Used Books Blog

The Lemur by Benjamin Black is a tidy, atmospheric novel that delivers on a tense and satisfying who-done-it plot.

The story follows John Glass, an Irish journalist who is living a comfortable physical life in New York. But Glass isn’t really a journalist anymore. He’s essentially a kept man, living in a loveless marriage and embarking on the authorized biography of his father-in-law.

Though his surroundings are plush, his emotional and spiritual life are far from it. Glass battles self-loathing for the biography he’s been commissioned to write, and seems to be in a state of spiritual ennui.

Enter Dylan Riley, a researcher Glass is contemplating hiring. He looks, thinks Glass, like a lemur. But Riley isn’t as innocuous as the furry creatures you see at the zoo. No, Riley has already done a good deal of research and finds some dirt. It’s easy to see why Black choose the lemur.

The term “lemur” is derived from the Latin word lemures, meaning “spirits of the night” or “haunter”.

The next thing Glass knows, he’s being blackmailed by Riley for five-hundred thousand dollars, half of what Glass is being paid for the biography. Before Glass can get worked up about it Riley is murdered - shot through the eye. But relief turns to suspicion and fear as Glass realizes the blackmail and murder can’t be a coincidence. It’s someone he knows.

Black sets up the plot with a sure and quick hand. He does so without you really noticing and at the same time creates a superb mood for the novel. That’s where The Lemur really excels. It oozes atmosphere and emotion. Not through the characters but in the description of places and events.

You’re not really connecting with any of the characters, but they all make you feel things. The sense of boredom and repression made me fidget. The panic Glass has is palpable, reminding me of times when I felt close to being caught bluffing at poker. The guarded but intricate conversations Glass has with a fellow writer bring back memories of strong but short acquaintances you never forget.

Black paints these great portraits, allowing readers to connect using their own experiences to fill in the shadows and edges. Pair this moody introspection with a screw-tightening page-turning plot and you have a fine novel. Sure, it lacks the emotional depth that would make it great, but it succeeds on a number of levels.

Read The Lemur by Benjamin Black on a holiday winter weekend and you won’t be disappointed.

Going To See The Elephant by Rodes Fishburne is a pleasant and readable first novel with colorful characters and interesting ideas. However, it lacks depth and a consistent tone that would have made it a truly great book.

Going To See The Elephant follows Slater Brown, a budding writer who has traveled to San Francisco to launch his career. He winds up writing for a long-standing but third-rate newspaper, gaining scoops through a unique and strange method.

Brown becomes a local celebrity, incurring the ire of a colorful and voracious mayor. He also falls in love with a beautiful chess player, who is on a collision course with Milo Magnet a eccentric inventor.

Fishburne does an admirable job in creating interesting characters, from grumpy, gruff, grizzled newspapermen to an eager government entourage. He creates small worlds which resonate with the reader. The newspaper. City Hall. The mad scientist’s lab. Alone, they are actually quite good. Together they begin to lose focus.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to like in Going To See The Elephant. The pacing is spot-on and you can’t help but be carried quickly through the story and enjoy the characters.

Yet, the theme of the book is about self-discovery and being true to your dreams. This subject matter deserves greater attention. It is in these instances where Fishburne seems to tell instead of show the reader how the characters deal with these internal conflicts.

In addition, the tone of the novel is uneven and is not cohesive. Is it supposed to be playful and humorous or is it supposed to be heartfelt and introspective? I’m not saying you can’t have both, but one should be consistent throughout, letting the other be the surprising and infrequent foil.

Science. Politics. Media. Love. There’s a lot packed into Going To See The Elephant and I can’t help but think what might have been. Could Fishburne have held back some of the ideas and used them in a future novel? Perhaps fewer concepts would have made it easier to keep Going To See The Elephant focused? I could easily have read an entire novel about Milo Magnet and his experiments.

So I chalk this up to a writer finding his voice. Going To See The Elephant by Rodes Fishburne is an interesting novel. Flawed but enjoyable.

You Don’t Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem seems like a sad combination of sexual themes from a Nicholson Baker novel with the enigmatic Los Angeles vibe often produced by Steve Erickson. Lethem simply misses the mark completely, filling the page with dead on arrival dialog, characters with no real substance or motivation and largely unnecessary sexual scenes.

