Another Spybrary podcast interview of mine is unleashed on the world. It’s with David McCloskey-recommended writer Robert McCaw, about his Washington molehunt book Traitors. Get it from your usual podcast source, or the link’s here. #readingcommunity #books #BookSky
Read: The Predicament by William Boyd 📚I’ve loved Boyd’s standalones for years and this Greene-ish spy series either Gabriel Drax isn’t hitting the spot for me. Thin characters, clunky prose, sluggish pace. #BookSky #books #readingcommunity
Read: Tamed by Alice Roberts 📚Pitched as pop anthropology humans domesticating animals and plant, emphasis on pre-history. Engagingly written but gets a bit repetitive. One of those ‘Would be better as a podcast’ books. #BooksSky #books #readingcommunity
Read: Let it bleed by n/a 📚Rebus investigates high level corruption in Edinburgh. Again. It would be easy to dismiss it as just more Rankin content, except Rankin content is consistently very very very good. I’ll even forgive the Stones reference. #BookSky #books #readingcommunity
Read: The alienist by Caleb Carr 📚Cracking atmospheric period NYC serial killer procedural with a walk on part for Theodore Roosevelt. #BookSky #readingcommunity #books
Read: The Absinthe Forger by Evan Rail 📚One of those niche histories about something obscure. In this case, fake absinthe from pre-1915 when most of Europe banned it in a moral panic. Happily quirky, slight, and a bit hazy, like an afternoon drinking in the sun. #BookSky #books #readingcommunity
I interviewed Jinwoo Park about his spy novel, The Oxford Soju Club, for the Spybrary podcast, and it’s finally dropped, or posted or up or whatever it is podcasts do. #readingcommunity #books #BookSky
Gripping and atmospheric, Harry’s Game-esque, but the realism is undermined by weird solecisms and a largely unnecessary infodump at the end.
Catholic RUC detective sergeant Duffy thinks he might be on the trail of Northern Ireland’s first unaligned serial killer (several people point out that it’s only the first because psychopaths in Ulster could just join whichever bunch of paramilitaries they preferred and have sectarian cover for all the killing they could desire) - but The Troubles won’t stay out of it. Nobody quite says ‘are you a Catholic serial killer or a Protestant serial killer?’ although it gets close.
It’s palpably in the real world - the Maze hunger strikes, Gerry Adams, Thatcher, pop bands are the background and the plot hinges on one other very real part of The Troubles - but some sloppiness unsuspends disbelief in a story that tries to rely on realism: nobody wore sweatpants in 1981 in the UK, we had tracksuit bottoms or possibly ski pants, skunk didn’t arrive till ten years later, and some bits of dialogue are anachronistic, for example.
The homophobia does ring true, and it’s relevant to the story, not just dropped in for colour. Police top brass snigger about ‘benders’ in the same way that my friends and I used to. We were schoolboys rather than senior RUC officers though, which makes a big difference.
Distracting enough, but slapdash about its world while trying to insist it’s real.
Read: Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway 📚Le Carre’s son picks his father’s Smiley/Karla rivalry. Superb. Enough to make me reconsider my proscription on works that fills in holes in the canonical texts. #booksky #sky #readingcommunity
Read: Rothstein by David Pietrusza 📚
This book is a huge achievement. It takes a high-living New York grifter who got shot by a victim of one of his ripoffs and makes a dull plodding story of it.
Arthur Rothstein was a fixer, gambler and scammer in early 20th century New York, lurching between poker games with showbiz impresarios, buying race courses, drug running, arguments with Hearst, flings with showgirls, a rift with his Orthodox Jew family, to hanging round on streetcorners in the early hours to shark homeless losers. He’s apparently the model for Fitzgerald’s Gatsby.
It’s pitched as ‘the life and times of the criminal genius who fixed the World Series’ but that’s about three chapters, and they’re all about who might’ve met whom in what New York hotel room, what they might’ve said, and how they subsequently screwed each other over. That sounds fascinating but it’s all written in such plodding unsuspenseful prose that any sense of forward movement is lost.
