Review: "The Possibility of an Island" by Michel Houellebecq

Reading through The Possibility of an Island, the fourth and longest novel of controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq, I could not help but think the famous Julian Barnes quite that I feel epitomizes Houellebecq’s work: “he is a clever man but not a clever novelist.” Houellebecq harkens back to the great thinkers of the early 20^th century, it is hard not to read his books and think of the work of writers like Aldous Huxley and most certainly Celine, but there is always something missing from his novels that make them great. He plays effortlessly with big ideas, but rarely does that translate into a palatable story for those who don’t share in Houellebecq’a bleak and brutal worldview. It comes off as crass and tawdry at times, especially during his tedious sex scenes or downright offense at worst. But I find his book’s to be entertaining overall, whether intentional or not. Daniel, the main character in this book, is very similar, or identical if you want to throw away pleasantries, to his other dower, overly educated libertines. He is a successful comedian, an art house filmmaker and a closeted scoundrel who, as he ages, becomes more depressed as his sex life diminishes and he comes down with a terminal case of ennui. This leads him into the ranks of a hedonistic cult who feel that cloning is the key to eternal happiness, the success of which is exhibited through Daniel’s clones, who narrate alternating chapters. None of Houellebecq’s books are a fun ride and they are as nihilistic as you can get, with this book’s ending, much like his others, is brutally unhappy and one scene, involving an orgy where Houellebecq’s ubiquitous themes of sex as a commodity and sexual class warfare is quite sad. But he is a pitch-black humorous streak that makes it somewhat palatable, although others might find it repugnant. Houellebecq is an interesting figure, one who stokes controversy, but who also makes you think more deeply of the world we live in.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Reamde" by Neal Stephenson

As I did last year, I started out the year by reading the longest book I planned to read, just to get it out of the way, and after reading Neal Stephenson’s large 1042 page novel Reamde, I’m having second thoughts about doing the same thing next year. While most of what Stephenson writes would be placed in the Science Fiction section of any book store, this book is more of a thriller, so his placement there, I thought at first, was simply because of his reputation, but he does have a certain style and structure that appeals to such an audience, which is why I found this book to be dreadfully dull at parts and ineffective in others, with a few really cool scenes peppered in there, as well as some funny ones. The plot is quite convoluted, involving a successful draft dodge named Richard, who, after leaving the country to avoid Vietnam, becomes a weed runner and opens up a popular ski resort. He also creates an RPG game which feels like a cross between the Sims and WOW (I don’t play games, can’t you tell). Called T’Rain, this complex game, whose code is written partially by Science Fiction authors with strange habits, soon becomes the victim of an elaborate hack which forces players to give up their game money at digital gunpoint. This also involves Zula; Richard’s adopted niece, as well as Zula’s dopey boyfriend Peter, the Russian Mob and suicidal jihadists by accident. Reading this, I was reminded of David Foster Wallace’s fiction, with its long explanations and obsessions transcribed, but here; it lacks that charm and just comes off as bloated, especially during the final, crucial 100 pages. But I did laugh some time, like the opening family reunion, any time Peter screws up and one scene, near the middle, where Zula fends off an attacker using pieces of a broken compact disc, was really suspenseful. This a smart novel, one intricately constructed and put forth with passion, but it’s meaning and its quality are lost on me.  
Rating: 3/5

Top 20 Books of 2016

As always, I set a reading goal and met it and slightly exceeded it in 2016. I split the two lists, one of authors I read for the first time this year and authors I have read before. Here are my favorite books I read in 2016. (Note: I was very partial to books published this year). 

First Time

10. Hurt People by Cote Smith: This suburban dark fairy tale about two brothers, one who watches as his brother falls into the grip of a mysterious stranger is an oddly hypnotic look at lost youth and the best book of its kind since Scott Heim’s Mysterious Skin. 

9. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ All-Time Greatest Hits by Mark Binelli: If all you know about the musician Screamin’ Jay Hawkins is from Hocus Pocus, there is a whole dark and sad world waiting for you in these pages, filled with tall tales, apathetic ghosts and lost love, this is one of this year’s true surprises. 

8. The Lost Time Accidents by John Wray: This complex story of time travel, inherited curses and the nature of time itself is challnageing, maddening but infectious.

7. Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett: This book answers the question of what happens when a black man wakes up one morning as a pasty faced white dude. He becomes a puppet for others nefarious plans, all the while pontificating on the state of his squalid city of Lagos. Smart, introspective and hilarious. 

6. Prodigals by Greg Jackson: These fiercely intelligent stories, of people on the brink of life, of people on the brink of change, of people of the brink of whatever, bring with them a keen, almost overwrought sense of their own selves and the promise of a fascinating new talent. 

5. Cannibals in Love by Mike Roberts: this novel, consisting of fifteen connected vignettes, is the first novel in long while that mixes the urgency of the time with a classic bildungsroman in the vein of Fredrick Exley and John Fante. Funny, poetic and sad, this novel has a beating, un-ironic heart.  

4. A Burglar’s Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh: One of the best non-fiction books to come out this year, this loose history of burglary, robbery and home safety will have you looking at the city you live in in a new light, and have you double checking to see if your front door is locked. 

3. Heartbreaker by Maryse Meijer: My favorite story collection this year seemed to right the wrongs of Amelia Gray’s and Lindsay Hunter’s cold fiction with a lot of heart and painful reality, with the story “Jailbait” being the standout. 

2. What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell: This meditative look at one man’s love for a male prostitute will swallow you whole. Rich in detail and painful scenes of betrayal, as well as mundane scenes granted importance through flighty skillful prose. 

1. The Nix by Nathan Hill: This large 600 page book about the 60’s, online gaming, the Occupy movement and mythical creatures is a grand, epic novel of ideas and family, and earned its place at the top of this list. 

Read Before

10. The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty: If you liked his sleeper hit and Booker prize winning novel The Sellout, you’ll love his debut. It has the same funny tone and hilarious quips that made that novel so great. 

9. The Sport of Kings by C. E. Morgan: This large novel of race and race horses is a major step up from her first novel. Dreamlike yet brutal, this novel was hard to forget 

8. Dear Mr. M by Herman Koch: Koch has had a steady place on my lists since The Dinner and this is his biggest, most complex story yet, blending an odd mystery with dull life of a has been writer with his dark, angry wit. 

7. Everybody’s Fool by Richard Russo: A sequel to his best book, Nobody’s Fool, we catch up with the residents of North Bath, which always seems on the edge of collapse. Adding in a welcome bit of violent menace into this earthy story made this one of Russo’s most accessible novels. 

6. The Heavenly Table by Donald Ray Pollock: While I don’t want to call this bloody story of three bank robbing brothers and a recently swindled farmer a culmination of sorts for Pollock, since it denotes and end, this book really shows and author reaching his potential and at the height of his powers. 

5. Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers: Again, Eggers proves himself as a master of the written word with this road novel that feels like a high brow National Lampoon’s Vacation, filled with treacherous landscapes and foibles, none of which is greater than what lies in the heart of the book’s main character. 

4. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead: Another great book getting its due, in both awards and lists like these, this fictional look at the antebellum south is a morally complicated tale of escape and promise and is probably the most original novel of slavery in America in a long time.  

3. Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer: After bashing him for two books, Foer crafts a brilliant narrative of a Jewish family whose faith and connection is threatened by forces great or small. Gone are cutesy postmodern techniques, all of which clouded his true skill as a storyteller. Too bad I seem to be the only person who likes the book. 

2. True Crime Addict by James Renner: Using his speculative and imaginative voice for a true, disquieting story, Renner produces his best and most personal work as he tries, fails and comes to grips with the odd disappearance of Maura Murray. 

1. The Cartel by Don Winslow: This novel, along with its predecessor The Power of the Dog, make up one of the greatest fictional novels I have encountered. Filled with shocking violence, breakneck pacing, suspense and rich dialogue, Winslow successfully sums up the history of the North American drug trade, and the heinous limits of comprise, justice and revenge. 

Top 10 (11) Films of 2016

2016 was a rough year personally and on a wider scale, as I’m sure it was for a lot of people, but it’s always nice to escape for a few hours in the dark recesses of a movie theater. I made a concerted effort to see smaller films this year, as the big budget blockbusters have me feeling a bit numb. So here are my favorite films of the year. 

Top 10 (11) films of 2016

10. 10 Cloverfield Ln., dir. Dan Trachtenberg: The most popular film on this list, this contained thrill ride, featuring a wonderful and scary John Goodman was the best tent pole movie this year. 

