Books of the Week, One Day Late!

I award you one million and thirty two apologies for bringing Books of the Week to ya’ll one day late, but I assume you all were too busy watching the Super Bowl yesterday, what with Kate Perry doing handstands on lions and all.

Anyhoo, without further adieu, here are your books of the week.

1) Shovel Ready – Adam Sternbergh (For those who like real gritty, semi-post-apocalyptic sci-fi)

This may have been my favorite book of the week, and rightly so. Shovel Ready has this dirty, grimy feel like a layer of crust that gets under your fingernails and it doesn’t matter how long you scrub and scrape, you can’t get it out. It just keeps getting packed in there. If you’re like me, you’ll like that; if not, then maybe not.

The main character Spademan was a garbageman. He still is, but after a dirty bomb goes off in Times Center New York, he is taking out a different sort of garbage. A gun for higher with an interesting code of ethics that gets him deep into the trash.

What I really loved about this story was Spademan’s voice throughout the story. It’s crisp, unique, and catchy. It portrays the smarmy world of New York perfectly. The story itself is interesting with the introduction of a few new technologies and the role they will play in shaping the world to come.

Beware, there are no speech tags or quotations marks throughout the story. This has become an increasingly popular stylistic choice and, while I understand the purposes behind it, I have to admit, I dislike it as a whole. It bungles up certain passages, making it hard to keep track of who is saying what. The only book in recent memory that has done the no speech tag/quotations really well was Fiend by Peter Stenson. And that was in large part because the main character is a meth-head and it adds to the atmosphere of never knowing what’s being said outloud and what’s being thought/hallucinated.

Despite this, Shovel Ready was good, real good. The pleasure of my week, in fact. Which brings me to…

2) The Girl With All The Gifts – M.R Carey (For those who like… this genre. You’ll see what I mean.)

FAIR WARNING! SEMI-SPOILER ALERT!

I’ve issued a semi-spoiler alert because I think you really need to know what I’m about to tell you; truly, I wish somebody had told me and I would have avoided this book like the plague (<–a  pun, but you don’t get it…yet. Trust me, though, it’s funny.)

Okay, I’m gonna copy/paste the Amazon blurb for The Girl With All The Gifts and then let’s talk about a book that so royally pissed me off that I would be inclined to give it 2 stars simply for the manipulative blurb.

NOT EVERY GIFT IS A BLESSING

MELANIE is a very special girl. Dr. Caldwell calls her “our little genius.”

Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant keeps his gun pointed at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don’t like her. She jokes that she won’t bite, but they don’t laugh.

The Girl With All The Gifts has been on a lot of awards lists for the year so I figured I should check it out and see what all the fuss is about. The blurb sounded great, and from the way it was written, made me think I would be getting into a Professor X/Xmen, weird government facility for gifted children.

Nope, nope, nope.

Here’s the big twist, and I’ll be honest, I don’t feel even remotely bad revealing this because the astute reader will figure it out in the first half of the first chapter, whereas the slow readers will be straight up told what’s happening in the third chapter. Which is too early to qualify as a plot twist and therefore I don’t understand why they don’t just come out and say it in the product description: the little girl with all the gifts? She’s a zombie.

That’s the twist. This is a zombie survival, post-apocalyptic book, which is both not what I expected going into the book, AND, a genre I really don’t enjoy. Therefore, I felt bamboozled into reading what, after the first six or so chapters, becomes a run of the mill, dodge the zombies, don;t get eaten, admittedly well-written, emotional story.

This pisses me off, a lot. The world described in the blurb only exists for the first handful of chapters which accounts for maybe ten percent of the story, after which, the main characters are running for their lives. Why they would focus on the beginning of the story in the product description is a mystery because it accounts for so little of the story overall.

Okay, now don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate zombie books. Again, as mentioned earlier in this post, Fiend by Peter Stenson, is a great zombie book (probably my favorite ever) because it had a unique premise and great delivery. The Girl With All The Gifts had a unique premise, great delivery, but absolutely bull-shit marketing. Seriously, the girls only gift is that she’s a zombie and therefore doesn’t get eaten by other zombies. Not much of a gift, and totally misleading in relation to the title.

Anyways, if you like zombie books, you’ll probably really love this, because it was actually a good book in a lot of respects. The writing is crisp, inventive, with an emotional punch that can leave you gasping for air. I just think the reader deserves to know what they’re in for heading into it.

Consider yourself warned.

3. The Stars My Destination – Alfred Besser (For those who like classic sci-fi with hateable protagonists, great writing and an interesting plot)

The Stars My Destination is on all sorts of top 100 sci-fi lists of all time, and rightfully so. I thoroughly enjoyed this story, and would top my list of favorite books of the week if this week hadn’t had so many strong contenders.

Gully Foyle is an absolutely horrible main character, and yet Alfred Bester makes him remarkably engaging. You can’t help but be sucked into his gravitational pull of horrible, like staring transfixed at a train wreck in progress. You simply can’t pull yourself away. It’s great.

There is some interesting technological devices at place in The Stars, but what I think is so great about these is that Alfred Bester really spends a lot of time considering how these technologies will shape the world of tomorrow (which at it’s core, in my opinion, is what sci-fi exists to do). Shiny toys are nice, don’t get me wrong, but those toys have an effect on society, and it’s great when authors extrapolate those effects out to their natural, and sometimes unnatural, conclusion.

4) Fuzzy Nation – John Scalzi (For those who like accessible sci-fi with great characterization and a heart warming (sometimes even wrenching) story)

This is right up there with The Old Man’s War as one of my favorite Scalzi books. Surprisingly, it was also one of his firsts. He does something interesting with this book, in that he takes an old short story and reworks/reboots it with 21st century sensibilities.

Now, one of my complaints is that the characters throughout the book are all jerks. They snipe and pick at each other which makes for great banter, but also it makes for unlikable characters. Scalzi does a good job of redeeming them, but this isn’t like The Stars My Destination where you know the main character is an asshole through and through and therefore kind of forgive him. In Fuzzy Nation Scalzi wants you to think his characters are basically good and that they are all covering for it by being dicks. Somehow this makes them less likable.

The rabid dog can’t be blamed for biting somebody, the grown man who knows better, can. Don’t know if that makes any sense, but in my mind it does.

Anyways, with that one nit-pick aside, Fuzzy Nation is pretty great and is up there as my second favorite book of the week. If you like more or less light hearted science fiction, then you’ll dig this, I think.

Anthony