Mike Finn > Recent Status Updates

I'm glad this isn't a clever-but-frustrated-wives-plotting-against-waste-of-space-indifferent-husbands-who-don't-see-them-any-more, The men have something secret going on. So do the wives. And they're on a collision course.

THE MAN WHO WALKED HOME

A story I admired but didn't enjoy. It's driven by a clever science-based 'What if?' question about an experiement that goes wrong and causes. global devastation. It's well-written. It turns a complicated physics into a first-hand experience. It has a human tragedy at its heart. BUT it spans centuries - too long for it to feel real to me. It left my emotions untouched.

This is already more complicated than I'd expected - which is good. The characters come from a suburban environment I have no experience of so I don't know how closely observed this is. That isn't getting in the way of the humour but it is leaving me asking: "Do men really behave like this?".

A little under three hours of the audiobook left and I'm taking a break, partly because things are getting so tense and partyl because I don't want the book to be over, especially if one of the main characters is harmed.

I'm very impressed with Jesse Mueller's narration. She gives each character a voice I can believe in AND manages the singing, all while keeping a perfect pace.

Before I start them, the length of King's books puts me off. BUT, once I'm immerse myself in the narrative, it's like being swept along in a tide and my only problem is how to find more time in the day to listen to the book.

I opened this when it arrived yesterday and had to set my planned reading aside to stay with it.

There's a serial killer on a bizarre revenge mission, a feminist speaker being stalked, a soul singer making a comeback and somehow King is going to bring them all together in a way that puts everyone, especially Holly and those she cares about, at risk. Yet, it's the people not the plot that make this book compelling.

FAITHFUL TO THEE, TERRA, IN OUR FASHION

A boisterous, riotously imaginative story about a world where all the planets of the galaxy come to compete in races. The story feels like a backstage tour of an exotic circus given by a pressured-but-loving-it ringmaster wrangling the acts and keeping them honest. It's fast and fun. Underneath it is an idea about the preservation the identity of a culture under threat.

PAINWISE

This was a strange thought experiment about the nature and effect of sensation. Our hero has been altered to feel no pain. He's used to sample worlds on a long-range mission. He's often damaged and rebuilt but never feels the pain. He loses the will to live. He encounters pleasure-seeking empathic aliens who love his lack of pain and take him away in a spaceship version of a hippy bus. It doesn't end well.

HELP

Same CIA unit as MAMA COME HOME. Different aliens and a different analog showing the catastrophic effect of colonialisation on the people being colonised. It's a subversive tale. It's entertaining and easy to read but, beneath the surface, it's a muscular attack on the cost of colonialism and a reminder that we not only fail to learn from history but we whitewash it out of existence.

THE PEACEFULNESS OF VIVYAN
I gave up on this halfway through. I couldn't connect with the mystery or the main character.

MAMA COME HOME
This was clever and fun. It's startling to see a CIA expert in Fake News in a story written by an former CIA agent and published in 1973.
I relished the casual disembowelling of male dominance by giant female aliens and I loved the ingenuity of the ending,

This is very cleverly structured to set up the situation, introduce the characters and sustain suspense. The writing moves the plot along smoothy. The dialogue works. As does the mix of plot-related disclosure and the disclosure of personal backstories for the two main police officers.

It all makes for an entertaining read.

This feels a little dry. The two timelines work well enough. The murder 1983 investigation seems convincingly splapdash. The 2012 story is a bloodless thing. I can't connect with Helgi, the main character. BUT I'm enjoying the puzzle of how the two timelines will eventually connect. I'm also picking up some good Golden Age Crime novel recommendations as Helgi is a fan.

This is well done. Too realistic to be cosy but neither melodramatic nor overly focussed on the mystery. This is Nora re-entering the world she turned her back on thirty years earlier. She's looking for her friend, who she believes has disappeared BUT she has also chosen to leave her order and won't be going back. Seeing Nora, a woman no longer young but still strong and capable, pursuing her goal, is a pleasure.

This is much darker than I'd expected. Not in a thrill-of-the-scary-monster way but in a life-can-be-terrible way. I hope there's a point to all this unhappiness.

That was wonderful. A book that understands that we all make mistakes and that all of the mistakes have consequences, that life can be crap and people can be awful, that greed and the lust for power breeds predators who hunt us but that kindness, forgiveness and the ability to find and hold on to the things that matter to us offer, if not salvation, then at least meaning.

At 600 pages, this is a long crime novel but I'm grateful for that, as it's the last one in the series. The story is immersive, people-centric and trope-free. Emotions, fleeting and or irrepressible, are captured perfectly. The plot is powered as much by anger, envy, guilt and a struggle for hope and purpose as it is by solving the murders. The two timelines within the one life time show the scars of trauma.

I'm only an hour into this and I can't listen to another minute of self-indulgent whining by this 44 year old man boy. Poor him. His life has no meaning. So he drinks and self depricates.

I know I'm supposed to feel sorry for and I'm probably supposed to admire the humour he uses to as he wallows in his depression but all I want to do is to tell him to shut up, suck it up and get real.

I'm setting this aside.