9. Cash Only, dir. Malik Bader: From something instantly recognizable to something rather obscure, this gritty ethnocentric crime thriller left me rather surprised with its urgency, energy and unique take on familiar material. 

8. De Palma, dir. Noah Baumbach: I always try to put a documentary on my year-end list, and none of the others I saw compared to this. Watching a master like De Palma talk about his obsession and the obsessive detail he put in to movies as varied as Dressed to Kill and Casualties of War is a cinephile’s dream. 

7. The Nice Guys, dir. Shane Black: After watching Chris Stuckmann discuss this movie on his list, I was reminded of how special this movie was: an original, brilliantly crafted popcorn film in the land of super- heroic redundancy. And the chemistry between Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe was beyond splendid. 

6. Manchester by the Sea, dir. Kenneth Lonergan: I’ve become a bit skeptical of movies being released around Oscar season, but this movie deserves all the hype it gets. It’s an enveloping story with real people I, at times, forgot were actors. Everything seems natural and perfect, and while it is long, I left wanting to see more. 

5. The Wailing, dir. Na Hong-jin: This Korean horror film deserves ample space next to movies like Oldboy and I Saw the Devil. Almost six years in the making, it shows, with brilliant set pieces, expertly built tension, an escalating level of weirdness and the creepiest ending of the year all add up to one of the smartest horror films in recent memory. 

4. Green Room, dir. Jeremy Saulnier: Saulnier improves on Blue Ruin with a breakneck take on the siege film. As soon as I thought I knew where this movie was going, it shocked me by doing something different. This is a movie made with skill, talent and zero fear. 

3. Moonlight, dir. Barry Jenkins: This meticulously crafted and beautifully shot coming of age story is the best directed movie I saw all year. Never sliding into melodrama or some half-baked social commentary, this story moves and impresses the deeper it gets, culminating in a show-stopping finale of heartbreak and revelation. 

2. The Lobster, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos: Easily the smartest movie of the year, but that in no way makes it inaccessible. This dreary yet dryly funny tale that feels like Brazil for the perpetually single was easy for me to get lost in and start digging for meaning. 

1. Tie: La La Land, dir. Damien Chazelle/ Sing Street, dir. John Carney: Among the bleak compost of 2016, I’m happy to say that these two films, which are oddly linked together for me in theme and execution, are leaving me with the strongest and most positive cinematic experiences of the year. Both successfully make important points about setting goals while not ignoring the sacrifices that must be made in order to achieve them and both feel like dreams I was in that sadden me to see come to an end. Can’t really give a movie, or anything, a bigger compliment than that. 

Review: "Lost in the Funhouse" by John Barth

As much as I have traversed the flat open areas of postmodern literature, I figure I simply must not get it. If I was being nice to myself, I guess I would say it is just not for me. Yet still, these tomes (even the short ones are tomes in a way) fascinate me. They challenge and madden me and hopefully make me a better reader. Some are good, like Infinite Jest, Against I don’t get almost the Day and The Public Burning, all books I quite liked even though I don’t understand almost half of what they are about. But some are just plain boring and read like the ingredient list of some synthetic cleaner you don’t want to touch your skin. Sadly, the last book I will read in 2016, John Barth’s short story collection falls quite snuggly into that category. These stories reads more like jilted, oppressive how-to manuals that break down story into little bitty parts that are microscopic and incomprehensible at times. It is hard to pick out a few elements that I like, since most of these stories, especially the shorter ones that range in length from half a page to ten pages, are all fit this description. Two do stick out, one is the title story, which I read earlier this before I decided to read this whole book. It tells the story of one boy’s trip to a carnival and how the story itself threatens to go of the rails. That same charm can also be found in the story “Title” where the author tells you what story he is trying to write, which is a story that has no real beginning or end. I am sure these stories have a brilliance and god forbid fun factor I was simply blind to, but it is hard to recommend a book that offered as little narrative enjoyment as this.

