Let’s read a book about having sex with a dead squid. Because that happens in this book. Somehow I have an ability to pick out books like this. I suppose it’s a gift. Just something about me that makes me me.

(Squid sex is only like two pages of three hundred and fifty, but I feel it’s one of those things that sort of encapsulates what type of book a book is.)

The Sympathizer is a long book that could have been about one hundred and fifty pages shorter. It’s a book of contradictions, such as the narrator incensed about other people erasing his comrades’ proper names, ignoring the fact that he doesn’t give proper names to a bunch of people either. It’s a book where you keep thinking there’s going to be a flashback with an origin story, except that flashback never comes. There’s a lot of adjectives and description and over-writing, those stylistic quirks that other people find charming or engrossing, but which I just get annoyed with. And I got annoyed.

Repeatedly.

There’s some stuff that isn’t so bad. I appreciate the narrator tells you right away he’s a double-agent. None of this sudden-surprise-twist-ending nonsense that has become so popular. He’s a double-agent, his one friend Man is a communist, and his other friend Bon, is not. This is where the one hundred and fifty pages of completely transparent criticism of Francis Ford Coppola and Apocalypse Now could be cut (What’s the point of that sidetrack? Unnecessary. Lose it.) and replaced with something, even a sentence of why, of three close friends, one-third went to one ideology, while two-thirds went to another.

The book isn’t free of some twists, although they are obvious so I don’t know if one can call them that. I’ll say reveals instead I suppose. There’s a lot of what I call blah blah blah political discussions, as one might assume would happen at the locale in which they happen in the novel (trying to avoid spoilers I am).

I don’t know. It took me forever to read this book. I feel bad saying anything negative about it since the author clearly worked hard. So I’ll say nothing and laugh because nothing ends up being vital to the story: Nothing is less precious than a bad review.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen went on sale April 7, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. — Toni Morrison

Hence the most important question facing any young writer may well be: How often should I masturbate and when? — David Gordon

Let’s get this out of the way first: David Gordon can write. Every scene, no matter how far-fetched or ridiculous or random, feels natural. Even cliché’d ones, like getting punched in the face by a big, burly, male relative of the girl he was hitting on, feel natural. Like these are stories your buddy would tell you at a bar, if you had the sort of buddy who frequently gets punched in the face (I don’t, but I assume other people do).

So Gordon can write. He is a good writer. He is a great writer. We can probably say he is a fucking amazing writer —

— who then writes a bunch of stories about how women sleep with him, some dreams (actual zzzz ones, not aspirations), some drug trips, and, as well, a vampire because really that’s just the sort of thing that keeps happening in the books I read lately (see here and here). So we can pretty much sum up my feeling on that with my review of 10:04 by Ben Lerner: Reading about white guys getting boinked, doing drugs, and futzing about bores me.

But Gordon can write, my mind reminds me. He writes so well.

And he’s clearly written the novel (well, short story collection) he wants to read, where lots and lots and lots of women want to have sex with him, and I’ll say him for while the stories aren’t all about David Gordon, there’s a similar tonality and voice that goes through all the stories, even in the ones when David is called Larry. And the sex is about as erotic as waiting around for an airplane to de-ice, my mind answers itself back.

Some people might find planes de-icing erotic.

I feel we’re missing the point. I have twenty-nine annotations I made in my kobo on White Tiger on Snow Mountain. Twenty-eight of them are about women improbably attracted to Gordon. One is about being a writer. I suppose two, if you take the quote above since that’s less about women being attracted to Gordon than just about sex. Also, I stopped making these annotations part way through, so there are likely more.

But Gordon can write. He writes so well, my mind says again.

So good writer writing a bunch of stuff I do not care about one tiny little minute epsilon bit. So do I rank this book on the writing (5/5) or the tedious content (1/5)?

David Gordon can write. Really fucking well. Let’s just leave it at that.

White Tiger on Snow Mountain by David Gordon went on sale November 28, 2014.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I’ve figured out the Netgalley system: Get books that have been translated into English. Even better if they are by POC. Even even better if WOC. For example, Nowhere to Be Found, you don’t even have to request it; it’s just there ready for download. I spent thirty minutes with it, finished, and then thought about what to write for two days.

