between professional success and personal happiness, and about how far you can bend, ethically, before you break. The most amazing thing about the show is the main character, who I have seen described as a female anti-hero, a reality show Walter White. Shiri Appleby (who I have loved since Roswell and who was great in Life Unexpected, which only I watched) plays Rachel, a producer on the show. She does terrible things, but your heart still breaks for her. Also, she generally looks awful, especially when compared to the glammed out contestants, which was genuinely surprising to see from a woman on television. The first season is just 10 45-minute episodes, and every one gets wilder and wilder. I watched this on my cable’s OnDemand but I think it’s also on the Lifetime app and/or website.

Catastrophe–This is a tiny little show, 6 half hour episodes, and my only complaint is that there is not enough of it. The premise is that an American business man goes to London, has a week-long fling with a British woman, and she gets pregnant. He decides to move to London to be with her and the baby, and the show is them trying to navigate this weird situation like grown-ups. It’s hilarious and raunchy and awfully sweet. As a bonus, Carrie Fisher plays his mother, who is awful. This is available on Amazon, free for those of us with Prime.

The Fall–We all knew that Gillian Anderson was cool, but I am now dedicating my life to becoming her character in this show. Stella Gibson is a British police officer who goes to Belfast to investigate a series of murders being committed by a remarkably well-adjusted serial killer (played by Jamie Dornan). The show spends equal time with these two main characters so, as a viewer, you always know what’s going on–this isn’t a whodunit, it’s about the cat-and-mouse game of the police desperately chasing this guy and him evading them. But the best part is that Stella is this whip smart, sarcastic woman with no patience for men, who always wears the most perfect silk blouses, and is always in control of the situation. My friend Lisa brilliantly summed her up by saying that she’s what Claire Danes’s character on Homeland could have been, if she weren’t so busy crying and falling in love. The show itself is dark and creepy and made me check the chain on my door over and over, but it’s also hypnotic. Watch it on Netflix and turn on the closed captioning so you don’t miss anything between the whispering and the accents.

*One of things that has allowed me to watch all this awesome TV is that I recently got a Roku. I really do not understand all this fancy technology the kids have these days, but I asked my little sister what I needed to do to make Netflix show up big on my TV and she told me to buy a Roku. It was $80 on Amazon, it took me 20 minutes to set up, and it’s amazing.

Finally, just to spread the love across media platforms: a podcast. I have an annoyingly long commute and podcasts keep me sane. Mostly I listen to pop culture podcasts, but I recently found the History of English podcast and I am hooked. This is a VERY detailed review of the history of the English language, starting with it’s earliest origins. Have you ever wondered why sometimes we pronounce the letter c like an s and sometimes like k? There’s a whole episode about that! Would you like to know how the ancient Hittite language is related to English? You’ve come to the right place. This is maybe the geekiest thing I think I have ever been interested in, and that is saying A LOT. There are 60 episodes and counting, so this is an investment, but that’s a plus for me as I look into a future of morning rush hours. Plus, as someone who had years of speech therapy and can still just barely control what sounds come out of my mouth, I am fascinated by linguists who can demonstrate what Old English or Proto-Indo-European would have sounded like. That ability feels like a superpower to me, and the host of this podcast does a great job of it.

Hopcross Jilly and Shifting Shadows

Aug19 by Anna

By Patricia Briggs

Rebecca bought me Hopcross Jilly, a Mercy Thompson graphic novel, by Patricia Briggs for my birthday, and it was awesome because I hadn’t even known it existed! It focuses primarily on Mercy’s stepdaughter Jesse, who is struggling to find her place in high school now that she is known as the daughter of the local werewolf alpha. I’m trying to be as spoiler-free as possible, so excuse the coyness, but the events also take place after the big showdown with the fae, so the main antagonist is fae.

Which is where my problem comes in. From just about the beginning of the series, I’ve been on the fae’s side in their struggle with humans. In Briggs’ world, the fae have been treated somewhat similarly (though better) to how the US treated Native Americans, with extreme prejudice and isolation. So, when they have finally taken as much as they are going to take, it feels like an underdog fighting back, even though they are in fact murdering people. I found myself on the unsupportable side of a debate with Rebecca in which I was trying to hand-wave away the (fictional) murder of innocent children.