You Don’t Love Me Yet is, to put it bluntly, bad.

It’s tough for me to say this since I like so much of Lethem’s work. I believe we’re seeing the growing pains of an author working toward a new genre. Most of Lethem’s prior work was based in science fiction or surrealism. Gun with Occasional Music, Amnesia Moon, Girl In Landscape and As She Climbed Across the Table are all very good reads.

Lethem then made a successful jump to more traditional literature with Motherless Brooklyn. But even Motherless Brooklyn borrowed from his detective genre past. Then came The Fortress of Solitude, a clear attempt at straight up literary fiction, which might have been good if an editor had made it about half as long. You Don’t Love Me Yet extends Lethem’s reach for literary fiction.

Even in his short story work, Lethem seems to hit the mark when dealing with surreal or other-worldly environments. No doubt he’s a talented writer, but he’s yet to take his talent and successfully apply it in a traditional literary fiction context.

You Don’t Love Me Yet follows the travails of an aspiring rock band in Los Angeles. The main character is Lucinda Hoekke, the bassist, who is painted as a flighty, mercurial woman with little idea of her own motivations. Perhaps she’s an alcoholic since nearly every scene seems to include drinking. I don’t know and, frankly, I didn’t care.

As a sterotypical musician, Lucinda needs some money and winds up working for an ex who is running a performance art piece about cataloging complaints via telephone. It’s here she conjures up a relationship with one of the callers, The Complainer, who turns her life and that of the band upside down. I won’t go into it because it’s all rather dreary and pointless.

Did I mention the sub-plot about the lead singer (on and off again boyfriend) who also works at the zoo and kidnaps a kangaroo that he feels is being mistreated? Yeah, it’s strange. I like strange but this just doesn’t go anywhere and the plot convergence is wholly unsatisfying.

You Don’t Love Me Yet reaches for what DeLillo or Erickson accomplish, turning ordinary oddities into meaningful insight. Avoid Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet and pick up any of his early work instead.

Syrup by Maxx Barry is as good as an icy cold Coca Cola on a sweltering hot summer day. In other words, Syrup is satisfying! It’s a fun romp that takes well deserved swipes at marketing, Hollywood, ambition and corporate ethics. Amid the social commentary is a romantic plot that, while a bit one-dimensional, is … well … fun. It’s not the romantic swoon you’ll get from Audrey Niffenegger’s Time Traveler’s Wife, but more like … Sawyer and Kate’s relationship on Lost. Yes, it’s a TV reference, but it’s apt in my opinion, particularly given the role books are playing in that series.

Syrup follows Scat (formerly Michael George Holloway), a recent college graduate, who seeks to become famous. Really famous. Acknowledging his lack of acting ability he seeks to make fame and fortune in business and marketing. The premise is that everyone has at least three big ideas in their lifetime. Three ideas that, if pursued, can make millions of dollars. And it just so happens that Scat has one of these amazing ideas about a new brand of cola named Fukk.

Scat’s idea brings him into contact with 6, a beautiful, young, driven marketer at Coca Cola. No, that’s not a typo, her name is the number 6 and the back story to this unusual name is one of the more intriguing gems in Syrup. Barry doesn’t follow this thread, but I wish he had. Scat is immediately smitten and immersed into the shark tank of corporate politics and ladder back-stabbing. Fukk is a success but doesn’t make Scat millions. In fact, it creates an arch-nemesis, Sneaky Pete, who Scat and 6 fight together through the rest of the novel.

Syrup is composed of very short micro-chapters much like Steve Erickson’s Zeroville. This format lets Barry be creative and playful. You can feel his energy and passion for the story. He’s having fun and thereby, the reader is as well. The format also lets Barry sprinkle in bite size case studies like the following:

Pick a random chemical in your product and heavily promote its presence. When your customers see “Now wth Benzoethylhydrates!” they will assume that this is a good thing.

This is a tongue in cheek send-up which flirts with deeper issues like the difference between perception and reality, the friction between art and commerce and finding yourself. But Barry never delves into any of these areas in greater depth. They’re nearly offhanded comments or topic sentences to a potentially longer essay. Could he have done more? Maybe. Would it have worked? Maybe. Is it necessary to make this novel complete? No!

