To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a story of contradictions, which perhaps explains why I’ve been having trouble getting started on this review. I liked this novel, but I’m sort of at a loss to explain what I liked about it. Maybe it’s the darkly comic tone of the novel, or the interplay of characters. But mostly I think it’s because it raises a bunch of philosophical questions that it doesn’t really ever answer, and I’m a sucker for that. (Note, if that […]
Tough Guys, Tough Talk, and Treasure
I’m a fan of film noir. For my money, it doesn’t get much better than Fred MacMurray “Hey, Baby”-ing Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or Humphrey Bogart talking tough in The Maltese Falcon. But even though I’m a fan of the detective film and I love to read, I had yet to pick up anything by Dashiell Hammett, the master of the hard-boiled detective novel. Time to remedy that, I decided. The Maltese Falcon is the story of archetypal detective Sam Spade who, along with […]
Marketing Genius or Load of Rich Creamery Butter?
Have you ever been talking with a group of friends and the subject of marketing comes up? Inevitably, at least one person will make the claim that marketing “doesn’t work” on him. I suppose this claim goes along with having a great sense of humor and impeccable taste as the most common delusions of the human species. I’ve just never understood why people make it a point of pride to claim that they are impervious to marketing efforts, as if that makes a person smarter […]
Amusing, but not the Moore I’d recommend for first-time readers
I’m kind of all over the place in the world of Christopher Moore. He’s published fourteen novels to date, and as of a month ago I had read twelve of them. But for some reason I’m just now getting to Coyote Blue, Moore’s second published novel. Coyote Blue tells the story of Sam Hunter, a confident insurance salesman in California who, on the surface, has everything he could want. He’s a successful salesman precisely because he is able to adapt his persona to whatever would […]
Troubling on so many levels
I’ve read Gillian Flynn’s body of work in reverse. I first became aware of her when everyone was reading Gone Girl, so I jumped on the bandwagon and tore through that novel like the suspenseful page-turner that it is. Next I read Dark Places, and in some ways I liked it even more, with its dark, In Cold Blood feel, though at times I felt like Flynn piled on the disfunction a bit too heavily. “How much more can this family go through?” I remember […]
Shakespeare + Monsters + Dick Jokes = Christopher Moore
As I’ve mentioned before, I love Christopher Moore for his ability to make me forget the troubles of the world. If he has to do that by making me laugh at the most sophomoric humor imaginable, so be it. With Serpent of Venice, though, Moore surpasses this admittedly low bar by adding two other components that I dearly love: Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe. At a book signing I attended, Moore explained that he got the idea for setting a monster story in Venice while […]