Nowhere to Be Found is a series of scenes. Each scene is like a perfect little wrapped truffle, but it’s like the box of these truffles has been shaken up and that little sheet of paper that tells you what each truffle is has been lost. So we have smooth bits and then inelegant jumps. There’s a bizarre shift partway through to a second-person, sadomasochistic narration, some of which repeats in first person at the very end (my kobo note when I got to that part: WTF?). There’s a whole absurd traipsing through an army training field to find someone who has a name-doppelgänger, then who doesn’t. There’s some subtlety about class in Korean society that is touched on but likely not explored as the story was initially written for a Korean audience, who don’t need their society explained to them the way I might. There’s some esoteric references (The Blue Bird, but maybe smarter people than me knew what that was already). There’s some cattiness and shaming:

the girl who was called the Black Hole because of her reputation for routinely going through multiple guys in one night.

Then the novella ends with:

And that is how I became an absolutely meaningless thing and survived time.

I don’t really get it.

I like all the little components, but I’m not sure I like them once they’re put together. It’s less than the sum of all parts. That isn’t to say I’m not going to steal some ideas from it to see what I can do with them instead. But this novella is a bit off. Not alien abduction off, but just not enough that I can really, unabashedly feel good about the experience.

And of course, my burning question with no real relevance to anything about this novella: why is Be capitalized in the title, but not to? The to Be is like a unit. Shouldn’t they both be or not both be capitalized?

I think Nowhere to Be Found is going to be released as one of those Amazon Singles things or something. It’s short – forty pages. So a quick read.

Nowhere to Be Found by Bae Suah goes on sale April 14, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This review contains spoilers, but no more than you would get by reading the interview with the author at the start of the book.

Let’s start on the first page, in the interview with Chiladze (I’m not quite sure who is interviewing him, the book itself or the aliens or the translator or a random person):

[A] writer is the last surveying representative of the ancient caste of clairvoyants or oracles.

A very astute quote as I had a weird, anticipatory relationship with this book. Each time I thought “What’s going on here?” or “Why did we go through all that stuff with Ia and Tamriko” (I’ve also established that my new favourite name is Ia) or “How does this all tie together”, the the next page, bam it’s answered. Clearly, we have the relationship between author and reader that he discusses in the introduction. So me and Chiladze, hanging out, him waiting for me to get to the next part, at least in some sort of weird, metaphysical readers/authors space.

Yeah, and that’s not even the weird part of the story. We haven’t got there yet.

The Brueghel Moon is a novella about a psychiatrist, Levan, who has a former patient, Nunu, visit him, then he goes to a garden party, and gets involved with the wife of an ambassador, Ana-Maria. Actually, the time line is a bit messed up so Levan might have gone to the garden party and then had Nunu visit him. It doesn’t matter; the point of the book isn’t about time. There’s only ninety pages, so not much can happen. Levan, who starts out the book whining about white man problems, i.e. he’s middle class and bored and unfulfilled and self-sabotaging, spends a fair amount of the book whining about white man problems and ends the book still trapped in his white man problems. Ana-Maria also whines a fair deal about her rich white woman problems, i.e. she’s rich and bored and unfulfilled and self-sabotaging. Nunu doesn’t whine so much. Instead, she talks about how she had sex with aliens and begat a child and I would say this was a spoiler except it’s pretty much discussed in the opening interview of the first four or five pages of the book, completely ruining any surprise or impact that alien sex (very vanilla and barely described, besides the alien appears to be roughly human) might have had. Come on. Alien, out of nowhere versus alien foretold? Alien out of nowhere has got to win at all costs.

In any case, the alien story comes around and joins with the Ana-Maria story, all nicely wrapped up in a bow, and it’s kind of satisfying. I appreciate in a novel with a psychiatrist, there’s none of this “Is Nunu’s story real or is Nunu’s story a hallucination” subplot because I’m totally over that as a literary device. I don’t really know why Ana-Maria would be interested in Levan, other than I guess he was kind to her. He’s too whiny for my taste. Levan seems interested in Ana-Maria for the reason men are often interested in women in stories: she is attractive. Other than that, her personality is kind of dull too. Nunu was pretty awesome, but, likely as to her growing up under Soviet rule, she’s a bit passive and accepting of what happens to her too, although her escape from the mental hospital was pretty awesome. You go Nunu, you get your whistle and march on away.

Still, and I feel I need to keep belabouring this point, there are aliens that appear in this novella. Aliens.

