Monthly Archives: September 2009

Review: Bones by Jonathan Kellerman

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BonesTitle: Bones (the 23rd Alex Delaware novel)

Author: Jonathan Kellerman

Publisher: ISIS Audio Books (this edition 2009)

ISBN: 9780753140802

Length: 11 hours

Narrator: Jeff Harding

Setting: Los Angeles, USA, present day

Genre: Police Procedural

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 2/5

One-liner: A dull, predictable yarn that isn’t about bones at all. Or much else.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The mutilated body of a young woman is discovered in a protected marsh area in Los Angeles. Veteran LAPD Detective Milo Sturgis is called in to assist a rookie Detective by the name of Moses Reed. Naturally Milo brings his friend, psychologist Alex Delaware, along for the ride. A few more bodies are uncovered and there are hints that a prominent local family might be involved in the grizzly deaths.I stopped reading this series somewhere around book 9 or 10 due to their repetitive nature. And I chose this one from my local library’s meagre selection of audio books on the grounds that …well…it’s a meagre selection of audio books. So I’m admitting up front that I was undoubtedly going to struggle to love this book, although I am ever the optimist. Sadly I found the story dull and lacking credibility and it’s another that I’d like to assign the one-word review: meh.

People killing other people for garden variety motives like jealousy or the prospect of a large inheritance isn’t enough for Kellerman. If the world was as populated by knife-wielding psychopaths as he’d have us believe I’d never leave the house. Of course this is fiction and it doesn’t have to be realistic but I think Kellerman constantly ascribing his murders to the most twisted of people (who of course aren’t like ‘us’) allows him to avoid exploring an actual human emotion within the context of his stories.

The plot is equally uninspiring. It’s convoluted (I’m convinced that he added one of the evil doers at the end and then inserted them randomly in the story already written) and has all the suspense of a tax return. This time there isn’t even a fabrication of a reason why child psychologist Alex Delaware is involved in the case. In the earlier books there was at least be a pretence of a reason: a client of Alex’s or the relative of one would be involved or the case would somehow relate to the mistreatment of children for example, but here it just seemed to be universally accepted that a private sector psychologist would be involved in every facet of an investigation.

In short the book was formulaic, the characters stereotypical and the brand-name laden writing was plodding. Kellerman can do much better, in a standalone novel called The Butcher’s Theatre he tells a gripping tale and tackles some weighty political and social issues in the Jerusalem setting even though it too features a serial killer, but perhaps he lacks the incentive now that he’s a brand name all of his own.

Review: Out by Natsuo Kirino

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Title: Out

Author: Natsuo Kirino

Publisher: Vintage Books [originally 1997, this translation 2004]

ISBN: 978-0-099-47228-5

Length: 520 pages

Setting: Japan, present day

Genre: Psychological thriller / Noir

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 2/5

One-liner: A desolate tale of hopelessness and body parts.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Four women work the night shift at a lunch box filling factory in Japan. Their jobs are back-breaking and dull, their husbands universally boorish and their futures look equally desolate. One of the women, Yayoi, kills her husband when she’s tipped over the edge by his abuse. The other three women are drawn, one by one, into the effort to keep Yayoi from being caught. When a local pimp and club owner is accused by the police of the brutal murder the women think they’re home free but life doesn’t work out quite so neatly.

This is one of the bleakest books I have read in a very long time. The story is monotonous as it meanders from one depressing incident to the next while the characters are uninteresting and almost completely devoid of humanity. Even if you can overcome the unending dreariness that permeates this story I’m not convinced it has much else to offer. Perhaps in her zeal to depict Japanese society in a confronting way (virtually everyone is racist, all the men are misogynists, no one seems to place much value on a human life and there’s a whole load of gore) the author forgot to tell an engaging, entertaining story. I admire people who dare to show the more insidious aspects of a culture, but if writers choose fiction (rather than non-fiction) as their medium to do that then they have to entertain as well as inform and this book did not entertain me at all.