Rating: 2/5

Review: "A Burglar's Guide to the City" by Geoff Manuagh

After reading a book as intensive, interesting and beguiling as Geoff Manaugh’s A Burglar’s Guide to the City, you will be forgiven if you check to see if your front door is locked twice or even three times before you leave the house. This is an affecting book to say the least, putting us in the shoes of not only criminals, who the author sees as sort of rogue architects, but also the victim of break ins as well which, as described accurately (in my opinion) is second only to rape in terms of the emotional damage it can cause. If you have experienced a break in and have had valuables stolen, which I am lucky enough to not have experienced yet, it is the shattering of trust and routine that can turn someone into a mess. But I am just taking now about the feelings this book produced in me and not about the book itself. While calling this a book about the history of burglary is somewhat accurate, it is also simplistic. At the heart of this book is something a bit more grand and profound. Broken down into large chapters, covering every aspect you can think of when it comes to burglary , it makes the case, very successfully I might add, that crime, specially the crime in the title, is not only facilitated  what type of city you live in, but is a natural byproduct of its existence. This is a really cool book, and while I am not used to describing nonfiction books in my review, I guess I will treat this as a short story collection and pull out a few tidbits that impressed me, made me think or simply made me laugh. After an introduction, which chronicles the life of nineteenth century bank robber George Leonidas Leslie, whose heist techniques we still see in today’s movies, the book talks about what a city’s layout says about the crimes in the area and goes into detail about the city of Los Angles. For instance, the reason for helicopter surveillance being such an important part of LA policing is due to the city’s vastness and many tucked away corners where criminals can disappear, similar to the reason behind London’s many surveillance cameras being the city’s density. In the same chapter, like in many others, Manaugh goes into great detail on certain crimes, one being the robberies committed by the Hole in the Ground Gang of Los Angles, who used the creek system hidden beneath LA streets to drill holes up through banks and escape through makeshift tunnels on ATV’s without ever being caught. The book also goes in depth on what constitutes burglary, which is different from robbery, the tools of picking a lock, which a lot are available online and why Die Hard is a masterpiece of architectural indirection. I have not begun to scratch the surface of all that lies within this book, its many nooks and crannies that are hiding in plain sight. For all of it, you’ll have to break in and find it yourself. 
Rating: 5/5

Review: "True Crime Addict" by James Renner

With True Crime Addict, James Renner brings a lot of the same sense of foreboding and everyday evil to a true story as he did with his two novels, both of which blend psychological realism, suburban fairy tale and the banality of evil amongst strong, hyper original narratives. But this is a more personal book, some would say too personal. It came about at the right time. I have a lot of free time at work, and one of the things that I became fascinated with are writings and videos on unsolved murder. While I admit that a lot of the fascination with that is of the grim type, I do feel a sense of duty comes with it. At the very least, it gives me an incentive to keep my eyes open and be more aware of the cracks and caverns hiding in plain sight. Renner feels that same way, and this book, through two different stories, shows clearly and disturbingly how that obsession, especially inside a deeply moral and deeply troubled man, can nearly destroy a person. The first story told is the main story, and one I was fascinated by even before I was made aware of this book. In early February in 2004, UMass student Maura Murray crashes her car on a rural road in New Hampshire. After interacting with person nearby, a former truck driver named Butch Atwood, she disappeared before the cops came. The window between the conversation with Bruce and when the police showed up at the crash site is a mere seven minutes. Maura has not been seen since and no traces of what might have happened to her have been found. The second story is of James himself, which begins when he was ten years old, and a missing poster of Amy Mihaljevic, a girl who was abducted and murdered in his hometown of Cleveland, caused him to fall in love with the dead girl and lead to a lifelong obsession with unsolved and cold cases. His investigation into the case of Maura Murray, which begin in 2010, uncovers a dense of web of conflicting evidence about Maura’ motives, hidden fissures  within Maura’s family and his own manic desires to see justice doled out to victims of violent crime. I won’t get too much into the details of what Renner finds: it would not only spoilt the surprise, but I will say that Maura was no the all-American girl that the media, her strange father and even stranger sisters made her out to be, and by the end I feel I can make an educated guess of what MIGHT have happened to her on that New Hampshire road. We also get glimpses into Renner’s strange worldview, which he espoused on heavily in his novels The Man From Primrose Lane and The Great Forgetting and his current home life with his wife and troubled son and a brief interlude into his past and his psychopathic, pedophilic grandfather. There is lot to digest and mull over, but it is presented in brief, digestible chapters. And it helps that the details of this case, both sad and scary, are not something you are soon to forget. 
Rating: 5/5