Pegasus In Space (read 12/7/11) Avoid

I love science fiction, and bad science fiction makes me very irritable.  Anne McCaffrey has managed to irritate me very much indeed.  It is doubly irritating because she has been so highly recommended by so many for so long and there has been so much high praise written about her after her recent death, but, in my opinion, it is all completely undeserved.  Her writing is terrible, her plots are juvenile, her characters are childish and the internal consistency is nonexistent.

If you value good writing, well conceived story lines, do not bother with the writings of Anne McCaffrey.

Pagan Babies (read 11/1/11) Meh

Elmore Leonard has been a popular crime fiction and suspense writer for quite some time but this is the first novel of his that I’ve read since some time in the early 1980s. I wasn’t particularly impressed with him then and this novel didn’t change my opinion. He certainly writes better than many popular authors, he is able to maintain internal consistency, but at no point does he make me care.

Every Demon Has His Day (read 10/26/11) Recommended

This was a random pick from the library shelf that turned out to be terrific! This well-written, humorous, fast-paced story about a woman who discovers she’s a prophet who has to save the world by preventing Satan from fathering the anti-Christ after her husband is killed by a demon and everyone thinks she killed him. Reminiscent of Christopher Moore.

The only reason I gave Lockwood a B+ instead of an A was the lame final chapter.

Can’t Teach An Old Demon New Tricks (read 11/9/11) Recommended

This is a sequel to Every Demon Has His Day and again Lockwood does a good job although, as before, she doesn’t know when to put down the pen. The maudlin sappiness of the last chapter is unfortunately. My only other complaint is Lockwood dumbing-down Frank, a pug in the first book and a novice angel in this one.

Isle of Dogs (read 10/20/11) AVOID

Wow, does Patricia Cornwell have something really big she’s using to blackmail someone at Putnam to get them to publish her books? One reviewer at Amazon wonders whether “we have a case of an imperious, arrogant author who has cheesed off her publishers enough that they’re letting her readers see what she’s really like?”

This novel is supposed to have been a change for Cornwell from serial killer/suspense to what the San Francisco Examiner describes as “the world of black humor.” They were a little too generous in suggesting that she “nearly conquers it,” but Carl Hiaasen doesn’t need to move over because Cornwell won’t be keeping him company. Cornwell writes at about the level of a fifth-grader and wouldn’t recognize humor if it ran her over.

Let me give you an example:

“I thought we were doing our best to play down this pirate business,” the governor seemed to remember. ["Seemed to remember"? WTF?] “Didn’t I order Superintendent Hammer not to release any statements to the press about anything without our approving it first?” [Could dialogue be any more awkward?]

“You certainly did. And so far, we’re managing to keep the sensational details out of the media.”

“You don’t suppose Trooper Truth [give me a fucking break] intends to keep blabbing about our pirate problem on the Internet, do you?”

“Yes, sir, “Trader replied as if he knew this for a fact. “We can rest assured his website is going to open a can of worms, because by all appearances, it’s an inside job and I fear your administration could be blamed if things really get ugly.”

“You might be right. I get blamed for most things,” the governor confessed as his stomach rumbled and his intestines lurched into activity like worms suddenly exposed to daylight. He wished Trader had not mentioned a can of worms.

Cornwell received money for writing that crap. There truly is no justice.

Governor Crimm picked up his nineteenth-century magnifying glass, which was English and made of ivory. Peering through the lens, he made out enough of the essay’s contents to get interested and slightly offended.

Really, Putnam?

The only mystery here is how this crap got published.

Boo Who (read 10/1/11) Meh

It’s not the most terrible book in the world, and if you are trapped on an airplane with nothing else to read you wouldn’t necessarily be trying to open the emergency exit to escape, but with so many better reads available I threw this book aside.

This is apparently the second in a series. If this is what WaterBrook Press considers worthy of publication, I’d hate to see what they reject.

I’ve seen the movie Catch-22 but I’ve never read the book.  After reading this review, I’ve put it on my short list.

Pirates of the Universe (read 9/22/11) recommended

Well, when I say “recommended” …

This was a pretty disappointing read, although I did finish it. At the time Mr. Bisson wrote this novel, he had some pretty serious issues with women. Only men could be space rangers, all the women were either sex objects or drudges. It’s too bad because the premise was pretty good. It’s set an unspecified time but presumably several hundred years in the future. Very, very large “creatures” appear near the moon periodically, and their “skin,” peeled off by rangers in space ships, is used as a source of energy. Earth no longer has oil or gas as it was all destroyed by an organism created to clean up spills.

In addition to Bisson’s disrespect for women, there were consistency and concept issues which were often annoying. Bisson is also the author of The Fifth Element.

Sherman Alexie is a Spokane Indian from Wellpinit, Washington, who is both a poet and a novelist.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (read 9/17/11) Recommended

I knew I had to read this collection of short stories after seeing a Youtube video of a scene with Victor and Thomas Builds-the-Fire from the movie adaptation (Smoke Signals). The written stories did not disappoint.

Most of the stories are told first-person through Victor Joseph, a Spokane Indian. All of them are about life on the reservation and the difficulties of being an Indian in a white man’s world.

I am adding Banville/Black to my list after reading a recommendation for his crime novel Christine Falls while grazing the internets this morning.

According to Wikipedia, “Banville is known for his precise, cold, forensic prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators.”

Reginald Hill is a contemporary English crime writer, awarded the Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement in 1995.

Death Comes For The Fat Man (read 8/20/11) Recommended

This is Hill’s 22nd crime novel featuring Yorkshire detectives Andrew Dalziel, Peter Pascoe and Edgar Wield. I would have liked to start reading this series with the first book, but my neighborhood library has a limited selection and, not knowing whether it would be worth the wait to order the first (A Clubbable Woman), I plunged in. If you are a fan of crime fiction and enjoy a good series, I can tell you, if your library has to order it from elsewhere in the system, it will be worth the wait to be able to begin at the beginning. Hill is definitely one of the better crime fiction writers.

Dialogues of the Dead (read 9/3/11) Recommended

Hill does a great job creating compelling characters and sustaining the reader’s interest throughout. I highly recommend this novel for its intelligence.

Pictures of Perfection (read 9/30/11) Recommended

A Dalziel and Pascoe mystery in which appearances can be deceiving.

Good Morning Midnight (read 10/6/11) Recommended

Dalziel and Pascoe investigate a suicide done in such a way as to throw suspicion of murder on the “wicked stepmother” and uncover hints of an international arms conspiracy.

The Woodcutter (read 11/13/11) Meh

I actually haven’t finished reading this one yet and I wouldn’t if I had anything else on my table. It’s a stand-alone story about a guy who leaves home as a young man to seek his fortune so that he can win the hand of his true love. The source of his fortune is the big mystery. When he’s been happily married for about 16 years, he’s convicted of fraud and pedophilia. The story really starts when he’s in prison and we learn his past through his conversations with his psychiatrist. The psychiatrist character is badly drawn and really annoying. I’m in a section now where that character is not involved but I dread her reappearance. I’ll keep reading until the library gets the books I’ve ordered but I doubt I’ll finish this.