For a start there’s very little conflict and even less suspense which are two things even an average crime novel should have in spades. We know virtually from the outset whodunit and why. The only vaguely interesting question is whether or not she will get away with it but as she’s a two dimensional caricature it doesn’t seem to matter much and I was in little doubt that whatever the facts of the ending it wouldn’t be a happy one. And if I could have ignored all of that I would still have struggled with the credibility factor. I could perhaps have bought that all the characters would be so blithely unaffected by the piling up of body parts around them but when the supposedly smartest of the women completely fails to see really obvious danger ahead and then throws herself stupidly into the dumbest of femjep scenarios I lost what remaining interest I had.

Then there are the characters who are all so detached from each other and the events going on in their lives that I as a reader was never terribly interested in what happened to any of them either. I should, for example, have been outraged when one of the women, Masako, was shown to have a past in which she was treated abominably by her employers merely because she was a woman. But I didn’t have any sense of her as a person and was more bored by the umpteenth revelation that life (for these people anyway) sucks.

Finally there’s the writing which leads to the unnecessary length. The best noir fiction is concise and memorable often for what is left unsaid but this book is excruciatingly long. It’s overly repetitive and contains a plethora of detailed descriptions of events and trains-of-thought that add nothing to the story.

In short I was underwhelmed by this novel. What could have been an interesting depiction of the treatment of women in modern Japanese society was, for me anyway, lost in the tedious, gore-filled story and dull characterisations. For me to be informed and even politically motivated by a work of fiction I need to be entertained first, as happens with the writing of Stieg Larsson, Matt Beynon Rees or a dozen other writers. This one just left me feeling guilty I had picked it for a book club read.

Other stuff

The book won Japan’s top award for crime fiction in 1997 so clearly other people think very differently about the book than I do. For a far more positive view of the book than my own check out Story Time.

Here’s a written interview with former romance novelist turned award-winning crime writer Natsuo Kirino

Review: The Coroner’s Lunch by Colin Cotterill

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Title: The Coroner’s Lunch (the first Dr Siri Investigation)

Author: Colin Cotterill (and he blogs here)

Publisher: Quercus [originally 2005?, this edition 2007]

ISBN: 978-1-84724-196-2

Length: 400 pages

Setting: Laos, 1976

Genre: Amateur sleuth

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 5/5

One-liner: An engaging, funny, staunchly un-categorisable book. With subversive puppets!

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The book opens Laos in 1976. A fledgling Communist regime is in power for the first time and Dr Siri Paiboun, a 72-year-old doctor and former warrior, has been appointed the country’s sole Coroner. He has no training for the role, most of the available books on the subject are in a language he doesn’t speak and he has little of the necessary equipment. Despite all this he’s required to investigate an assortment of peculiar deaths, including the wife of a Party Leader and what appear to be tortured Vietnamese soldiers. Helping Dr Siri are nurse (and wannabe trainee Coroner) Dtui, morgue assistant Mr Geung and the spirits of dead people who inhabit Dr Siri’s dreams.

The highlight of the book for me was the humour which has the same witty, haphazardly surreal quality as Douglas Adams’ writing. In the past I have lamented the lack of books with this kind of sensibility but I now realise it’s a terribly difficult thing to achieve and am simply grateful whenever I stumble across an example. I don’t re-read books very often but books like this, that offer something wonderful quite independent of their narrative, tend to make it to the shelf of books I re-acquaint myself with from time to time.

The characters are delightful too. Dr Siri is reluctant in his roles as communist and coroner though he performs the latter with increasing diligence. He treats the people he meets with the amount of respect and compassion each deserves and his struggle to cope with the supernatural aspect to his life is handled well (it’s a theme normally guaranteed to turn me off). There are a myriad of other players, major and minor, alive and not, good and evil, who are all equally well depicted and credible.

The book also offers a marvellous sense of time and place although I’m so woefully ignorant of this particular part of the world and its history that I’ve no clue if it’s a realistic depiction. For all I know it could be as much a production of Cotterill’s imagination as his protagonist’s corpse-inhabited dreams but, realistic or not, it’s a glimpse into a fascinating world.

For once the prominent blurb on my copy of The Coroner’s Lunch, which likens it to Alexander McCall Smith’s African series, isn’t wildly inaccurate. Dr Siri certainly shares characteristics with Mme Ramotswe of Smith’s series although I think the plot of this book is far more intricate and it tackles weightier social issues, albeit with a delicate touch and wry humour. I found myself wanting more of this writing and these people almost before I’d even finished and, happily for me, there are already five more books in the series. What joy I have to look forward to.