Syrup by Maxx Barry is fast paced and funny, a marriage of soap opera and satire that is a pleasure to read.

Outrageous Fortune by Tim Scott is a rare blend of action, humor, absurdity, science-fiction and personal insight. You know things are going to be interesting when the first word of Outrageous Fortune is ‘Fuckers’, uttered by main character, Johnny X67. He has every right to be pissed. His house has just been stolen. But that’s not even in the Top 10 of strange things that Johnny encounters in this non-stop adventure.

The world that Tim Scott creates is a fantastic collection of interesting ideas, vivid imagery and incisive social commentary. On top of that he’s laid out a riotous action plot coupled with interludes of penetrating observations. I knew I was hooked when he described a city that had been divided by music genres. Such a brilliant concept I’m green with envy!

The Classical section is high-brow and well maintained with sound ordinances and large signs that chide the noisy with large flashing ’shhhhh’ signs. In Jazz you have all sorts of strange free-form architecture but can’t be sure to get a decent pizza since they might be ‘experimenting’ with an ‘all olive’ phase. Or visit Compilation, the haven for those pale, boring souls who don’t have taste enough to identify with any one type of music. And stay away from Holiday Song, an area with perpetual snow and roaming, ho-ho-ho-ing Santas.

Scott takes readers on a fast-paced ride that reminds me of the movie After Hours and Brazil. It’s a desperate, funny, bizarre world where you (and the characters) are struggling to catch-up and digest what is going on. You don’t want to put the book down because you know something else is going to happen in the next few pages.

The only thing that distracted me was the mix of English and American phrases and places. Scott is English and that comes through unmistakably through his prose. However, the novel takes place in America in some sort of composite of Santa Cruz, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Perhaps the cultural collision is intentional and part of the alternate reality Scott wants to create. I don’t know, but it jolted me out of the regular reading and flow of the story.

Amid the Monty Python meets Philip K. Dick prose are amazing reflections on relationships, religion, reality and happiness.

On relationships:

I watched her character shrink before me and I felt so helpless. The spirit I’d loved her for had turned into fear, so that she no longer thought she could cope with the world; was so scared of the thought of being on her own that she crushed the present, suffocating any joy from life, and turned everything into a battle for survival. I knew this was not right - not for us, not for people who had a house and food and friends. And the more she clung to me, the more we both drowned, sinking under an invisible sea of desperation.

On religion:

Now the emphasis was on seeking peace rather than clinging to spurious explanations for our existence - and once the focus moved toward peace, religion seemed to lose a lot of its hold over the masses. Religions never had been interested in peace that much, anyway.

On happiness:

What mattered was regaining who I was, because the pleasure of being alive is not pining for different lives, or different things, but just being.

For every talking elevator who tells bad jokes there is a literary gem. Tim Scott gives readers both sizzle and steak; swashbuckling science-opera and high-minded literature. Read Outrageous Fortune and then wait for Scott’s next novel.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami is another solid effort by one of the best modern writers on the planet. Sure, it’s not as absorbing and gripping as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or as eerie and complete as Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World. But that’s a massive pedigree to live up to, the former a taut, rich and uncomfortable story similar to David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, while the latter (one of my favorite books of all time) an amazing mix of surrealism and science fiction.

Kafka on the Shore seems to borrow from both of these former works; from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the exploration of dark themes and revealing personal histories; from Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, the surreal and a convergence of dream and reality. This isn’t a rehash though, it’s a fresh story and perspective. This time it feels more like a collage, with different ideas, images, people and perspectives stitched together in an almost poem like format.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a typical narrative style fiction novel told from three distinct perspectives, a 15-year-old runaway, an elderly dullard and an aimless truck driver. The characters start from very different places and at first it’s not altogether clear how they’ll cross paths. Thankfully, Murakami surprises the reader - or at least this reader - and doesn’t follow a paint-by-numbers plot.

