false 13 73 68 true 5959371 read 5 true 729892 currently-reading 0 true 729891 to-read 2 false 1940860 gave-up-on http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/33090982 Chuckell's review of The Bible Salesman: A Novel
by Clyde Edgerton

Nothing. That was all the sales department at Little, Brown trying to figure out a way to position this dreary little book. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/41316926 Just After Sunset (Hardcover) by Stephen King
bookshelves: currently-reading
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/36966490 Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (Hardcover) by William Least Heat-Moon
With maybe 50 pages to go, I am giving up on this book. Listen, there may be some people who don't already know, bone deep, that Americans as a people have taken a criminally disdainful approach to preserving our nation's natural beauties and bounties. But the thing is, no one who doesn't already feel that way is ever going to pick up a book titled Roads to Quoz anyway--they're all too busy snow-mobiling and off-roading. So my feeling is that I don't need to be reminded, at least once every other page for 600 pages, that America is a place where historical landmarks and natural wonders have been all but universally bulldozed under to make way for strip malls and McMansions. I can complain about that myself, I don't need anyone to do it for me.

PrairieErth is one of my favorite books ever, so this one is a gross letdown. It's like taking a long car trip with your crotchety grandfather. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/41107078 The Sword of Shannara (Shannara, #1) by Terry Brooks
bookshelves: currently-reading
I probably first read this book in seventh grade--1980, say. Wow--this is the first time I've typed "19something" and had the weird feeling that it was a year deep in mists of history. Like, 1980 looks almost as old-timey as 1890 to me for some reason. Anyway.

I would have to say that this book has stood the test of time: I'm reading the same first-printing trade paperback with the 4/C gatefold illustration bound in the middle that I read when I was back in junior high, and the pages might be a little yellowed, and the phototypesetting with the occasional tilted line looks a little quaint, but obviously the book is the same--the words haven't moved around any in all the years this volume has held pride of place in my shelf of treasured books.

Right. The book has stood the test of time. I, on the other hand, have not--whatever ability my 12-year-old self had to find charm and adventure in this story has clearly been lost. 'Cause this thing SUCKS! ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/41105196 Under Enemy Colors (Hardcover) by S. Thomas Russell
You could certainly compare this book to the work of Patrick O'Brian--but why bother? Sailors, cannonballs--but other than that? O'Brian's world is filled with richly imagined, deeply believable characters sailing oceans of majesty and terror and the profoundest beauty. This fellow Russell's sailors are lifeless wooden mannequins and the sea they sail upon is a place where dreary things happen but never anything unpredictable.

In the acknowledgments section--to be found at the rear of the book, a port I now wish I'd never set sail for--the author is careful to say of himself "I'm a novelist, not a historian," and I'd have to say he gives himself rather too much credit by claiming to be either. The man's idea of period detail is to carefully refer to each female character by her full name and title--". . . she was accompanied by her cousin, the entrancing and bewitching Miss Henrietta Carthew . . ." etc. etc. Oh, it's sheer agony to read.

This brings me to the following question: Why is it apparently so difficult to write merely good fiction? I didn't--couldn't possibly--expect this book to be anywhere near as good as O'Brian. I would have been utterly satisfied to be merely entertained. But no--a tedious, none-too-bright hero slogs through some predictable adventures while pitting himself against an absurdly, cartoonishly evil, craven enemy. I guess writing talent is just not evenly distributed--some people get a lot, most get none at all. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/40425144 to: The Thirteen-Gun Salute (Aubrey/Maturin Book 13) by Patrick O'Brian
I learned that I still fucking love Patrick O'Brian books. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/39028786 Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx (Paperback) by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Violent drug-dealing thugs run amok in the Bronx of the late 1980s; their girlfriends are universally gullible, cruel, and pregnant. Alternate title: Locked Up or Knocked Up, and Sometimes Both. No doubt it's a moral failing of mine but I'm having trouble caring much for this cast of morons. I'm sure poverty and slum-life is grindingly, brutally difficult--but still. The people in this book are all a bunch of doofuses.

I've been moved to write a rhyming couplet:

This is not a book designed / To much improve my faith in humankind.

Ultimately, this book's greatest strength became, for me, a glaring flaw--and that is the author's awe-inspiring nonjudgmentalism. During the litany of events that make up this book--and it is really not more than a vast catalog of heartrending tragedies and colossal stupidities--the author manages to remain dispassionate and utterly disinterested. And while I admire her ability to report without involvement or judgment, by the end I had to really wonder--how could any sane person spend so much time with this cast of child-smackin', crack-smokin', santeria-practicin' numbnuts without simply losing her shit? How could she bring herself to stand by and simply report on a mother giving her sickly preemie two asthma treatments in a row because she'd missed one earlier in the day? There wasn't a single character in this book that I didn't want to grab by the shoulders and shake some sense into, and by the end the fact that the author hadn't done anything like that was a huge irritant for me. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/38036925 The Hour I First Believed: A Novel (Hardcover) by Wally Lamb
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/36978453 to: Liberty: A Lake Wobegon Novel (Lake Wobegon Novels) by Garrison Keillor
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/56012-what-a-croc Chuckell made a comment on Paul of Dune:

John, if you've read all the latter-day, post-Frank Herbert-but-making-money-for-the-estate titles and loved them, say so, and trust that people here will listen to you. For myself, I applaud you for your ability to tolerate horrendous writing, absurd plotting, and generally slipshod publishing. All I can say is that I read one of them, and the experience was grim and unhappy for me. As far as that goes, even the later "Dune" novels that were theoretically written by Frank Herbert himself were pretty dreadful, and if you could make your way through them I admire your fortitude.

Have you ever read Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun"? It has all the mystery, exoticism, and adventure of the original, beautiful, powerful Dune. ]]>