Other stuff

The Coroner’s Lunch is reviewed by Helen at It’s Criminal, Maxine at Euro Crime, Karen at Euro Crime.

Sunday Salon 2009-09-20 – Week in Review

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OK it’s actually Monday but I meant to do this post yesterday which surely counts, right? Two hellish weeks in a row do not make for a pleasant-to-be-around Bernadette so, dear blog reader, be grateful that you only have to deal with me where all the crankiness has been edited out.

I did manage to draw the winners of the first Aussie Author Give Away (although BJ/Moondancer if you’re reading this please contact me as you haven’t responded to my emails and I don’t have a postal address for you). See what people thought about Australia and come back for another round of that give away next month.

Books Then and Now

I have mild photophobia (light sensitivity) which I manage well most of the time but when I spend many successive 12 hour days in fluorescent light it gets considerably worse. This is annoying because it means at the end of a long, tiresome day I can’t indulge in the thing most likely to relax me: reading. So for the second week in a row I have hardly read a word of fiction.

I did incorporate mini-reviews of two books into other posts this week. Death on the Nile featured heavily in my contribution to Kerrie’s Christie Week Blog Tour and I also participated for the first time in Friday’s Forgotten Books by talking about a little-known Australian book called Ligney’s Lake by S H Courtier.

I’m currently listening to Jonathan Kellerman’s Bones (which is in the meh category so far although I’ll keep listening) and reading Colin Cotterill’s The Coroner’s Lunch (delightful).

Work should be slowing down now so hopefully I’ll be able to read something I want to read this week

Arrivals and Departures

I acquired only the one book this week (it’s Graham Greene’s The Quiet American if you can’t see the cover, a book I mooched after having it recommended by Bibliojunkie). I’d like to think this is the start of a new trend of austerity but I know I’m going to buy a couple of books next week as two of my favourite authors have new books coming out on 1 October.

I didn’t manage to rid myself of any books aside from my give aways :(

Link Fest

Barely any time for surfing or reading news feeds this week but I will share my new favourite You Tube clip. A young lady on Bulgaria’s version of American Idol had a little trouble with the English language and created an…interesting…cover of Maria Carey’s song “Ken Lee” (you might have thought it was called Without You). I know it’s not politically correct to laugh at such things but, seriously, couldn’t she Google the correct lyrics before going on national television?

…and one more thing

I subscribe to around 150 book blogs and, due primarily to BBAW, most of them had a post each day last week, with more than a handful posting multiple times per day. I’m afraid I suffered from over-supply and did the only thing I could to cope (consigned the entire lot to the ‘mark all as read’ button). I know it’s not terribly fair given that everyone went to so much effort but 1000+ posts a week is way more than I can process. So I offer my deepest apologies to all the book blogs I love for not helping you celebrate and think in future I’ll do my book blogger appreciating during the other 51 weeks of the year.

Forgotten Book: Ligny’s Lake by S H Courtier

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This post is a contribution to Pattinase’s Friday’s Forgotten Books

Title: Ligney’s Lake

Author: S H Courtier

Publisher: Wakefield Crime Classics [original edition 1971, this edition 1992]

ISBN: 1-86254-286-4,

Length: 176 pages

Setting: Australia, 1969 (contemporary)

Genre: Amateur sleuth / bibliomystery

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Synopsis

Lewis Ligney is a vaguely mysterious high-ranking official with the Australian Government. He’s physically imposing via his size and the fact his face has been badly disfigured from an incident during WW2. Sandy Carmichael is a freelance engineer who befriends Ligney, his sister’s next door neighbour, and finds him an intelligent. congenial companion. One evening Carmichael sees Ligney at a boxing match in Melbourne but when he tries to make contact Ligney claims he doesn’t know Carmichael and disappears from the venue. Carmichael then reads in the newspaper that Ligney is missing, presumed drowned at Bateman’s Bay. Carmichael knows he saw Ligney after the supposed drowning and sets out to find, and hopefully help, his friend but discovers that Ligney had many enemies.