I am immediately drawn to the story when it turns out that the elderly dullard has a talent for speaking to cats. I’ve always liked cats and, as a kid, loved the idea of them talking and doing all sorts of mysterious things. What if my cats could talk to me?! What would they say? What would they sound like? At 7-years-old I pestered my parents to see The Cat from Outer Space. What can I say? I was 7.

That’s the strange thing about Kafka on the Shore. It mixes and matches style and pace. The beginning is more like an X-Files episode trying to determine the cause of unexplained phenomena, full of recollections, eyewitnesses and official interview passages. There is a horror-like vignette, like a dash of salt, added to the narrative as well. Yet there are soul searching passages of personal revelation, poignant philosophical musings, some Greek mythology, a hearty dose of sex and sly barbs at our diminishing grip on culture.

It’s tough not to fall for Murakami when he rattles off some truly gorgeous prose.

Just by looking at that happy smile, you can trace the beautiful path that a contented heart must follow. Like a firefly’s glow that persists long after it’s disappeared into the darkness.

Kafka on the Shore is about how to keep that glow alive once it’s disappeared into the darkness and the everyday, meaningless tragedies that make it difficult to do so. Not for those with delicate constitutions, or for those who want things to be neat and tidy, fully explained and mapped out. The rest of you should pick up Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami and enjoy the journey.

I collect Advance Reading Copies, better known as ARCs. ARCs are uncorrected proofs or galleys printed prior to the publication of a book for promotional purposes. You may also hear them referred to as an Advance Copy, Advance Readers Copy, Advance Review Copy or Advance Reader’s Edition. Either way, I find them intriguing and seek them out whenever I buy.

Advance Reader’s Editions are great because they’re scarce (print runs are very small) and you can often get the book well before it’s actually available to the general public. Better yet, they’re in soft cover format instead of a bulky heavy hard cover book. To top it all off, they’re generally cheaper than a First Edition.

An Advance Readers Copy usually has a letter from the editor in the preface and includes marketing and publicity information on the back cover. The cover art on an ARC may be completely different and sometimes there are real differences in the content, though that seems more the exception than the rule in my experience. There are frequently typographic errors in the text, though I don’t find that it detracts from my reading of the book. In fact, it’s a sort of sleuthing that I enjoy. It enhances the feeling of privilege - that you’re getting a sneak peek at the author’s work.

Collecting ARCs isn’t really mainstream, but it is acknowledged by bibliophiles and I highly recommend reading the esteemed Ken Lopez’s take on the topic. There’s also a bit of controversy about the subject from a publisher perspective, exacerbated by the used books market on the Internet. Every Advance Reading Copy is labeled as ‘Not For Sale’ on the cover, plain as day. Never mind that pesky ‘possession is nine tenths of the law’ axiom.

Scribner went so far as to put a letter on the cover of Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story that essentially pleads and browbeats recipients into not reselling the book. In this letter EVP Susan Moldow cites previous experiences in which Advanced Reader’s Editions showed up on eBay shortly after being distributed. I find it a bit shocking that a publisher is worried about such a small rounding error.

Instead, I’d like to think Scribner isn’t that shortsighted, that perhaps this was a bold, sly move to encourage people to sell copies on eBay and increase the buzz on the book. I mean really, what better way to get folks to sell these on eBay than to actively campaign against it right on the cover. Talk about a collector’s item! Fine Books & Collectibles has a nice article on the subject, including a stance on the unenforceability of the ‘Not For Sale’ language.

Unfortunately, publishers are concerned about the resale of Advance Reader’s Editions. A few times a year Alibris would get threatening letters from publishers or their lawyers demanding that we remove certain ARCs from the site. With that in mind I actually held off on my review of Zeroville until it was published. I’d purchased it as an ARC well before the release date, another great addition to my collection which includes (among others) Fluke by Christopher Moore, Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Government by Max Barry, Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff and Th1rte3n by Richard K. Morgan.

Thing is I gave Zeroville a great review which might have helped the hype and sales. In my mind, Advance Reading Copies are to books what private Beta sites are to the Internet. What do you think? Are you a reader who likes the idea of an ARC? If you’re an author, what’s your take? Any publishers nosing around the blog, jump into the fray! Booksellers, have you gotten those nasty-grams from publishers? If so, what did you do?