Showing posts with label book review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book review. Show all posts

July 30, 2013

The Cuckoo's Calling - Not Really A Book Review

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THE CUCKOO'S CALLING  by Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling)  

After a long long pause I decided to write a review of a novel again. I occasionally wrote short reviews and recommendations in the past but had gotten tired and stopped. This book however compelled me to write one, not because it was amazingly great, but because I did something that I never have done before with any other books no matter how boring, i.e. I stopped reading at page 105 and NEVER finished the book. I didn't want to torture myself and so this is the very FIRST TIME I abandoned a book.

The quite lengthy book at 455 pages is a mystery/crime which is one of my favorite genres. The main characters are Cormoran Strike, an Afghan war veteran turned Private Eye and his supposed to be just a temporary female assistant, Robin. The P.I was hired by the brother of a young model who committed suicide to find out if she was actually murdered.

I will not elaborate on the story but will list down the reasons why I didn't like the book one bit.
  • The story is very simple which is not a bad thing but there is nothing new, extraordinary, or exciting to this novel. It's just same old same old "is it suicide or murder?", lacking layers and intrigue to reel you in to the story. I was able to guess with certainty the killer very early on. 
  • There are too many side stories and descriptions of places and people that serve no purpose. It's as though the author was paid per word.
  • The characters are not well defined. I saw them all as cardboard figures cut out from a template. I waited for distinct personalities to emerge but they never did. They, including the 2 main characters are all dull and have one voice, no distinction between men and women. It's very frustrating for me not to be able to picture in my mind the different people, most specially the P.I. 
  • Dropping F and C bombs page after page after page; it's a major pet peeve of mine. Uttering swear words constantly doesn't make a character edgy and cool, nor does it add anything to the story line. 
I don't know who Rowling is targeting to read this book. I'm guessing she is encouraging her Harry Potter fans to try reading mystery in addition to fantasy. If she wants people like me to read her mystery books, she has to do better. Hiring a really good editor for her next installment of Strike series is a must. I, for one will not be reading the sequel.

I may be too spoiled for having read hundreds of books by my favorite and, in my honest opinion, best British mystery writers ever:

Ellis Peters
P.D. James
Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine
Agatha Christie
Dorothy L. Sayers

September 4, 2008

Gargoyles, Grotesques, Dante's Inferno, Roasted Egg(?)

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I started reading a new fiction book I borrowed from the library, THE GARGOYLE by Andrew Davidson very late Saturday night and was only able to finish up to page 106. To my surprise when I resumed reading the book the next morning, the next 3 pages are all about delicious food, not recipes, just food that the main characters are having.

Let me explain why I was surprised: the book is not a travel or food memoir. It is the story of a male porn star driving while drugged and drunk who got into a fiery car crash burning most of himself. His skin reconstruction procedure was described in a graphic stomach-turning manner that you could almost feel his pain. He started planning his elaborate suicide which was quickly abandoned when a fellow patient, a multi-tattooed schizophrenic sculptress of gargoyles and groteques, from the psychiatric ward came to visit him claiming they were lovers in medieval Germany, that they met when she was a nun and scribe in the monastery of Engelthal, and he was a badly hurt and burned mercenary. In her daily visits she told their story à la Sheherazade and several tales of deathless love in Japan, Italy, Iceland, and England.

I love everything about this book which reminds me a little of Umberto Eco's THE NAME OF THE ROSE and my most favorite fiction THE HEAVEN TREE TRILOGY by Edith Pargeter (Ellis Peters of Brother Cadfael fame). I also love the parts where the burnt narrator travelled to hell like Dante, and his ultimate redemption. For a 463-page book, it's quite an easy read.

THE GARGOYLE A++pages 107 - 108


Marianne Engel had previously brought me snacks, but it was obvious that this meal was far more substantial. she opened the hampers - one for hot items and the other, packed in ice, for cool - and started to lay out the food. There was a freshly baked round of focaccia, still smelling of wood smoke, and bottles of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. She danced a swirl of of black across the surface of the yellow, and then dipped a chunk of the focaccia into the leoparded liquid. She said the familiar prayer before she lifted the bread to my mouth: "Jube, Domine benedicere."
She'd also brought cheeses: Camembert, Gouda, blue, Iranian goat. She asked my favorite and when I picked the goat, she smiled broadly. Next, some steaming wraps that looked like crepes but had a bawdy smell. Gorgonzola pancakes were not for everyone, she explained, but she hoped I liked them. I did. There were cantaloupe balls wrapped in thin slices of prosciutto, the fruity orange peeking through the meaty pink.

She continued to excavate the hampers. Bastardly plump green olives, fat with red pimiento stuffing, lounged contentedly in a yellow bowl. A plateful of tomatoes soaked in black vinegar with snowy nuggets of bocconcini. Sheaves of pita and cups brimming with hummus and tzatziki. Oysters, crabs, and scallops drowning a wonderful death in a marinara ocean; little wedges of lemon balanced on the plate's edge like preservers waiting to be thrown in. Pork sausages with peppercorn rims. Dolmathes, trying hard to be swarthy and look macho in their little green suits, scented with sweet red wine. Thick rings of calamari. Souvlaki shared skewers with sweet buttered onions and braised peppers. There was a shoulder of lamb so well cooked it fell apart if you only looked at it while thinking about a fork, surrounded by a little family of roast potatoes.

