Margaret Atwood

Author Rating: D

The Handmaid’s Tale (listened to audiobook read by Claire Danes, March 2017; not recommended)

This will be an unpopular opinion but this book is terrible. It’s boring. Twenty-five chapters in and I want to slap the main character, Offred. Just eat the fucking toast already.

I do not understand why this novel is recommended so glowingly by so many. Has anyone actually read it since they were 14, in 1985?  I don’t believe in the dull, gray world, and I have been given no reason to care about any of the characters, least of all the main character, Offred, who is as appealing as gray washwater.

It’s hard to find really good speculative fiction. This doesn’t even rise to the level of passable.   Claire Danes might be a good reader. It’s hard to say given how unremittingly dreary and uninspired this particular book is.

 

Gore Vidal

Author Rating: C

1876 (read 3/24/2013) Not recommended

“Gore Vidal is a great writer.” You’ve heard that, right? If the rest of his works are of this caliber, he’s highly overrated. I threw it down after getting 1/3 of the way through. Nothing happens! A guy and his widowed daughter get off a boat in New York, they stay in a fancy hotel while he looks for work as a writer. Time goes by and he gets jobs, but we never see anything happen. Every other sentence is “I’m just like Rip Van Winkle, oh, I shouldn’t say that, it’s boring.” I was hoping to learn something about American history while being entertained but I was neither entertained nor enlightened.

 

Raymond Carver

Author Rating: C

Where I’m Calling From (read 4/14/2013) Meh

I wanted to like this, I really did. I was supposed to like this, I really was. While I found the writing engaging, the stories left me feeling that I neither liked nor cared about any of the characters.

 

Frederik Pohl

Author Rating: C

All The Lives He Led (read 7/27/12) Meh

I haven’t finished reading this book yet, and I’m not sure I will finish it. Pohl is yet another example of a writer who is far more popular than the quality of the writing can possibly justify. Here’s a sample paragraph:

And then when she had finished devouring her pizza, she exploratorily ran her tongue over her teeth a time or two. Unsatisfied with the result, she unwrapped a coat of ruby-red foil from something she pulled out of her bellybag and popped it in her mouth. I guess I was really enjoying watching her chew, and showing it, because she grinned and pulled out another stick of the stuff for me, this one wrapped in green foil. “Cleans your teeth,” she informed me. Maybe it did. That wasn’t why I enjoyed it so much, though. It was the taste of the gum itself, I guess, that really got my little buds tingling, fruity and flowery and, I think most of all, just a tad warmed by the flesh of Gerda Fleming.

Really? This is what passes for quality writing?

The narrator announces at the beginning of the novel that he is going to tell us about his life, but he’s not sure why or that he should. In the above paragraph, do you know what Brad Sheridan is supposed to have enjoyed? Gerda Fleming is a person you would think he would be highly suspicious of — she comes up to him out of the blue, knowing his name and background information that she shouldn’t know unless she had been talking to the dreaded Security Forces, yet he acts as though she were just some random person.

We’re at page 82 of 347, and I’m very tempted to just throw it over and start the next. The aimless wandering is really annoying. Nothing has happened except I have wasted my time watching this kid chew gum. Pohl has given me no reason whatsoever to continue with this story. He has not created characters here that operate under any pattern of discernible motivation. We’re told things but they have little to no relationship to what happens during the filler.

Nope, we’re not going to finish it. My life is simply not that long.

 

Raymond E. Feist

Author Rating: C

The Riftwar: The Messenger (read 7/24/12) Meh

This novelette published as one of five by various authors in the Legends II anthology isn’t so bad that I couldn’t finish it, but there was nothing engaging about it.

Why does there seem to be so much fantasy/science fiction that has human beings using horses for transportation and dressing like they’re living in the 15th Century yet able to build machines to provide breathable atmosphere so they can build a city on a high mountain on a planet so large they have not explored the entirety of it in 10,000 years?

This is why I won’t be bothered with Feist. To me, that’s just plain stupid. He gets a grade of C though instead of Banished, because he’s not nearly as stupid and annoying as Anne McCaffrey.

 

Robin Hobb

Author Rating: C

Realm of the Elderlings (read 7/24/12) Agnostic

This novelette published as one of five by various authors in the Legends II anthology isn’t so bad that I couldn’t be bothered to finish it, but I’m not sure that I could stand more than the 89 pages that contain this story. It’s fairly overwrought, and I can only tolerate so much of that kind of thing

I was a little surprised that this is the first entry here for Robin Hobb. I have a vague memory of having tried to read one of her full-length novels in the past and throwing it over as a bad job. As much as I would not go out of my way to read anything further of hers, I don’t think I would slit my wrists in despair if I were stuck on an airplane with nothing else to read. I wouldn’t want to test that theory, however.

 

Rene Gutteridge

Author Rating: C

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.

 

Terry Bisson

Author Rating: C

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.

 

Corson Hirschfeld

Author Rating: C

Too High (read 7/14/11) Meh

I picked this up in the library because of the cover and checked it out because the back cover blurb compared Hirschfeld favorably to Carl Hiaasen and Donald E. Westlake, the latter being one of my favorite authors. Unfortunately, Hirschfeld fails to live up to that praise. While the novel is competent to a degree, there were too many threads that can’t bear up under the weight of reality.

 

Bill Pronzini

Author Rating: C+

Deadfall (read 12/20/09) Meh

Reading this book was like examining an ancient record of a lost time — the early to mid 1980s. As I got ready to write this review, I did a search for any earlier post mentioning the author and discovered he was already on my banished list as a result of his short story in a very bad anthology of very bad mystery writers. This particular book wasn’t so awful that I stopped reading before the end, but it being relatively short was a significant factor in the decision to continue.

Apparently Pronzini wrote a series of “Nameless Detective” mysteries, this being number sixteen. Nameless is on a stakeout, waiting for some deadbeats to get home so he can repossess their car, when he hears two gunshots coming from a nearby home. He sees a figure running away and, upon entering the house, discovers the victim who he later learns is a gay man named Leonard whose wealthy brother had died falling from a cliff months earlier. Leonard’s “house mate,” who believes the two deaths are related, hires him to find the killer.

Pronzini treats homosexuals as if they are another species. He has no understanding of human sexuality. “Confirmed homosexuals couldn’t be seduced by a woman, of course.”

He is equally clueless about women, ascribing to Nameless’ girlfriend the kind of stupid responses to things that one expects from a man who sees women as a separate species as well.

What also becomes clear in reading this is how much Pronzini disapproves of pot smoking and is one of those misinformed people who insist that it is a “gateway” to heroin.

I’m giving Pronzini a C+ because, if you can ignore the cluelessness and can tolerate caricatures instead of characters, the story itself is plausible.