Used Books Blog

The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez is a smart, entertaining science fiction romp that satisfies even though initial brilliance fizzles into mediocrity.

Mack Megaton is a robot or ‘automated citizen’ of Empire City, who has evolved because of a freewill glitch in his programming. Mack’s not like other automated citizens since he was created by a mad scientist of sorts who was hell bent on taking over the world. The government and his psychologist keep a close eye on the nearly indestructible robot as he integrates into society.

The beginning sequences, as we are introduced to Mack, are simply fantastic. This isn’t your typical artificial intelligence type of of fare. It feels like a real look into what a self-aware robot might actually deal with as it evolves.

I dreamed. Not in the same manner of biologicals. My dreams weren’t confusing and symbolic. They were replays, tours of my memory matrix, dissections of every single nuance as my evolutionary program sought to adapt to better functionality.

The exploration of Mack’s personality, how he thinks and how he deals with the world are the best parts of The Automatic Detective. They alone make it worth reading.

Mack hesitantly intervenes in a dispute at his next door neighbors. Soon after, they disappear, he’s attacked by drones and his apartment blows up. Mack feels compelled to find his next door neighbors, particularly April, a purple-eyed child who took a shine to Mack. Of course, Mack wouldn’t mind a bit of revenge too.

This simple plot device puts Mack on a collision course with an assortment of mutants and other robots. At first, the action scenes involving Mack are interesting and fun. Mack calculates odds before smashing things and inventories damage by percentages. It’s a bit like what I think Spock would be like in the midst of ‘roid rage.

The problem is that once the decisive turn in plot is reached, the rest is paint by numbers with more brawn than brains. It’s not bad really, but it pales in comparison to the first half of the book.

It almost felt like two books, the first part an intriguing, intelligent mystery with a truly unique protagonist and the second part a Transformers 2 like sequence of action devoid of real thought. Did Martinez just run out of good material? Or did he get caught up in his own creation, birthing it and then just wanting to watch it run wild? Was Mack his Frankenstein?

I’m being hard on Martinez, but only because the first half of The Automatic Detective made me think I’d found the literary equivalent of a Hope diamond. So pick up The Automatic Detective and get ready to be entertained in a variety of ways.

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.

The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde is an entertaining, inventive read but doesn’t quite measure up to the Thursday Next series.

Reduced down to a simple scale, The Big Over Easy is very good, while most of the Thursday Next series (including The Well of Lost Plots) are great. Fforde is a victim of his own creativity.

The Big Over Easy is a mystery novel that follows detective Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crimes Division (NCD). Yes, he’s that Jack Spratt and in this alternate world nursery characters are real and live among us.

The NCD is under the microscope after Spratt fails to secure a conviction against the three pigs for death by scalding of Mr. Wolff. And now Humpty Dumpty has been murdered!

That’s the set-up and Fforde delivers with great nursery references (many of which I’m guessing I missed) and his usual absurd humor.

There’s nothing wrong with The Big Over Easy and yet, it’s not quite as inventive as The Eyre Affair, the first in the Thursday Next series. As much as I tried to simply enjoy The Big Over Easy for what it was, I couldn’t help but compare.

It didn’t help that Fforde draws at least one of his characters (Lola Vavoom) from the Thursday Next series into The Big Over Easy.

Comparisons aside, it’s a fun novel and yet again showcases Fforde’s ability to create a world populated with literary characters. This time it’s even more absurd because Fford draws on everything from a gigantic egg to a Greek Titan. Yes, Prometheus winds up living at the Spratt residence as he seeks asylum, escaping his daily liver pecking imprisonment.

The plot line of The Big Over Easy is satisfactory but nothing surprising. It’s a bit like a nursery version of CSI. That’s not why you read Fforde. Instead you get the clever newspaper excerpts at the beginning of each chapter and literary humor on nearly every page.

Read The Big Over Easy and become a fan of Fforde. Then read everything else he’s written.

A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore is a quick, engrossing, macabre and hilarious novel. It is everything that Moore’s next novel, You Suck, is not. A Dirty Job remains original while still drawing on many characters from previous Moore novels. Where You Suck felt like a recycled paint-by-numbers affair, A Dirty Job feels fresh and is brimming with ideas and unique insight.

Moore is a master satirist and combines his satire with blazing creativity and a healthy dose of the absurd. Be forewarned, Moore is not for the easily offended. Nothing is out of bounds and he’ll regularly write the things you might be thinking but would never say.

A Dirty Job follows Charlie Asher, a recent widower with a young baby and a second-hand store to run. If this wasn’t enough, it seems that his wife’s death has changed him - and his daughter Sophie - into agents of … Death. Yes, Charlie is in charge of transferring the souls of the dead to new owners. The ’soul vessels’ can be anything, from a cane to converse sneakers to breast implants.

