9. Sleeping Giants

By Sylvain Neuvel    

Another sci-fi book lent to me by my boss.  It was a personal favourite of his, partly because the writer is a local boy (hails from Quebec) and partly because the novel reads like a screenplay (it was also written originally in English for accessibility). 

The hardback languished on my desk at work for a number of months.  My company was undergoing renovations, so I had to move to a different area (after years and years of staying put!).  I finally decided to take the book home with me to read.  

The story unfolded in the epistolary format where each chapter featured a character being interviewed by a high-ranking government agent.

The writing was easy to read but I didn’t really like it.  Characterizations were rather two-dimensional and the dialogue often hokey and somewhat juvenile.  There were parts that were amusing and enjoyable, but the overall style was rather derivative and clichéd.   

Olman was interested in reading Sleeping Giants after I was done.  Although I gave him fair warning about how I didn’t like it, he thought he should read it out of obligation as the writer is Quebecois.  When he finished he had similar feelings as I although he was more generous in his review.

SG is first in a trilogy of which my boss has all the books.  When I informed him that I finished SG, he immediately offered to lend me the rest.  I rather abruptly declined, saying that I needed to catch up with other books in my pile, which was true, but I still felt a bit awkward about my sudden refusal!   This book was just not for me.

8. The Passenger

By Lisa Lutz    

The Passenger (2016) is my first Lisa Lutz novel that's not part of the Spellman universe. It’s a departure from the witty caper humour that I associate with that well-loved series.  It seems that Lutz wanted to jump on the Gone Girl bandwagon and try her hand at a dark psychological crime thriller.

 

I’m writing this review four years after having read The Passenger so I don’t recall much of the plot, though I do remember the twist, which veered into soap opera territory.  Something about Jo’s (the real name of protagonist) mom having a secret affair with Mr. Oliver, the rich, powerful guy in town.  Jo grows up ignorant of who her dad was, and of course, ends up falling in love with the wrong boy – Mr. Oliver's son, her half-brother, unbeknownst to the young lovebirds.  Some terrible accident happens involving Jo, and Mr. Oliver helps her leave town with a new identity and enough money to start a new life elsewhere.

 

But before all this got revealed, the novel begins with a dead husband, a fleeing widow and a mystery of who Tanya Dubois is and why keeps running off and changing identities.  

 

The official blurb summary:

 48 hours after leaving her husband’s body at the base of the stairs, Tanya Dubois cashes in her credit cards, dyes her hair brown, demands a new name from a shadowy voice over the phone, and flees town. It’s not the first time.

She meets Blue, a female bartender who recognizes the hunted look in a fugitive’s eyes and offers her a place to stay. With dwindling choices, Tanya-now-Amelia accepts. An uneasy―and dangerous―alliance is born.

It’s almost impossible to live off the grid today, but Amelia-now-Debra and Blue have the courage, the ingenuity, and the desperation, to try. Hopscotching from city to city, Debra especially is chased by a very dark secret…can she outrun her past?

This review also provides a good summary that helped me recall events.

 

As one Goodreads reviewer said: “this is a three-star book but I had a four-star time reading it.”   

The Passenger was definitely flawed in its execution, but I was immediately drawn into the central character and the fairly gripping narrative. Lutz has always had a way of making her protagonists relatable and likeable, despite their tragic flaws.  She's definitely become one of my fave contemporary genre writers.

7. Recursion

By Blake Crouch            

 

6. Crazy Rich Asians

By Kevin Kwan  

CRA was everything I expected it to be.  Breezy, comedic and romantic with a dash of amusing insight.

My SIL quite enjoyed CRA and was already reading the sequel when I saw her last Xmas. She preferred reading the book first before watching the movie as the book goes into more detail about the familial relationships and social hierarchies of Singaporean high society.  But I had already watched the movie during my flight to SF, which btw, was the perfect flick to pass the time, so it worked out anyway despite my SIL’s regretful projections on me.  

For my friend’s birthday last September, I bought her this copy as the movie had already been out and was a runaway hit.  And she told me she thought it was better to watch the movie first, then read the book as the film did such a wonderfully lavish job with the production design and fashion, that her pre-envisioning of that world would have paled in comparison.  My friend gladly lent the book to me, which was how I got to read it.  Win-win!!

5. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

by E. L. Konigsburg      

I loved this charming 1968 Newbery Medal winner!   So wish I had read this when I was in grade school, yet still glad I that I could finally read it in middle adulthood.  

It’s the perfect adventure book for city kids - about a 12-year old girl and her little brother who runaway to New York by taking the train from Connecticut.  I remember how funny it was to follow Claudia's logic in choosing the Metropolitan Museum of Art as opposed to, say, living off the wilderness.  Main reason?  She wanted to be comfortable!  What's more, her arguments with her brother were an absolute delight to read.

I ordered the nice special edition in the hopes that my daughter will one day enjoy it when she’s ready to read this.  My dream is if she loves FtMUFoMBEF as much as I do, we can plan a visit to the Met in Manhattan (once this pesky pandemic is over as I’m writing this retroactively on May 8, 2020).

Just to fill up some space, I'll include the first paragraph, which according The New Yorker, is "a masterpiece of graceful, efficient exposition":

Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her back. She didn’t like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place. And that’s why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

4. Broken Monsters

By Lauren Beukes  

Based on what I can remember a year later, something about a female detective in decaying Detroit trying to solve a series of bizarre murders where the killer fuses the bodies of street kids with animals. 

The narrative switches between POVs of characters, going into the mind of the killer as his mind gradually disintegrates...or becomes something else.  It's later revealed he’s a homeless schizo artist.  The detective also has a fraught relationship with her teenage daughter, who along with her friend attempts to lure a potential online predator.  There’s also a transplanted loser-journalist who’s trying to revive his career in Detroit after screwing up his life in NY.  He hooks up with a dreadlocked DJ in the underground arts scene and becomes a local youtube sensation making ‘ruin porn’. 

All the characters somehow converge at the end with a confrontation with the psycho-killer who was able to transcend into some supernatural dimension using his demented art as a kind of portal.  Sounds like it was a crazy ride, right?   Mmm, no.

I first heard that Beukes’ niche was supernatural crime noir, which intrigued me.  I couldn’t find Shining Girls at Dark Carnival so got this instead.  So I really wanted to like Broken Monsters but several things prevented me from enjoying it.  I did not like any of the characters and the dialogue was often hackneyed and awkward.  There were some interesting descriptions of Detroit, which provided a cool backdrop of urban decay, but knowing that Beukes hails from South Africa, it became evident that she was writing about America from an outsider’s perspective.  

Moreover, there was something off about the writing style, which was workmanlike but lacked a narrative flow and a sense of lyricism that was needed in portraying lost or hidden worlds within a decaying metropolis.  As a writer, Beukes was just not able to pull it off. 

3. REAMDE

By Neal Stephenson

REAMDE was given to Olman by his BIL some Christmases ago, and Olman passed it on to me.   

It was a fun, but rather overlong, read that encompassed 1056 pages.   Olman had warned me that Stephenson can be overly nerdy in his descriptions.  I had thought that with this length, there would've been some interesting themes to explore, but there really weren’t any.  

REAMDE was just a globe-trotting techno-thriller adventure story where unlikely characters got thrown together, not just in the physical world, but within the virtual world of T’Rain.

Here’s a sample cast of characters:  a former smuggler now MMORPG entrepreneur, his adopted Eritrean-American niece, her cyber-slacker BF from Seattle, a Hungarian hacker, another Chinese hacker, a Hakka street seller, a Chinese-British MI6 spy.  Mix in Russian mobsters, Islamic terrorists, and Christian isolationalists.

I don’t mind super long novels if they're written well and enable me to immerse myself in the story and details, such as the wonderful Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. 

At some point in the middle, I realized REAMDE wasn’t going to be a ‘great’ novel, so I started skimming over the overly detailed and sloggy expository sections.  I felt that even Stephenson was impatient to wrap up his novel towards the end because the final confrontation and shootout between the terrorists and the main protagonists at an isolationist homestead felt very rushed.

REAMDE would have been a great book to recommend if it had been pared down to half its length.  This was my first Neal Stephenson novel and it was obvious REAMDE was not the best introduction to his work (Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon might be better - both copies I have on my on-deck).

Here’s a very thorough, detailed review that aligns with my feelings about the book:  http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2011/12/reamde-by-neal-stephenson.html