Things to look for

This book drips its Australian-ness from every page starting with the central premise. In what surely must be a unique event among nations Australia’s serving Prime Minister, Harold Hold, disappeared and was presumed drowned while swimming in the ocean in 1967 so having an important Canberra identity disappear in this fashion is clearly borrowed from the news headlines   There’s also the novel’s language and its protagonist’s journey up and down much of the East Coast of the country. In all the book is as Aussie as they come. Which makes the fact it was never published in Australia during the author’s life something of a mystery itself.

Although I’ve no evidence to back up my theory I wonder if Courtier was the victim of what A A Phillips termed our cultural cringe: a phenomenon which saw, until quite recently, virtually every artistic endeavour in Australia viewed as inferior to that produced elsewhere (especially the UK). It’s certainly interesting to ponder that Courtier’s very Australian books found publishers in the UK and US right up until the 1970′s while  these days many Australian crime fiction authors (such as Michael Robotham, P D Martin and Barry Maitland) set their crime fiction in the UK or the US to increase their chances of being published in those countries.

The plot is well constructed and, aside from the fact I never quite understood why Sandy went to such efforts on behalf of Ligney, fairly credible. Although set long after the end of WW2 the war plays a pivotal role in the story but I think it’s quite realistic that people would have had vivid memories of the dramatic events that took place 20-25 years earlier. The resolution is quite a page-turner and quite unpredictable too.

I’d not heard the term bibliomystery before seeing the publishers mention it in the afterword here but I’ve certainly read my fair share of novels in which books or things associated with them are central to the plot. In Ligney’s Lake it is Henry David Thoreau’s Walden that plays a key role. Courtier did a reasonable job of explaining the significance of the book to Ligney (and therefore this story) but I have to admit that my total ignorance of Walden made for some confusing moments.

Where the book falls down a bit for me is in its characterisations which are quite one-dimensional and a bit ‘blokey’ but quite representative of the time it was written. If, for example, Sandy had been more fleshed out it probably would have been clear why he went to such lengths for someone who appeared to be little more than an acquaintance.

A miscellaneous fact or three

Only two of Sidney Hobson Courtier’s 26 novels were ever published in Australia during his lifetime, with the remainder being published by English and American publishing houses. He also had five novels translated into German.

Courtier was born in rural Victoria in 1904 and died in 1974 and so was a contemporary (though older) of the more well known (and far more prolific) Arthur Upfield and Carter Brown (both of whom also had much of their work published outside Australia instead of or before it was published in this country).

Courtier was a school teacher who wrote 10 standalone crime fiction novels of which this is one, more than a dozen books that formed two series featuring different police inspectors and approximately 200 short stories. All of Courtier’s crime fiction novels are listed here.

When he died Courtier left an unfinished science fiction novel which he apparently hadn’t settled on a title for.

studentsIn a 2008 exhibition called Murderous Melbourne: A Celebration of Australian Crime Fiction and Place two of S H Courtier’s books inspired props to be designed by Melbourne University’s architecture students. This is one of the images of the exhibition but you can find out a bit more about crime fiction’s relationship to place by watching this video (the section on the exhibition starts at about 2:44).

A final word

I don’t think I’m alone in being woefully ignorant of my own country’s crime fiction heritage so I am quite chuffed to have found such a decent example by this neglected author who seems to have loved his country even if it didn’t return the favour. I’m not sure I found all the literary allusions the publishers of my edition saw but I did enjoy a ripping Aussie yarn.

Winners Announced of Aussie Author Give Away #1

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AAGA Logo1Thanks to all those who entered my first give away. I’ll get to the winners in a moment but first I thought I’d share entrants’ answers to the question that had nothing to do with the outcome of the competition. I asked people to tell me the first word or phrase that came into their minds when they thought of Australia. The common themes from those outside the country are certainly exotic animals (a.k.a pests if you’re an Aussie farmer) and the outback (which very few of us live in but most of us have driven through)(in my case these are mostly known as road trips from hell).