Did I mention that The Morrigan - a trio of supernatural ’sisters’ who take the form of large birds - are after these souls as well?

The battle between The Morrigan and Charlie is what moves the plot along. It’s the action/adventure portion of the novel. Moore does a fantastic job of bringing these creatures (and the Squirrel People) to life in gruesome detail. There’s a clear enthusiasm to these descriptions that makes it easier to read.

Charlie’s self-discovery of what he has become and his trips to retrieve the soul vessels give Moore ample opportunity for his uncensored social commentary. He aims at the natural inclinations of the Beta Male, goth girls, Internet relationships and other Bizarro Seinfeld observations.

Yet, A Dirty Job is more then just a smart action comedy. The main subject matter of death surrounds the novel. Death … is the topic of the novel. So, while you’re chuckling Moore is also telling you about how people come to terms with death. He provides a portrait of what it is like for a family to wait for the impending death of a loved one. There is a hard-edge of pain in the middle of A Dirty Job that Moore seems almost panicked to hide, which is in itself interesting.

Don’t get me wrong, A Dirty Job is not a downer. It’s Christopher Moore for Pete’s sake! So, grab a copy of A Dirty Job and hang on for a roller coaster ride of ‘eww’ inducing action and laugh out loud comedy with a chaser of thoughtful reflection on mortality.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell is a beautifully written novel that captures the difficulty of growing up while delivering a unique view of family and society in England circa 1982.

I’d read a number of negative reviews prior to reading Black Swan Green. Many readers seemed unwilling to stray from Mitchell’s multi-narrative structure (as seen in Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten) or couldn’t relate to Jason Taylor, the 13 year old stammering protagonist.

To those naysayers I say this: you are wrong.

Readers who really pay attention to Black Swan Green will recognize that it is a multi-narrative structure. Instead of stories from far flung reaches of the globe or throughout time they are simply stories from a year in the life of one person. Yet, what is packed into the year in the life of a 13 year old boy can be quite varied. They’re like the tracks on an eclectic CD compilation. Mitchell levels his unflinching prose on war, unemployment, acceptance, friendship, death and divorce.

In addition, Mitchell paints incredible stories through the lens of Jason Taylor. It’s not just about Jason’s coming of age story, it’s about all the adult issues swirling around him. You’ve missed substantial portions of Black Swan Green if you’re simply reading what is written on the page. Mitchell’s genius is in his ability to create stories that live off the page, that blossom out of a few simple sentences into the known spaces of understanding and feeling.

While reading I often turn the corner down on a page if I find a phrase or passage particularly interesting. Black Swan Green is filled with turned down corners! Here’s an example that is both evocative and intimately linked to the time period.

I crossed the flooded clinic car park leaping from dry bit to dry bit like James Bond froggering across the crocodiles’ backs.

Or this incredible observation in relation to how an alcoholic parent can be so different but the same person.

Green is made of yellow and blue, nothing else, but when you look at green, where’ve the yellow and the blue gone?

And then this supreme example of the inability to define beauty.

Beauty is immune to definition. When beauty is present, you know. Winter sunrise in dirty Toronto, one’s new lover in an old cafe, sinister magpies on a roof. But is the beauty of these made? No. Beauty is here, that is all. Beauty is.

Mitchell can also put down on paper and describe a feeling that I am certain many of you have experienced.

School corridors’re sort of sinister during classtime. The noisiest spaces’re now the silentest. Like a neutron bomb’s vaporized human life but left all the building standing. These drowned voices you hear aren’t coming from classrooms, but through the partitions between life and death.

In revisiting a elementary school Mitchell delivers another thought-provoking turn of phrase.

Primary school seemed so huge then. How can you be sure anything is ever its real size?

Finally, something that sums up much of what Black Swan Green is about.

The world won’t let things be. It’s always injecting endings into beginnings.

Many of these passages were jaw dropping, enough for me to stop reading and put the book down to marvel and think. Black Swan Green confirms and maintains Mitchell’s position as one of the best writers of this generation.

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.

Woken Furies by Richard Morgan mixes hard-edge science fiction with sociology, politics and philosophy as the Takeshi Kovacs saga continues. Though a bit formulaic, Woken Furies is pure Morgan, equal parts slam-bang action and cerebral dissertation.

This is one of those instances where it’s probably best if you’ve read the other books in the series.

Woken Furies hits the ground running in a rich world of Morgan’s making. It’s a world where your essence is written to a ’stack’ - a microchip of sorts at the base of your skull. Should your body die, your stack can be retrieved and you can be ‘re-sleeved’ in a new body.

If that’s confusing … well, then you should read Altered Carbon and Broken Angels to get your bearings.

Like most Morgan novels the plot is a pursuit. In this case the pursuit seemed to be secondary and was a device for Morgan to explore the impact of the innovations he’s introduced into his world.

How would our relationships change if we were able to re-sleeve and live for centuries or longer? How would you approach the world if you could live in a virtual construct?

