Books, Good & Bad

The Good

Last week I read The Black Tower by Louis Bayard. Detective story involving Vidocq, the French Revolution and Louis-Charles, maybe. Great story, hard to put down.

Now I'm reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami (warning: music starts playing automatically). After the crap I waded through earlier this week it is like a cloud of golden light.


The Bad

Downriver by Loren D. Estleman. It tries to be a hard-boiled detective story, but it just doesn't cut it. Not believable, and too much unrealistic dialog. I gave it up after a couple of chapters.

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill. Neurotic clap-trap. Meandering pointlessness. There is a murder, but I suspect he's going to take the whole book to get around to telling the story, and then I'll bet the protagonist is the killer. I gave up a third of the way through.

The Translator by Ward Just. Similar to Netherland, but there were a few bits of substance here. He does wander around a bit, and the wanderings are kind of interesting, and the story does seem to be going somewhere, but then at the end of the book he just falls in a hole. What the hell? Why would you write an entire book just to fall in a hole at the end? Fall in the hole in the first page and save us all a lot of grief.