The list in its entirety (with my thoughts in red)…

  • Outback x 2
  • The Ashes (one the world’s greatest sporting events for the uninitiated amongst you)
  • Crikey
  • Fosters (sorry Mack but I don’t know any true blue Aussie who drinks it, you should look for Coopers Pale Ale which is from my home state and is available in the US) (well in Trader Joe’s in California anyway)
  • G’day Mate
  • Oy (only we’d spell it Oi and sing it as part of a chant that goes Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Oi)
  • very far away
  • beautiful
  • scenic
  • Koala (you people know they only sleep, eat and pee right?, they might be cute but they’re dull)
  • down under (or on top if you use this map)
  • Cape Tribulation
  • Sunburn
  • “the shits” (can mean many things depending on your inflection or state of inebriation)
  • Kangaroo x 2
  • Duck-billed platypus
  • Emu
  • Wallaby
  • Home x 3 (2 residents and an ex-pat)
  • Shrimp on the barbie (clearly a better tourism slogan than the more recent one which was “Where the bloody hell are you” – I think it lost something in the translation)
  • rugged, individual or rugged individual (we certainly like to see ourselves and our country this way)

Thanks for playing along everyone.

For the record the first thing that comes to mind whenever I think of Australia is “The Lucky Country”. It’s the title of a 1964 book by Donald Horne in which he argued that Australia was kind of lazy and lacking in motivation. He said that other countries were inventing things and innovating and all that neat stuff while Australia just took advantage of timing. But I say ‘nuts’ to Horne. We’ve invented things, we’ve had social innovations (my home state was the first in the world to grant women universal suffrage concurrently with the right to stand for election in 1894) (New Zealand only did the first half of that one year earlier). And if we haven’t been quite so motivated as some countries perhaps that’s what has spared us all out war on home soil. I’ve visited a good many parts of the world and loved every minute of it but I feel pretty lucky to be an Aussie and always enjoy coming home.

But enough of all that. What you really what to know is who the spinning wheel of death selected to win the books. So, the winners are:

  • BJ (who won Garry Disher’s The Dragon Man)
  • Dorte of D J’s Krimiblog (who won Clare Langley-Hawthorne’s The Consequences of Sin) and
  • Kerrie of Mysteries in Paradise (who also won Clare Langley-Hawthorne’s The Consequences of Sin)

There’s an extra copy of The Consequences of Sin thanks to the delightful Clare Langley-Hawthorne who signed and sent it to me before heading to the wilds of Oregon for a camping trip.

All of the winners have been notified by email and as soon as they send me their postal address I’ll put the books on a boat (or not, in the case of Kerrie who lives right here).

Congratulations to the winners, thanks to all the rest of you and there’ll be more great Aussie books to give away on 1 October so do come back then.

Agatha And Me

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Thanks to Kerrie from Mysteries in Paradise for hosting a blog tour to celebrate Christie Week 2009 and for allowing me to participate. I feel quite privileged to be in the company of such an array of blogging Christie fans.

By the time I hit 10 years of age I had run out of the meagre offerings of children’s books our local library had to offer. My mother decreed that, among a few select authors, Agatha Christie’s novels would be suitable for my young eyes. At the time I thought it was a comment on my advanced maturity but in retrospect I think she hoped Christie would have enough published content to stop, for a while at least, my endless cries of “Muuuuuuum…what can I read?”. The first Christie book I was allowed to borrow (with my very own adult library card) was Death on the Nile and reading it, not to be overly dramatic, changed my life.

It was the first time I had read a book that wasn’t just a story. Of course there is a great story (more of that later) but what I remember most vividly is the way it introduced me to a whole world I’d been unaware of up until that point. At the beginning of the book, when all the characters are being introduced, they are all palpably excited by the prospect of an impending trip to exotic Egypt. The way that Christie depicted her characters’ anticipation and their subsequent adventures made me want to visit the places she talked about. From then on I became obsessed with two things: Egypt and travelling. I devoured more books, wrote my own stories, trawled encyclopedias and became a regular visitor to the Egyptian room at our State museum.

Me (L) and my friends on the balcony of the Cataract Hotel, Aswan

Me (L) and my friends on the balcony of the Cataract Hotel, Aswan

7 friends and I sailed down the Nile for a week or so on this felucca

7 friends and I sailed down the Nile for a week or so on this felucca

During my childhood our family took its limited holidays in places no more than an hour or two’s drive from home but reading this book opened my eyes to the possibility that people could travel further afield than Moana beach. After a couple of other trips to more traditional destinations I finally visited Egypt when I was in my mid-20′s. Happily, it was as exotic, mysterious and wonderful as I’d imagined. I didn’t travel in quite the same style as the people in Christie’s adventure (no staterooms on our boat) but it was a magical, memorable experience all the same.

