Reviewing Books I'm Reading Aloud

The highlight of the entertainment year at stately Dick n Hisses Manor last year was reading Peter Swanson's Eight Perfect Murders.  So it was with much delight that we realized a few weeks ago that we had another book of his, The Kind Worth Killing, on our shelf.

Part of what made last year's read such a good one was that Hugs and I managed to marry the perfect stitching projects to the experience, and I can't say I managed to thread that needle (HA!  Pun intended!) quite as well this year.  When I think back on Eight Perfect Murders I'm also remembering the weight of the canvas in my hands, the feel of the threads and the specific complexity of the stitches in it...  I'm not sure I wholly remember what I was working on with The Kind Worth Killing.  But nevertheless!  It was a delight!  Not quite as "topple you off your feet" twisty as last year's read (what is?  That book was SO fun), but Swanson's prose is buttery -- it reads aloud so smoothly and effortlessly.  The setting is immersive to listen to, and his narrative tricks are just a joy to watch unfold with reading companions.  We had so much fun trying to anticipate each next turn and failing spectacularly.  It kept us guessing the whole way, but kept us talking about it every day before we got back to sitting down and reading.  I was really sorry to see this one end.

I'm assuming our latest choice came off a best-of list and wasn't just a random pick-up by Boomer, but she has been excited about it for quite a while -- every time we'd peruse our little library to pick our next book she'd light up and say, "This one should be great.  I love Louise Penny!"  The book in question?  A Better Man.

Now.  Some mystery series are full of essentially standalone books.  You don't have to read the Miss Marple oeuvre in order or anything.  A Better Man is clearly part of an ongoing series, and we were a bit leery; a previous highly-recommended "latest installment in [X Series]!" title we read aloud last year was a huge bore for how the author was shoe-horning a ton of fan-service appearances by previous characters.  We found the whole environment of that one really smug and annoying.  But Boomer insisted she'd read many of the other books in this series and that it would be fine as a standalone.

Reader, it wasn't.  The book opened with all of Twitter ablaze with everyone's howling derision, first directed at an artist character I immediately didn't care about (there was a very Mary Sue sort of description of this woman's overnight success in the art world that, I guess, ALL OF TWITTER cares about, and then the cold open here of the reception of this artist's latest show?  I don't know -- I really couldn't pay attention to any of this stuff), and then directed at the police detective whose name graces the series.  There was a bunch of blah-blah-blah describing what happened in a previous book, some kind of colossal police activity that seemed to have actually gotten results (of course it did -- this hero wouldn't have actually failed!), but at the cost of another life.  Or several lives?  Or lots of lives?  It was hard to say because the prose was really clunky and high-handed.  I was listening to this chapter, and doing a very poor job of it, aside from tossing in the occasional "All cops are bastards" remark when the author got too dreamy-eyed at the notion of police work.  It just went on and on, describing without any details the fallout of whatever the big shoot-out in the last book was, and telling everyone else's perspective of the Hero Detective.  He'd been busted down from Chief of Police back to Chief of Homicide, because his higher-ups would rather humiliate him than fire him!  And oh boy -- they didn't remove the current Chief of Homicide from his job, so now there were TWO Chiefs of Homicide!  How embarrassing for our Hero Detective!  Only, all the police officers love and admire him so much, and he's so great, he's like a saint among men!  Oh, and did we mention that the current Chief of Homicide is his son-in-law?  Oh, and did we also mention the son-in-law has accepted another job and is leaving in ten days, so this big humiliating "Psych!  You're being embarrassed by being shoved into a job that someone else is already doing, LOSER!" power play by the evil higher-ups seems just to be... them filling an important job when the current guy has given notice?  Oh, and ALL OF TWITTER is VICIOUSLY PILING ONTO the Hero Detective, because he and his whole story from all the previous books in the series are so cool that OF COURSE all the world would be talking about it!

This was all just the first chapter.  We finally got to meet the Hero Detective in the next chapter and things got even worse.  The whole thing read like fanfic.  And don't get me started on the "wacky" characters in the Hero Detective's hometown, where his wife's story was going on (was she the artist?  I got lost in all that and didn't care enough to find out).  We read about eight chapters, got into the start of the actual mystery, and decided to call it quits.

