Walking on the Moon

Peter Swanson has put together a book that’s a little bit murder mystery, a little bit character study, and – for me – a little bit nostalgia trip. Kill Your Darlings starts with a murder and follows our characters back through time to show how we got here. He does a nice job both telling us who they are and what happened to lead us to the events that start the book.

It’s a little bit of a gimmick to work backward through time. I think it works pretty well here, partially because of the murder mystery connection. A mystery reader who found the style gimmicky could still imagine the building flashbacks as facts uncovered in investigation. I thought it was a reasonable way to build the characters.

Swanson ties his characters to specific ages and dates that are within a year of my birth. He also takes them on a junior high trip to DC that I also took. I wind up feeling a bit of extra nostalgia for that.

Overall an interesting story told with some panache.

Recommended.

I’d heard little bits and pieces about Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mister Ripley for a while but never got around to reading it. (I know there’s a movie, but I haven’t seen that either.)

The book is pretty much a character study of what I’ve seen described as a “charming sociopath.” I can’t really quibble with that characterization. Highsmith shows us this fellow in vivid detail.

It’s a good read. The writing is great, the plot is suspenseful. I spent the book living in Ripley’s head in a way that’s difficult to pull off.

But I still find it a more interesting book to talk about than to read. Picking away at Ripley’s motivations – and maybe Highsmith’s intent – is a lot of fun. Probably worth reading just to do so.

Recommended.

I feel like I’m not really giving Martha Wells her due when I say this was another good Murderbot book. This was another good Murderbot book. Writing series SF is hard and she makes it look easy.

Recommended.

Man, this book. I really enjoyed it, but it is a ride. Haruki Murakami does a thing in The City and Its Uncertain Walls that I have a hard time describing, but that I really enjoyed. This is very keyed to who I am as a reader, so if this doesn’t sound like fun to you when I describe it, it probably won’t be.

This is a book that’s very metaphorical and metafictional and inhabits a magical reality. Murakami is not coy about this. His characters are largely readers and librarians and his POV character directly says how much he admires the genre.

For this reader, the metafiction and magical realism are slippery. I do love a book with levels of interpretation, but symbolism and metaphor are fragile. It’s a bold way to tell stories because there’s no net. If too many strands of symbolism and metaphor fray or fail to connect, the reader drops. Doing this across cultures (Murakami is Japanese and I’m not) is even harder. Other authors have dropped me.

I should probably also say that I went into City without knowing anything about it beyond its cover blurb.

The novel is divided into 3 books, each a different time in our narrator’s life, connected by his relationship to and from the titular city. Though which city the title refers to is probably also open to some interpretation; it’s that kind of book. Each of these books are rewarding in their own right and in their interconnection. The narrator is engaging even though he’s carrying a lot of symbolic weight. The settings and situations are evocative and engaging. The writing is beautiful, even when the meaning is obscure.

And the meaning is often obscure. Even within a book the connections and interpretations can feel tenuous. Reaching between the books feels more so as the characters change and new characters come and go. How a character relates to an idea changes as they do, and this manifests indirectly in this work. Except when it’s explicit.

This kind of interpretive juggling is fun for me, so I really enjoyed myself throughout. By the end, I’m still putting pieces together and looking forward to considering the whole thing from different angles and deciding what I think about it.

Then I read the Afterword and I feel like the whole thing changed again. I have no idea if that was Murakami’s intention or not. This is the kind of book where small changes in a reader’s frame of mind can create big shifts, so it might be that a couple words in the Afterword catalyzed a big change in how I thought about the book.

So, a ride. And a fun one, honestly.

A must.

I picked this up because I remembered that I liked the last Cherie Priest book I read without remembering all the details. The Drowning House turned out to be a well wrought supernatural thriller set in a modern Pacific Northwest.

To clarify the “supernatural thriller” label: it’s somewhere on the boundary between horror and action. There are plenty of very spooky scenes, including the initial chapter, that will scratch itches for scares. But in the end it’s about a showdown between Good and Evil with outsiders in over their head, a fair amount of derring do, and suspenseful confrontations.

What makes this all work for me is Priest’s pacing. The early more horror-centric chapters really drop us into the unknown waters of whatever creepy events are coming, but without filling in any useful details. We have some of the questions and then we meet our protagonists. Priest strings us along, letting both the players and the situation reveal themselves in good hair-raising time. Until suddenly the reader realizes that the spookfest has become an actioner and that they really do care about these folks who are caught up in it. I had a lot of fun.

Strongly recommended.

Havoc is a thriller with an interesting set-up. It is told in the first person from the point of view of an octogenarian agent of chaos. She’s on the leisurely lam from some earlier incident gone wrong after starting to travel after the death of her husband. It is set in the pandemic, but that’s basically not a real factor in the story. Christopher Bollen occasionally invokes it as a difficulty in managing travel or contact but in another time plenty of other causes could fill those plot holes.

Overall, Havoc is well crafted and diverting. Our narrator is interesting, but obviously untrustworthy. If nothing else her justifications of her casually sowing strife in others relationships smacks of self-deception. A lot of the fun is figuring out what is really driving her and why.

And on paper the answers are interesting and satisfying. The plot gears all mesh. There are dropped hints that slipped under the RADAR. All the things that make a psychological thriller work are there.

But for me, the big twist just rubbed me the wrong way. I know it is just me, but the reveal just took me out of the story in a way I could not recover from. Probably worth a try if you are not me.

This is a kind of high concept history book. Take the signers of the Declaration of Independence and do a capsule biography of each of them. It provides a way to take a slice of pro-revolution (well, mostly) Americans and dig into their lives. They are going to be relatively well documented and give some kind of a slice of life in the Colonies around 1776.

Denise Kiernan and Joseph D’Agnese do a good job running these folks down and telling their lives in pretty interesting capsules. There is a lot of variation in outlook and experience of these people. It’s a good reminder that America has never been monolithic. But the bios are necessarily short and if someone interests you, their chapter is over pretty quickly. As an invitation to reading more history, that can be effective, but I have already swallowed that pill.

More Martha Wells Murderbot. I do not have a ton to say about it beyond that earlier review. This continues to be fun and interesting. I see that there’s an overarching plot line going on, but I’m only barely paying attention to it. I am enjoying watching the Murderbot’s character develop and being engaged by the plots.

It’s fun. Recommended.

I was impressed by Mallory O’Meara’s earlier history on Milicent Patrick who designed the Creature From the Black Lagoon effects. This is a more straightforward history of women’s role in American drinking history and culture. It’s still very good.

O’Meara does an excellent job addressing what could be a pretty light topic. She tracks the history of people drinking alcohol from prehistory to modern America. That history, as most sources relate it, leaves women out of it, which she sets out to correct. It also reflects women’s role in society – because drinking is important to society – and O’Maera makes sure you know it.

Tone and style really matters here. The book has the citations one hopes for in a history, even though the documents for events in bars and distilleries can be dicey to find. Having the goods, O’Maera adopts a conversational tone in delivery. When she writes about the drama between the players at the center of the emerging Tiki Bar movement, it sounds like a story you might hear at a party. But when you get to that moment when you wonder “how does she know that?” or “is that really true,” well, there are citations.

Overall this is a well researched book about an interesting and fun topic that may just tell you about some bigger things, too.

Strongly Recommended.