I sat trapped under the culinary avalanche, unable to move for fear of tripping a plate over. "There's no way we can eat all this."

"Finishing isn't the point." She pulled a bottle out of the chilled hamper. "Besides, I'm sure the nurses will be happy to help with the leftovers. You won't tell them I was drinking alcohol, will you? I like retsina because you can taste the earth in it."


We made a determined effort, but it was predestined that we'd never be able to finish the meal. We gave up, she brought out a slim metal thermos and poured Greek coffee into two demitasses. It was chuggingly thick that it took a good thirty seconds to pour out. Then she brought out the dessert: baklava so honey-dense that it oozed like a charitable beehive. Tricolor gelato, green white red. And of course bougatsa, her dog's namesake - light brown pastry with custard between layers of phyllo.

page 136

I noticed the dried blood clinging around the edges of her battered fingernails as she took food from the coolers. Fish n' chips, bangers n' mash. Prime rib with pudgy Yorkshire puddings. Finger sandwiches: ham and eggs, cheese and vegetables. Scones with strawberry jam. Kaiser buns. Garlic and onion bagels. Herb cream cheese. German butter cheese , Swiss, Gouda, smoked Gruyère, and Emmenthal. Fresh cucumber with yogurt sauce in a delightful bowl adorned with images of Hänsel and Gretel. Chunky red potatoes, quartered to show their white interiors; chubby green stems of asparagus, sweating butter; a plump eggplant's fecund belly pregnant with stuffing. There were fat mutton slices piled up in an obscene monument of arterial schlerosis. A lonely pile of sauerkraut that seemed to have been added at the last moment only because someone had thought there weren't enough vegetables. Roasted eggs, even though who the hell eats roasted eggs? Then, an abrupt culinary turn towards the Russian states: varenyky (pirogies in layman's terms), cavorting with candy-blackened circles of onions, and holubtsi (cabbage rolls, fat with rice) in tangy tomato sauce.
Marianne Engel popped an egg whole into her mouth, as if she hasn't eaten in days, and devoured it in a manner that was almost bestial. How could someone this hungry not have sampled the meal while preparing it? When she has tamed the worst of her hunger, she announced, "The story of Vicky Wennington has great storms, vigilant love, and saltwater death!"I settled in, anxious to hear it, and took another bite of the holubtsi.

It was coincidence that I was making New England Baked beans last Sunday when I came across the roasted eggs which according to several websites are on the Jewish seder table but curiously and oddly are not eaten during seder. They symbolize something, I forget what. I put one egg in the oven and after an hour and a half this is what the egg looked like:


the roasted egg has a slightly smoky roasted flavor which I really liked

January 12, 2008

Ghosts, Ghouls, Zombies, And A Succubus

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What a way to start the new year: a book and a movie with ghosts, ghouls, zombies and a she-demon.

THE DEVIL YOU KNOW by Mike Carey A
Mike Carey is the creator of the character Constantine in his graphic novel Hellblazer which was made into a movie with Keanu Reeves as Constantine. The Devil You Know is his first novel published in 2006. The hero, Felix Cantor, a semi-retired freelance exorcist, after a botched job exorcising a demon from his best buddy, is working as a magician in birthday parties to pay his bills. That was until the day he was asked to banish a female ghost in the Bonnington Archive. He could not resist accepting it because he needs the money and gets curious when the ghost would not show herself to him. He wants to know who the ghost was and why she is haunting the archive. The story becomes a murder mystery with Eastern European mafia in the middle of it. Our hero employs a Hawaiian-shirt clad computer expert zombie, gets help from his Catholic Wiccan landlady, falls in love (lust, actually) with a succubus named Juliet (who in the movie version should be played by Angelina Jolie), and almost gets killed by the mafia. Very entertaining, excellent story and writing style. Highly recommended. I can't wait to read the sequel VICIOUS CIRCLE.

RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION B
Milla with machetes in both hands fighting superzombies! Not an intellectual film, just entertaining. I liked it!

May 4, 2007

Book Review ANGELICA: A NOVEL by Arthur Phillips

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Angelica: A Novel by Arthur Phillips 5 stars
A psychological thriller set in Victorian England written most brilliantly by Arthur Phillips à la Rashomon, which is one of my top 20 favorite movies. The same story is retold from four different perspectives: the mother's, the hired spiritualist's, the father's, and the daughter Angelica's, my sympathy shifting as I read. The book deals with ghosts (real or imagined), relationships, memories, and psychoanalysis. The book is so good I couldn't decide if I should finish it in one day or read it slowly because I didn't want it to end just yet. I just had to read it again. I had the same reaction to Phillips' last novel The Egyptologist, I read the book twice in one week. He has become one of my favorite authors. Highly Recommended


 
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