Rather than digging into the person, the narrative is drowned in detail - lists of semi-relevant characters, details of court cases that don’t really go anywhere. Pietrusza doesn’t corrall the many many facts into a coherent story, and I ran out of patience.
There’s a reason this has been punted as a beach-read, and I can see why it’s sold so well. It presses all the right buttons, and the prose style is closer to your common or garden woman-in-danger tropey psychological thriller than literary. That’s not a bad thing at all as literary style is often annoying and wanky, but it does mean that the book aquaplanes over the inner world of characters rather going any deeper. It’s quite happy with the therapy speak explanation - exactly what the main character’s audience is getting from this is constricted to her snarky comments about them, rather than pushing into anything deeper, or even wider. It’s a limitation of having a superficial first person narrator.
It sticks to the convention of a last act twist too, though it’s been one of the candidates for the ending right from the start, and I didn’t really buy it.
Read: Calling by Inger Ash Wolfe 📚Scandinoir in central Ontario. Scanadia-noir? Jaded small town detective catches a religious nutjob serial killer. Thoughtful and atmospheric. #booksky #books #readingcommunity
Read: Next of Kin by Kia Abdullah 📚Aunt kills toddler nephew. It’s and accident. Or is it? Kinda courtroom, kinda psychological, thriller. Fast, tropey read, which is not a bad thing. #booksky #books #readingcommunity
Read: The Age of Wonder by Holmes, Richard 📚British scientists and breakthroughs in the wider culture where they happened, from about 1760 to 1830. Sounds pedestrian but it’s rivetting storytelling. #books #readingcommunity #booksky
Read: Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 📚Gleefully weird and Vonneguts gonna Vonnegut. He seems to slip under the ‘problematic’ radar with some of his language. He’s using it to making a point, but that doesn’t always stop the Bad Word Police. So it goes. #books #readingcommunity #booksky
Read: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 📚Very, very belatedly read this and remembered how weird and good Vonnegut is. Grim, black humour and immensely readable. So it goes. #books #readingcommunity #booksky
Read: Agent Sniper by Tim Tate 📚Real life Zelig-esque Polish spy/defector (and massive fantasist) in the Cold War, clearly written and researched. A good read.#booksky #books #reading
Read: Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum 📚 on audiobook, which came out two years ago. So much of what @anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu says about countries run by greedy narcissistic bullies could now be said about the US. #booksky #books #reading
Read: Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark 📚 One of those ‘how autobiographical is this?’ games about a struggling 1940s writer. Snarky and funny and far more tricksy than I expected. #reading #books #booksky
Read: The Pretender by Jo Harkin 📚Peasant Pretender puppeteered by powerful Plantagenet proponents. Wolf Hall minus the portentousness. #booksky #reading #books
Read: London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe 📚As in his ‘Say Nothing’, Keefe clearly disentangles a lot of complicated world views and confabulations to illuminate a particular world, though the overarching story isn’t as sharply defined. #reading #books #booksky
Read: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt 📚Cormac McCarthy with a sense of humour and optimism, and also an editor, and all the more likeable for it. #books #reading #booksky
Read: Last One Out A Novel by Jane Harper 📚Her usual territory: resident returns to Australian small town and insular relationships (often between 3 male friends) which led to a tragedy a few years before. Realistic characters, well observed interactions, but nothing new. #booksky #reading #books
Read: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe 📚Fantastically researched especially the bits the TV series smoothed over. You do wonder exactly why Adams hasn’t sued over the allegations it makes about him. #books #booksky #readingcommunity
Read: Pearl by Siân Hughes 📚Hughes is an award winning poet, and it shows, in a good way as her narator writes intensely and immersively about her mother’s death. As someone who felt no cause to grieve my own mother’s death, it was… informative. #books #booksky #readingcommunity