To this day I approach each new book with a dual anticipation: that I might be entertained by the story inside and learn something new and interesting about people or places beyond my teeny suburb at the bottom (or top depending on your map) of the world. Aren’t I lucky? A hundred or more times each year I get that tingly feeling and I have Agatha Christie to thank for it. Because not just any old writer can be that inspirational.

For those who, inexplicably, haven’t read the book the story concerns Linnet Doyle, one of the richest women in England, who travels to Egypt with her husband Simon for their honeymoon. The couple’s trip is marred by constantly running into Simon’s former fiancée Jacqueline De Bellefort, who was also Linnet’s best friend but now appears to be stalking the newlyweds. The three cruise down the Nile on the Karnak: the passenger list filled out by an array of socialites, servants, mysterious strangers and, of course, the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. There is, as the title suggests, a death (followed by several more) and various minor mysteries for Poirot and his old friend Colonel Race (who is there on the trail of a spy) to unravel.

The story is intricately plotted with its beauty contained in the to-the-second timing of everyone’s movements. Like a great magician, Christie is a master of distraction and keeps all but Poirot’s little grey cells busy pondering jewel thefts and legal shenanigans while the real murderer goes undetected. The characters, all of them, are vividly depicted, leaping from the page in rich imagery that might seem like a cliché until you realise Christie is the original who countless others have imitated. And of course there is the marvellous sense of place and the exotic atmosphere that the book exudes.

Over the years I have re-read the book, watched the film ’til the tape broke (which is why I was the sole person to nominate Peter Ustinov as favourite Hercule Poirot), badgered my theatre group to stage the play (which Christie also wrote), wasted far too many hours on the hidden puzzle game and paid homage to Death on the Nile in a dozen other ways. In preparation for this blog tour I listened to a version narrated by everyone else’s favourite M Poirot, David Suchet. Although the book was first published in 1937 and despite the fact I know the story backwards it was as gripping, timeless and immersive as ever.

Thank you Agatha, it’s been a magical trip so far; as always I can’t wait for the next chapter.

Sunday Salon 2009-09-13: Week in Review

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What a week! I won’t bore you with the details, just know that Murphy’s Law ruled my life this week.

There are only 2 days left to go in the running to win my first Aussie Author Give Away so hurry and enter to win one of two great Aussie crime novels.

Don’t forget that Book Blogger Appreciation Week starts tomorrow. You should have already voted for your favourite blogs in the various award categories (and if you haven’t it’s too late now) but there are many other ways you can participate in the week’s activities and say thanks to the book bloggers that make your world a more bookish place.

This week (starting today in fact) is also Agatha Christie week.  As part of festivities Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise is hosting a Christie blog tour all week (my contribution is scheduled for tomorrow).

Books Then and Now

Regular readers will see that I haven’t reviewed a single book this week which is a rarity for me. I have actually finished two books (Ligny’s Lake and Death on the Nile) but they’re both the subject of posts which are due on specific days next week so you’ll have to wait for my opinions (how on earth will you sleep?).

I have partly-finished books all over the place, most of which I hope to finish soon. All except the one I slammed on the desk of the Nurse Ratched I came across at a local aged care facility. Thankfully it wasn’t a library book as it would have lessened the impact of my dramatic exit if I’d had to retrieve the thing.

Arrivals and Departures

pardonable liesmystery of a hansom cab

the historian the_last_breath

Again I acquired more books than I managed to rid myself of this week. These are the four books that have a new home with me (the second one along is Fergus Hume’s Mystery of a Hansom Cab and was first published in 1886 though this is a new edition). I sent 2 books off to a new home with a fellow BookMooch member.

Link Fest

…and one more thing

When major companies release new versions of their software is it too much to ask that they do bit of product testing? Apple’s new version of iTunes released this week completely screwed with smart playlists containing non-music file formats (e.g. podcasts or audiobooks). So, instead of my regular Saturday morning walk listening to my favourite podcasts I spent 2 hours scouring the web to find a workaround to the bug. I pay a ridiculous amount of money for your shiny gadgets and musical bytes precisely so that the products you release are trustworthy Apple. So lift your damned game.

