Rehabilitation of a Reader (part 3) Boneyard Reviews

Dark Matter By Blake Crouch

Having a conversation with a friend, telling him about my journey to become a reader again, he suggested that I should try Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. He is the person I bounce my ideas off of for books I’m going to write. He thought that my book, Losing Grip, sounded like Dark Matter. Dark Matter deals with multiverses, and mine, with dreams and parallel worlds. Okay, I’ll give it a whirl. 

This was a chilling experience because our styles are so close in the way we write. In fact, I have incorporated some techniques he uses in my own writing. Blake does write with fluff—no bloat here. I love it. His fast paced writing kept me wanting to return, a real page turning. I set aside 2 hours in the morning to read, I found myself reading at night and in the middle of the day, whenever I have a sliver of time. Very compelling. I found an author I love. I can’t wait to dig into more of his works. In fact, I'm going to try to dig up his Pine Trilogy next.

I’m going to have to create a new category—Highly Recommended. This guy makes me want to read. Yes!!        

Boneyard 5, No Recommendation 2, Recommend 3, Highly Recommend 1

Caught Stealing by Charlie Huston.

I found this one at a used bookstore. The writing is different from what I’ve come across so far; told entirely in the first person with ‘—’ en dashes used for dialogue; I’ve never seen that before. As I journey down this road, I’m starting to understand that normal grammar rules don’t matter with fiction. This book is going to be a major motion picture. 

I read the reviews that used terms like “brutal”, “visceral”, “edgy”.  I very much enjoyed this book. It had a Hitchcock feel of a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. The story starts out with a guy spiraling out of control and then he has one of his livers removed due to alcohol abuse. Okay, a dude on a self destructive path and that all changes when a neighbor needs to leave and he wants to watch his cat. 

Not clear what the neighbor was into, but people are after him. When they started pulling out the staples that were there from the operation, I started to think, the motivation of this pain is real thin and do I really want to continue. The answer is, no. It’s a short book, 249 pages, and I did give a good amount of consideration to continuing, but decided to move on. To the boneyard. 

Boneyard 6, No Recommendation 2, Recommend 3, Highly Recommend 1

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

This one is totally on me. Because I like Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter so much, I did a Gemini search for authors like him. Andy Weir came up and one thing stated about him is that he had humor. This is so true. I had a small list of 12 or so authors that were compiled by Gemini. I was running around town, trying to find these books by these authors and I found about 8 of them, but reading the first few pages, I could tell, they weren’t for me. 

Stepping into Barnes and Noble, Andy’s book was being featured. I grabbed it and read the first few pages, and took it home. I should have read the description on the back cover. The book was funny, and slow with lots of science. Not that I can’t read about science and understand it, I just find it boring. I skipped a little and it didn’t change. I flipped to the end, and what was to be the climax, and it seemed to dribble to something not very exciting. It was all about saving mankind on the planet earth; this is not a very compelling storyline for me. If I had only read the back cover I could have saved myself time and twenty bucks. Because this was my error, I will leave it with no recommendation. Although, if you're into saving mankind, lots of science, I think you’ll like it. Very well written.

Boneyard 6, No Recommendation 3, Recommend 3, Highly Recommend 1

Good Behavior by Blake Crouch

Back to Blake. (that could be the title of a TV show) This is one of his early works. 3 novellas center around the character Letty Dobesh. The Pain of Others, Sunset Key, Grab. I had seen the TV series that was spawned from these short stories and enjoyed it very much; I had no idea who Blake Crouch was at the time. As the stories progress, you see his writing style evolved into what is on display in Dark Matter. There are also thoughts by him on the series and the character he’s created. I loved the first two, The Pain of Others and Sunset Key. Grab is about a heist in Vegas, it’s good, but not that intriguing as she’s working with many people to pull off the heist. I think the intriguing thing about this character is works alone or with one other person. That being said, well worth your time. It’s fast paced and a quick read. 

Recommended 

Boneyard 6, No Recommendation 3, Recommend 4, Highly Recommend 1

No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy is a name floated around the Internet that seems to be a polarizing figure; some love him, others hate him. Not too many in between. I was warned about his writing style, yet it was still a bit to get used to. He doesn't seem to have much use for comas, apostrophes, dialogue tags, as well, differentiating spoken words and internal dialogue. In descriptions, every-once-and-while, there will be a coma—this kind of threw me. His writing is more like a dump—he puts a lot on the reader—you figure it out. There are entire chapters of internal dialogue (italics) but at times it looks like dialogue between two people—again, you figure it out. Dialogue, in my opinion, is his weak suit; it’s redundant, and most of the time, about stupid shit. It tries hard to be philosophical, as it drones on, and on about life and God, good and bad, like someone that doesn't know when to end the scene. I guess that's where his fans come from—the philosophical part. The action is very good and the core story is very compelling, if it wasn’t I would have sent it to the boneyard. I had seen the movie, and the YouTube videos attempting to explain the ending scene in the movie, so I thought reading it might help—it didn’t. The ending dribbles to the end and is unsatisfying. Halfway through, I did get used to his writing style but in the end, the book, and Cormac McCarty left me scratching my head. What's the fuss all about? Many YouTubers have it on their top ten books. I don’t know why? I’ve even seen him described as one of the greatest American fiction writers. Again, I don’t know why? I did get to the end, so that’s something. I come away with a couple of thoughts; one, I don’t ever want to read another Cormac McCarty book. Two, I can’t recommend this work. Am I happy I read it? Not really; I wish I had spent the time reading something else.  

No Recommendation

Boneyard 6, No Recommendation 4, Recommend 4, Highly Recommend 1