Anyway, it was fun to see more of Jesse, who is usually very much a side character, and the fae villain was quite interesting, and it had a satisfying ending, even if it wasn’t as pro-fae as I would have liked. I do also want to qualify this by saying that Briggs is clearly a novelist, not a graphic novelist, so there are times when the action and dialogue gets a little muddled since she isn’t writing in quite the screenplay style that a graphic novel demands.

I have also been reminded that I completely forgot to review Briggs’ Shifting Shadows, which is unforgiveable considering how long I’ve been whining for something exactly like this. Shifting Shadows collects all of Patricia Briggs’ short stories in a single volume, including the Alpha and Omega novella that kicks off that series, as well as some brand new stories. The new stories feature Mercy, of course, but also a variety of side characters that haven’t been given much backstory before, including Ben, one of Adam’s least pleasant pack members; Ariana, the fae with whom Mercy’s ex, Samuel, falls in love; and Kara, a young girl werewolf mentioned very briefly in the second Mercy novel.

And, of course, it contains all of my favorites from a variety of anthologies, like “Seeing Eye,” in which a werewolf and a witch pair up to bring down an evil witch coven; “Fairy Gifts,” about a vampire summoned to save a trapped fairy; and “The Star of David,” a Christmas story about David Christiansen, a werewolf mercenary from the first Mercy Thompson novel. I am just so happy to have them all collected in one place!

—Anna

The Ghost and Mrs. McClure

Aug15 by Anna

By Alice Kimberly

I have been kind of a cranky reader lately (post Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell), and I was cranky starting this book, too. You may have noticed that I can be a bit snooty about my pulp mysteries, and I only condescended to read this mix of a cozy and pulp mystery on my mom’s recommendation. It has a ridiculous premise: a recently widowed woman leaves her up-scale career and lifestyle in New York City to help her aunt run a small-town bookstore, which turns out to be haunted by a hard-boiled private eye, shot there in 40s.

The private eye ghost is a little over-the-top, our protagonist is often ditsy, and the writing is a bit amateurish (the author definitely hits her stride later in the series, though). It is the fluffiest of fluff, and it just makes me really happy. All of the various oddball characters in the small town are cartoonish in the way that cartoons are awesome: they are quirky, and accessible, and just so comfortable. I’ve read the first three on the last two weeks, so they are each a quick read and quickly addictive, too.

On the flipside, in case I was feeling too pleased with my new series, I also checked out Werewolf Cop from the library, thinking Werewolf! Cop! I should have been warned off by the blurb by Stephen King, but I was just too eager to read a possible supernatural noir novel! This book was so offensively bad that I couldn’t even hate read it for the blog. I won’t go into details or this post will run as long as my last one (and I only made it to chapter 2), but it reminded me why I stopped reading all male authors for a chunk of time in my teens. (I went back and got books four and five of the Haunted Bookshop series instead.)

—Anna

Edited to add more praise: I just finished the fifth and final published novel in the series (though another one is rumored to be in the works), and they just keep getting better and better! In the later novels, the ghost shows Mrs. McClure memories of his old cases, and the novels are build around two mysteries from different time periods in interesting ways. Reading all five books back to back, I also started to notice the subtle evolution of Mrs. McClure’s character. Through the encouragement of the supportive ghost and her successful investigations, she noticeably gains confidence and takes increased control of her life. It is just a really nice through-line.

Also, I meant to write this before, but forgot: with every single novel, about halfway through I would start thinking how obvious the solution was, but every single time, I got it wrong, and not in a disappointing way, either. (Of course, in my defense Mrs. McClure was wrong as often as not as well.)

The Thief

Aug12 by Kinsey

Ages ago–maybe two or three years ago–Anna sent me a Kindle book called The Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner, as a gift. She told me it was YA fantasy/adventure book that she really liked and she thought I would like too. And I read it and I thought it was fun and and well written and had an interesting twist at the end, and I moved on with my life and didn’t think about it again. Then a few weeks ago I was on vacation, sitting on the beach, and when I finished my trashy romance novel I didn’t feel like walking back the beach house to get another book. So I started poking around my Kindle, looking for something else to occupy me until I was willing to leave the beach, and The Thief popped up. I started re-reading it and was reminded of how much I enjoyed it and then a tiny voice emerged from somewhere in the depths of my memory: could there be . . did Anna say . . is there a sequel? You guys, there wasn’t just one sequel, there were THREE, and apparently two more books on the way. And as much as I liked The Thief, the two books that came after it were so so good that I am now completely obsessed and desperately waiting for number 4 to come in at the library.