Weekly Geeks 34 of 2009: On Reviewing

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I haven’t participated in Weekly Geeks often lately but this week’s exercise got me thinking about reviewing. The exercise was prompted in part by Shannon Hale’s post on book evaluation in which she discusses her preference for genuine review over quick ratings. When I first read her post I started to take issue with her in my head as I do rate the books I read. But as I thought more about the points she made I realise I share some of her opinions about what is most useful in a review. So I thought I’d tackle her questions for myself:

Do you find that the anticipation of reviewing the book has changed your reading experience?

I don’t think reviewing has changed my reading experience very much as I tend to tackle the book with the same tingly anticipation as I always have and read straight through. I don’t tend to take notes or scribble in the margins (I’ll occasionally stick a post-it on a page I think I might like to refer to but not very often).

However, reviewing has changed my after-read experience. Since I started this blog I have reviewed every book I’ve read. Rather than placing a just finished book on my shelves and immediately picking up the next one I spend an hour or two thinking about the book I’ve just read and examining my reaction to it so I can write a useful review. Introducing this discipline has provided me with a better recall of the books I’ve read and a clearer overall picture of what I’m reading and why I’m drawn to certain books over others.

Are you rating the book even as you read? Or do you wait until the end to sum it all up?

I wait until the end of a book to come up with a rating. In fact these days I usually don’t rate until I’ve finished writing my review. The ending of a book is such an integral part to the reading experience that it has never occurred to me to think about a rating before I’m finished.

Does knowing you’ll be reviewing it (or rating it) publicly affect which books you pick up in the first place?

No. I read what I want to read or what my various book clubs are reading for discussion.

Does the process of writing the review itself change how you felt about the book?

I think sometimes it does as it helps clarify my thoughts. I tend to react very emotionally to books (in fact I react emotionally to most things which is a very problematic way to stumble through life but that’s a topic for another day). Writing a review helps me tease out what underlies the emotional reaction (the characters? the plot? the atmosphere created? the sense of place?). I can’t recall an occasion when writing a review made me change my mind completely about a book (e.g. from love to hate) but there have been times when I’ve been writing a review and realised I didn’t just like a book, I loved it.

What is your motivation to assign a rating to a book and declare it to the world?

My primary goal for recording my thoughts about the books I read is to provide a resource for future me whose memory for books read, based on current experience, is going to be pretty flaky.

My motivation for sharing these thoughts with the world (in addition to future me) is that it is a good way to discover other people with similar tastes whom I can share recommendations and discussions with. I started by writing reviews on Good Reads but that doesn’t generate much discussion (unless you write a review of a very popular book and I don’t read very many of those) so I decided to blog (I have/have had blogs for other purposes so it seemed quite natural).

I still copy my reviews to Good Reads (as almost a backup of my blog) but I don’t post them elsewhere (e.g. Amazon) as there’s virtually no discussion generated there and that’s what I’m more interested it than just having my reviews ‘out there’.

If you review a book but don’t rate, why not? What do you feel is your role as reviewer?

I apply a rating to all the books I review. Even more than the review itself though the rating is really for me so that I can very roughly compare the enjoyment I received from each book. I have rated my books on the same sort of scale for far longer than I’ve been writing reviews and over time this has provided me with guidance on what books, authors, genres etc I am likely to enjoy. I honestly don’t see how other people could get too much value out of my rating as it is quite subjective and can mean little to them.

I see my role as a reviewer as declaring what I liked and didn’t like about a book or what worked and didn’t work for me. I tend to look at certain things for each book like the way the characters are drawn and depicted, whether the book offers a sense of place and how well the plot holds together as well as the ‘gut reaction’ I have to the book. All of this is to attempt to explain my love/hate/meh reaction to each book. I think (hope) this is more useful to readers of the review in helping them decide if the book is something they might like to read than basic ‘loved it’ or ‘hated it’ reviews or even a simple rating.