This is the problem with consuming books this way, and I'm sure the same applies with audiobooks: you can just gloss over a lot of this when you're reading to yourself.  I'm sure these introductory chapters would have raced along, you might not have noticed quite how overblown and ridiculous the prose was being, and you'd get to cut right to the chase.  But reading aloud meant we each had to take turns saying all the "HOW AMAZING AND PERCEPTIVE THE HERO WAS!  ALL THE OTHER POLICE OFFICERS WERE SO WOWED BY HIS AWESOMENESS!" crap, to say nothing of having to listen to each word of it.  This book was really well reviewed and seems highly regarded, as does the whole series, so I might have enjoyed it on my own.  But we won't be continuing with it together.

Desert Dweller I'm glad to hear this -- it's very reassuring to know we're not skipping out on a universally beloved series!  The entire tenor of the book just rubbed me the wrong way, and I have a high tolerance for crappy mystery books!  I've also read plenty of series where I've jumped in late in the game, but this one was just setting the stage so colossally poorly... Oh well!  Life's too short!  On to the next book on the shelf! 

(I will say that I kind of love the trope in cozies of an absurd number of murders happening in a small town.  The Jessica Fletcher Effect!  I think that's what you get when your formative experience with the genre is Miss Marples, right?  You just end up being like, "I mean, of course someone's always getting murdered around this one little old lady.  How else will she have mysteries to solve?!")

Grace D. Li's Portrait of a Thief.

This book was rapturously reviewed by the NYT crime fiction reviewer, whose taste we generally trust, so I was really looking forward to it.  A heist novel!  About a gang of college students turned art thieves who are on a mission to return looted art to China!  This sounded delightful!  And it started really strong -- we thoroughly enjoyed Li's cinematic prose, it read aloud so smoothly, and the actual physical book was buttery and marvelous (such great-feeling pages, and beautiful font!).  And the question of museum ownership and cultural legacy is fascinating.  But then it started to flounder a bit.  About 2/3rds through the book, Boomer lamented, "I was kind of hoping there'd be more heist and less... uh..." and Hugs and I finished for her, "Navel gazing?"  The team of college-student-turned-international-art-thieves friends were sort of insufferable; I enjoyed the perspective of first- and second-generation children of the Chinese diaspora, but the book felt in the second half like we were rehashing the same feelings over and over again.  And each one of the students was high-achieving, dazzlingly attractive, and attending a top college, so a lot of the "is that all there is?" moaning from them about how hard it was to be 21 and unsure of what you want to do with your life was falling on unsympathetic ears in my living room.  More heisting!  Less bitching about what a difficult lot in life it is to be graduating from Harvard!

Anyway, the book did a reasonably good job of sticking the landing with a final, satisfying bit of heisting, so that was nice.  Several of the characters had endings I felt were unearned, but that might be because I found them loathsome by the end of the book and didn't want a happily-ever-after for them.  I might have liked this book more for reading it to myself, because I would have skimmed a lot of the blah-blah-blah-it's-so-difficult-applying-to-med-school-when-you-have-a-stoic-relationship-with-your-father-and-unresolved-grief-issues-about-your-mother's-death-when-you-were-young stuff.  But that's not how it went, so I had to wallow in every paragraph of it.  (Also, I was sick while reading this, so I didn't even have the energy to be stitching.  There was NOTHING to distract me from the tedium of elite college students whining about how hard life is.)

Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney

This was the second book we read from Boomer's B-O-M club.  I immediately enjoyed the tone of the prose, and we all agreed after just a couple of chapters that we were really enjoying it.  The story is told from the point of view of Daisy Darker, the youngest and least-loved daughter in a dysfunctional family.  After years of carefully avoiding each other, the family has gathered at Daisy's grandmother's house, a crumbling pile on a tidal island, for a command performance at the grandmother's 80th birthday.  The tide comes in, cutting the house off from the world.  A storm blows in, of course.  The grandmother announces the terms of her will, as one does at these events, and no one is happy with it.  Then the murders start. 

The mystery is a tribute to And Then There Were None (aside: I read that one as a kid -- when it had one of its more racist titles, but not the most racist title -- and remembered the gist but needed a refresher on the plot points when we read The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji back in the fall.  Lots of And Then There Were None-style books going on at our house recently...), but it's also got a whole "let the narrator tell you how horribly put-upon and unloved she was as a child" thing going on too.  That part got a bit tiresome at about the two-thirds point in the book, despite how enjoyably the prose had roped us in.  We all agreed that yes, the narrator had established how unfairly she'd been done as a child.  Yes, everyone in her family was horrible.  But let's move on, shall we?  I started to grumble that I was looking forward to a huge zag in the final third of the book, a big Peter Swanson-esque reveal of how unreliable the narrator has been this whole time, a complete yanking of the rug out from under us.  We agreed that it seemed pretty obvious where the author was taking this one, and if that was all she had for us, it was pretty disappointing.