So The Thief is about a thief (yes) named Gen who we first meet in the king’s prison after he was caught stealing something audacious and then bragging about it in the pubs. Enter the king’s magus, who offers to get Gen out of prison if he will use his considerable thieving skills to steal something important for the king. The thief, the magus, and the other folks in their little party then ride around dodging soldiers, looking for this mysterious object, and trying not get killed by any of their enemies. The actual thing they’re trying to steal was a bit of a MacGuffin for me, but Gen is a smart, tricky character, and up until the last minute it’s never quite clear who’s using who and how much Gen is controlling the situation. It’s suspenseful with a dark edge (there are deaths along the way and prison is not sugar-coated), but Gen himself is very entertaining.

It’s the second and third books that take the action to a whole new level with intrigue and awesome characters and complexity. However, it’s challenging to talk about these, because you can’t even describe the most basic plot elements of any books past the first without ruining the fun of the first book. So I’m not going to say a word about what happens in the rest of this series–I’m not even going to write out the titles. You’re just going to have to trust me when I say that books get twistier and darker and better.

This is like when I owned paperback copies of the Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart books, a YA Victorian mystery trilogy he wrote before his famous His Dark Materials trilogy. They’re great books that I was constantly loaning to people, but reading even the first line of the description on the back of the second book just about ruined the first one, so I taped post-it notes over the back of the books so that I could hand someone the whole stack with spoiling them on the plot before the were ready. So consider this review a virtual stack of books with post-its taped on the back. I love these books. The third one is my favorite, but these are quick reads and fit nicely together as one whole story. I should have listened more carefully to Anna when she initially told me about these, since she’s always right these things. Don’t make my mistake!

Kinsey’s Three Word Review: Dark, complicated adventures.

You might also like: The Phillip Pullman books that I mentioned, actually, as well as a number of things that we’ve already raved about here: the Graceling books by Kristen Cashore, The Girl of Fire and Thorns trilogy by Rae Carson, and the His Fair Assassin trilogy by Robin LaFevers (the killer nun books). You might also like Cinda Williams Chima’s series that starts with The Warrior Heir, a fantasy YA story that did a number of interesting things and that hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves–it’s the better version of the Mortal Instruments series.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, part 7

Aug6 by Anna

By Susanna Clarke

So, last episode! I’m running a little late with this one since I was on vacation last weekend, but better late than never, right? I thought about never, but just couldn’t quite bring myself to leave it hanging. The conclusion in the tv show was very satisfying, but the book conclusion was particularly gripping, I thought. Here are all the final spoilers in a particularly long post, I’m afraid, since a whole lot happened at the end. Continue reading →

Fallen Angel: To Serve in Heaven

Aug3 by Rebecca

Fallen Angel: To Serve in Heaven
by Peter David (author) and J. K. Woodward (illustrator)
2006

This graphic novel was beautifully drawn and had a quite interesting philosophical take on God and the meaning of life, etc. I like religious themed stories, especially ones that deal with the motivations and choices of god-like beings, so this was right up my alley. On the other hand, it was a bit too noir-ish for my particular taste.

The premise is that there’s a city, Bete Noire, that’s sort of the center of reality and fully of dark grittiness and only certain special people are able to access that city. It’s a pretty common trope (Simon Green’s Nightside springs to mind, but also Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, Melissa Marr’s Carnival of Souls, etc.) Our main character is a fallen angel and the plot circles around some machinations by the city’s Magistrate and conspiracy, but mostly serves as an exploration of Liandra’s backstory and introducing the other main players in the city, introducing the series as a whole.

So it was beautiful, it introduced at least one really interesting idea, and there was at least one really funny scene (the Magistrate is furiously trying to interrogate Liandra about her past, but she’s spent the last several hours trying to drown her sorrows about an entirely different part of her past, and it was pretty hilarious failure to communicate). However, that failure to communicate isn’t uncommon as these characters mostly alternate between being threatening and being cryptic. It makes the characters come across as both unpleasant and more than a bit dumb.

It wasn’t great but was still worth reading.