These are interesting topics because they actually relate to modern day issues. How are we dealing with our growing life span and the ability to hop-scotch around the globe. How does that effect our current family dynamic? I live 3000 miles away from most of my family. That’s not something that happened much even 100 years ago.

How will ‘life streaming’ on sites like Facebook and FriendFeed evolve? What about those MySpace and Facebook pages that continue long after the user has died. Is virtual sex cheating?

We’re putting more and more of ourselves online so couldn’t the endpoint be something like Morgan’s Renouncers, a religious group who have renounced the flesh, live in a virtual construct and are awaiting Upload.

And then there are the more blatantly obvious parallels Morgan draws with his political and religious themes. He explores revolution, dynamics of economic class and politics, and weaves a type of religious extremism into the heart of the story.

Yes, there’s a lot to think about in Woken Furies.

In between you get high doses of well crafted, bloody fight sequences and raunchy sex scenes. The dichotomy between the action and cerebral are more pronounced in Woken Furies. It feels more forced then in Morgan’s other novels and was distracting at times.

Despite this criticism, I enjoyed Woken Furies. I read it quickly and enjoyed both the sizzle and the steak. I recommend Woken Furies but be warned, Morgan is not for the timid.

As I’ve mentioned before I like TV and am not one of those Kill Your Television type of bibliophiles. The other night I’m catching up on TiVo and watch the latest episode of Fringe, which has gotten progressively better, so tune back in if the first two or three episodes left you cold.

This episode, “Ability”, led the characters to a rare book store where we witness a customer selling a copy of Jonathan Carroll’s Land of Laughs. The appearance of Land of Laughs was an illuminating look at the influence literary fiction is having on TV writers. There’s no question this wasn’t a coincidence as Carroll is well known for his amazingly surreal novels which dovetails nicely with the general theme of Fringe.

I’ve read a good deal of Carroll including Land of Laughs, Sleeping in Flame and The Wooden Sea among others. I read all of them before starting this blog so they aren’t currently reviewed. I am reminded that I should do a retro review to highlight the eerie, quirky genius that is Jonathan Carroll. Seriously, go out and read one of his many books. You will not be disappointed.

This is the second time I’ve noticed a J.J. Abrams show paying homage to and telegraphing plot and themes via literary works. The first time was on Lost, when I noticed Benjamin Linus reading a copy of VALIS by Philip K. Dick. Anyone who read VALIS immediately understood that there was an element of time travel involved on the island.

Literature is the fuel for our entertainment, regardless of the final medium and channel. So a big thank you to J.J. Abrams for putting these great writers in front of a mass audience.

Do you remember the Choose Your Own Adventure book series? If you grew up in the 80s I’m guessing you might. I know I do.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say on the subject.

Choose Your Own Adventure was one of the most popular children’s series during the 1980s and 1990s, selling over 250 million copies between 1979 and 1998, and translated into at least 38 languages.

I can understand why they were so popular. Written in the second-person, these books put you, the reader, in the driver’s seat, allowing you to make choices during the narrative that effect the outcome of the book. Talk about empowerment!

Here’s an example from the The Abominable Snowman, the first book in the Choose Your Own Adventure series.

If you decide to cancel your meeting with Runal and search for Carlos, turn to page 7.

If you feel Carlos is OK and go ahead with your plan to meet Runal, turn to page 8.

You make these choices frequently through the book, winding your way to one of multiple endings. The number of endings for each book could be as high as 44, or 30 like in my favorite of the series, Inside UFO 54-40.

There was usually one really good ending. You’d try again and again to get to that ending instead of the others that ended in death, imprisonment or some other misfortune. Inside UFO 54-40 was unusual in that none of the normal paths actually got you to the really good ending. ‘Paradise’ could only be found by breaking the rules of the book and finding the ending you wanted by thumbing through to that elusive, orphaned, page.

While I certainly enjoyed the structure of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, it was the lesson in Inside UFO 54-40, about thinking outside of the box, that stuck with me.

Choose Your Own Adventure books have been praised for capturing reluctant readers. I wasn’t one of those. I was reading Watership Down, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Cat’s Cradle, Dune and Caves of Steel. But the series helped continue my passion for books. It seems to have done that for many others, and is also heralded as a great gender neutral series because of the second-person narrative style.

The series was written by a number of authors though most were penned by R.A. Montgomery and Edward Packard. Montgomery is trying to revive the series through Chooseco, his new publishing company. I can definitely see a way for the series to connect to a new generation, but it’ll take better integration with the Internet and a major overhaul of the Choose Your Own Adventure site.

Perhaps a few dedicated fans with technical savvy can reach out and help Chooseco? It’s a worthwhile endeavor in my opinion.

In the mean time, check out the great collection of covers and reviews at gamebooks.org and pick up a few used copies for your kids (or you).

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.