That said, the pace kept up really well, and despite our grousing, none of us wanted to stop reading it.  When we felt it was laying too much of the same plot points on really thick, we had a lot of fun laughing about it, or sharing mock exasperation with it.  We also had some fun poking holes into the mistakes in the setting of the story (there are lots of flashbacks to specific dates with a few notes of inauthenticity to them, or preposterous feats of memory by the narrator as a really young child), even while still keeping up to find out where the book was taking us.

And in the end?  It was like when your favorite sports team spends a significant chunk of a game playing really badly, letting the opponent build up a big lead, and then pulling out a thrilling last-second victory on the most preposterous play imaginable.  The story did go exactly where we hoped it wouldn't, but then added a triumphant flourish to that that none of us saw coming.  Ultimately this was one of the most fun read-alouds we had this winter -- like the complaints and groaning asides we shared made the group activity of reading it that much more fun... and then it somehow managed to stick the landing.

I really highly recommend The Decagon House Murders as well, if you haven't already read it.  If I had to choose one tribute to And Then There Were None that I've read in the last six months, I'd pick that one!  

You and Boomer have similar taste!  Anthony Horowitz is her favorite!

Update, after reading the next two books...

Finlay Donovan Knocks 'Em Dead
Finlay Donovan Jumps The Gun

We all really liked the second book in the series.  The concept of the first book was that the protagonist accidentally stumbles into a convoluted action-mystery plot, with the various other characters making ridiculous assumptions about her bona fides as a gun-for-hire.  This is not a well you can really go back to twice, though, so we were curious how the sequel would progress.  The first book tied up all of its plotlines very nicely, but ended with a little twist of a cliffhanger; it could easily have been a standalone, but that last stinger was a great foundation for building the next story.  Now our protagonist is trying to solve a complicated mystery about actual guns-for-hire, and while it wasn't nearly as frothy and laugh-out-loud funny as the first book, it was still really enjoyable and silly.  And it also tied up its mystery mostly fully satisfactorily.  Without saying too much, the story involved a question of who had taken out a hit on a character our hero wanted to keep safe, and who was the actual hitperson who had accepted the job.  By the end of the book we'd gotten the answer to the first part of that, and just enough resolution of the second part that I could have been happy if there hadn't been a third book.

And so the third book.  Sigh.  I guess this series became a hot enough commodity that the author and publisher decided to milk it, because the third book starts with that unanswered question from the second... and then goes absolutely nowhere with it, keeping the story going without any closure.  There is no additional plot and no additional mystery.  We're just looking for this hitperson, and going about it extremely slowly and with very little action.  The series has a major police detective character who gets moved from "interesting foil for the protagonist and also one leg of a love triangle" to "Poochie, and also now singular love interest for the protagonist, and I really liked the other guy in the love triangle a lot better and found him a more narratively interesting choice".  Eventually we go full-bore copaganda set-up, as the bulk of this book is set at a "Citizens' police academy" sort of camp setting, where hundreds of pages go by without anything really happening except weirdly lionizing a bunch of cops who are all terrible at their jobs (even Poochie).  Elle Cosimano is a very capable writer, and the prose was always fun to read; I really like hero of these books and her best friend/sidekick, so I never stopped enjoying their whole vibe of wisecracking, self-doubting, comically terrible decision-making... but the whole balance of this book was off.  The central focus was entirely the "will they or won't they (DUH OF COURSE THEY WILL)" supposed sexual tension of the hero and the "hot cop" character, which was just not appealing at all (because ACAB).  The central mystery was limp and ultimately aimless.  And the book's greatest sin is that it resolved nothing.  It felt like the author got within a few thousand words of her goal and just tossed in a hastily-decided "Uhhh... the bad guy is... uhhh... that character!" while pointing at a completely random choice.  And then veered hard into two more chapters revealing major plot twists, character changes, and "cliffhangers" that served less as hooks to keep her readers eager for the next title in the series and more as "Wait, the book just stopped in the middle of the story."  

In short, major diminishing returns here in this series with book three.  Of course, I'll definitely tune in for book four, but this series is on notice!

I too do a lot of reading out loud, in the form of bedtime stories for The Lurkling. Currently I'm reading her The Princess Bride. Her choice, I think entirely based on the title. It hasn't been quite what she expected. 