In short…

Ms Hale says that the reader is just as important a part of the reading experience as the book and I agree wholeheartedly. I know that my reactions to books apply only to me so don’t particularly try to be objective when reviewing. I tease out the things I reacted to and leave it to the review reader to determine if these things are likely to be things they’ll enjoy or not.

Sunday Salon 6 Sept 2009 – Week in Review

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This has been a fun week for me as I launched this blog’s first giveaway known as the Aussie Author Give Away. Each month I’m giving away a couple of books by Australian crime fiction authors to share the great stuff produced by Australian writers (and also because I could do with a few less books on my shelves).

The inaugural giveaway provides the opportunity to win a copy of either The Consequences of Sin by Clare Langley-Hawthorne (a thoroughly delightful historical mystery set in Edwardian England) or The Dragon Man by Garry Disher (a top notch police procedural set in present day rural Victoria during a typical Aussie summer).

The Internet being a sometimes wondrous thing I was contacted by Clare to offer a signed copy of her book to give away on top of the pre-loved book I was already offering so there are now two copies of that one to win. Read the rules and leave your entry here by 15 September.

While I’m in competition mode I should also point out that Craig over at Crime Watch is offering you the chance to win the book of your choice by a New Zealand crime fiction writer. You’ll soon have no excuse not to have read something by an antipodean crime writer.

Books then and now

Reading wasn’t quite so much fun this week. It started wonderfully with Phillip Gwynne’s The Build Up (I’m still yammering about that one to friends) but after that I got a bit stuck when I started a big brick of a thing: Jo Nesbo’s The Redbreast (614 pages!). I’m not marking the book as a DNF because my lack of concentration wasn’t really the book’s fault and I’ll get back to it when life settles down a bit. However, I put it aside for a bit of comfort reading instead and read Carolyn Hart’s Dead Days of Summer and Dick Francis’ Silks.

I’m still listening to and enjoying Death on the Nile narrated by David Suchet in preparation for Agatha Christie week (starting September 13).

My current print book is a 1970′s Australian mystery I picked up from the library called Ligny’s Lake by S H Courtier. In one of those strange moments that small-ish cities can throw at you the copy I borrowed had a bookplate in the front with hand-writing I recognised. My best friend’s mum had given the book to her sister 15 odd years ago and she had donated it to the library some years later. I do love the journeys books take through the world.

Arrivals and Departures

10 short stories

I’ve acquired fewer books this week although I did buy one. I justified that because it was one of the books promoted by the Australian Books Alive campaign which is an annual event designed to engender an interest in books and reading. Not that I need my interest engendered any further but I feel I ought to support such a worthy goal. Besides I couldn’t resist the pull of the free book written especially for the campaign which you can only receive if you buy one of the featured books. So, I bought one book, got one book for free and had two mooched books arrive on my doorstep. I didn’t manage to send off a single book :(

Link Fest

  • The Director of literature for the Australian Council for the Arts, Susan Hayes, wrote in our national newspaper this week that she thinks the paper book as we know it will disappear within the next 10 years. Although I disagree with her time frame the article makes some good points and has prompted some comment. There’s no doubt that publishing is changing although I do wish people would stop making comparisons between e-books and e-music. It’s a completely different thing.
  • Criminal Brief had a fun post about how to tell what kind of crime or mystery novel you are in based on the ending. As well as being funny it does a good job of explaining all the different sub genres (thanks to BVLawson on Twitter for the link).
  • Maxine at Petrona wrote a thought provoking post about where she draws the line in the sand as far as gruesomeness and violence in crime fiction, especially as it relates to women, are concerned. I haven’t left a comment yet because my thoughts are not particularly coherent on the matter but it is a subject I find myself contemplating more and more these days. I haven’t had problems with the same books that Maxine mentions but there are different books and series that I’ve stopped reading due to their particularly nasty violence.

…And one more thing

There’s just time for a short rant before I finish up. To those who think you can force me to go to your site to read your content (either because your ‘blog’ has no RSS feed or you only push teasers to your feed) you can’t. Force me that is. It suits me to read in a single place via my news gathering client of choice and web 2.0 allows me that freedom. I’m not giving that up just so you get more site traffic. Whatever you have to say is lost on me.

Oh and happy father’s day, Dad. Dad1Lunch will be ready when you get here.