For those of you who've seen the film but haven't read the novel it was based on, the key conceit is that William Goldman presents it as though it was originally a novel by Florinese author S. Morgenstern, which Goldman's American-Florinese father read to him when he was a kid. However, when he in turn obtains a copy (at great effort) for his own son, he finds that it's actually an interminably dense turn-of-the-century satire of Florinese politics and its upper class, much of which his father had been editing out. So what Goldman writes here is an abridged version of Morgenstern's "classic" text, concentrating on just "the good parts" about True Love and High Adventure, interspersed with an extensive meta-narrative - mostly about the process of adaptation, but also (mostly fictional) digressions about Goldman's life as an author, his father and his relationship with his family. The edition I have is the 25th Anniversary one, which includes further meta-narrative (with varying levels of fictitiousness) about making the film and how it was stuck in development hell for years, and also how his novel adaptation was excoriated by Florinese academics and got him into legal problems with the Morgenstern estate. 

Obviously I'm leaving all that out and, like William Goldman's fictional father, only reading her the "good parts". In the hope, I suppose, that one day later in life she'll read it herself and realise what I was up to. 

We first started reading aloud when the fourth Harry Potter book came out, because we didn't want to buy more than one copy but then couldn't choose who would get to read it first.  It was so much fun to read that way that we immediately cast about for another book to read when we'd finished, and settled on The Princess Bride.  And I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I'd just read it to myself; it absolutely wasn't at all what we were expecting (as fans of the movie), and I think the humor just didn't hit right as a result.  But it really is such an oddball, silly, and meta-upon-meta-upon meta book!

I love that you and LazBro have both read it to your kids, in exactly the way the story is meant to be read aloud! 

This past Sunday we started our next book, Small Game by Blair Braverman.  We planned to read this the same as all the books we've read since baseball started again, just one session a week, but Monday was a holiday and we had about 90 minutes in the afternoon with nothing else planned, so we got out our stitching and read a few chapters... and literally just as it was time to get up to make dinner we got to a plot point that demanded we keep reading all the way through.  There was no baseball on our TV on Monday or Tuesday nights, until we finished!

Many of our books are coming from The Mysterious Bookshop's "psychological thrillers" book-of-the-month club, but this one came from their "first novels" club -- Hugs spent a slow workday perusing their other clubs, read the synopsis for this, and got it for me for Christmas.  So it was a semi-curated title from a store that trades in mysteries, which is why I had certain mystery/adventure expectations going in...  This book defied most of them.  

It's a fairly slight novel (I mean, we read the whole thing in three sittings), and the premise is that the main character, Mara, is an instructor at an outdoor survival school who is scouted to appear as a contestant on a new reality TV show.  The conceit is that a group of survivalists are thrown together into a wilderness setting with minimal clothing and just one tool each (provided by the producers).  They are to "build their own civilization", and the contestants who can last six weeks will each receive a $100,000 prize.  Mara is looking to relaunch her own life, and sees $100,000 as a pretty good starting point -- she agrees to go on the show even though she has no serious interest in being on TV.  The other contestants all seem to fit a type -- there's a white-collar outdoor hobbyist, an Eagle Scout, a serious hunter/outdoorsman, and a pretty woman who just wants to be famous.  The production of the show doesn't go how Mara expects at first... and then something goes horribly wrong and the survival simulation becomes a survival reality.

This was a spectacularly fun read; the first half of the book reeled us in with the setting -- the thorough descriptions of the survival skills at play, the unspooling stories and backgrounds of the various characters -- and then the back half had us unable to put the book down for needing to know what was going to happen and why.  And Hugs neatly described the writing style by pointing out that the spare prose served Mara's character well, while Mara also served the spare prose well.  It was an immersive read/listen, with an excellent set-up and a story that quietly wove itself in unexpected directions.  (It was also a tonally perfect follow-up to The Wager.)  I really, really loved every minute of sharing this book with Hugs and Boomer, and there are pieces of it that I think we'll carry with us for a long time.

Just finished reading The Indian in the Cupboard, Lynne Reid Banks (1980) out loud to my 8 year-old. He enjoyed it and was invested in the story's arc: what would happen to the vivified plastic playthings, and so on. Tensest moment was when Little Bear had to get his arrow back. Now on to the Frank Oz film from the 1990s. 

ganews, the Texan cowboy and his ingrained hatred of indigenous people does not fade throughout. That Omri comes to the realisation he must return the plastic to its previous life is a nuanced maturation that does imply some colonial regret.