The narrative switches around, first person, second person, third person, back to first. We get to see inside Levan and Nunu’s head, never Ana-Maria’s, but since Ana-Maria seems to vocalize every thought she has to Levan, we’re likely not missing much. The switching narrative voice works pretty well with the swaps sometimes being so subtle that it takes a page or two before you realize that now we’re back inside Levan’s head or the like. Normally narrative switching bothers me, but this was done well. Conversations seem artificial, a lot of “Now I will explain some point” but I don’t know how the Georgian language works, so maybe that’s more a structure of the language and the translation. There’s a few shout-outs to Tolstoi: happy families becoming unhappy and the like. It’s a decent, short read. I’m glad it wasn’t any longer.

Really, I don’t know what else to say. Aliens.

The Brueghel Moon by Tamaz Chiladze went on sale January 13, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

(with a new translation by Peter A. Bien)

My reason for requesting Zorba the Greek from netgalley was likely neither the best nor most auspicious. My grandmother had a copy of The Last Temptation of Christ on a bookshelf in her basement, another book written by Kazantzakis. I never read it and I can’t read her copy now because I think my aunt donated it somewhere after my grandmother died. I miss my grandmother. So I requested Zorba the Greek because of a very tenuous connection to my grandmother (I don’t even know if she even read The Last Temptation of Christ).

So we have a novel with a message of it’s important to embrace life and not overthink it. Decent message. We have the narrator with minimal personality, which I suppose is so every man reading it can put himself as the narrator (no women, we’ll get to that). We have Zorba (the Greek, although he says numerous times he’s from Macedonia, but maybe Zorba the Macedonian doesn’t have the same ring to it?), a sixty-five year old lover-of-life trying to impart wisdom on our thirty-five year old narrator, who has rented a Cretan coal mine and decided to hire Zorba at the ferry terminal because Zorba basically said Hey – I’d like to go to Crete. Can you hire me? to which the narrator replies Well, I just met you, and I haven’t told you why I’m going to Crete, or if I have a job you’d be suitable for, but sure — why don’t you be my foreman? (paraphrasing). Obviously this isn’t a modern novel, or Zorba would turn out to be some sort of psychopath and slowly destroy the narrator, chipping away at him, until the narrator can’t take it anymore and we have a vertiginous descent into insanity. However, Zorba isn’t a psychopath, although he does waste all the narrator’s money, encourages a monk suffering from schizophrenia to burn down his monastery, leads on a bunch of women, and concocts a crazy rope-pulley-system to carry trees down a mountain, which obviously fails spectacularly and injures a bunch of people.

Oh, and Zorba’s a self-admitted rapist, which he just sort of imparts like it doesn’t really matter. It kind of makes sense, as Zorba’s view on women can be summed up by bitches be crazy. I mean, according to Zorba “women … don’t have brains and he debates whether or not they are actually human. He redeems himself a teensy little bit, by intervening to try and stop the mob from attacking the widow (she ends up beheaded, so not much success there. She was killed for being too alluring, which is dishonourable, which about two pages later, both the narrator and Zorba dismiss as just one of those things that happen, so this book is also pro-honour killings), but he likely only does it since “woman is a feeble creature” and, thus, she can’t protect herself. A more generous reader would write this off as antiquated notions of gender. I am not generous. While not the main focus — the main focus being an idea of never losing the wonder of being alive — I have no need to read a book of rampant misogyny. But then again, what do I know? Zorba does say that I don’t have a brain in my head.

But let’s say you move past the espoused views of women. There’s a calm, pastoral feeling on Crete. Sunshine and oceans. Golden sunsets, pale nights with shooting stars, tables with meat and fish and olive oils, warm breezes. Currently, there are snowbanks outside my house eight feet high. I could go for an afternoon on a Cretan beach (hopefully sans Zorba, the sexist jerk). The whole book, I kept thinking of Il Postino (maybe all I should have been thinking of was the movie version of Zorba the Greek, which I’ve never seen). The setting had the exact same feel. But I’m scared now to rewatch Il Postino though, afraid that I’ll realize it’s just as problematic as Zorba the Greek is.

As for the translation, seems fine, except for a few times when we are suddenly put into present tense for a paragraph or two, usually at the start of a chapter. Don’t know what’s up with that. Maybe it’s because I have an uncorrected proof?

Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis went on sale December 30, 2014.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

In 2005, when I was volunteering in Costa Rica, I spent a morning cutting sugar cane. It was supposed to be part of a cultural exchange. I was volunteering with a group of Australians. Perhaps sugar cane grows in Australia and the Australians knew what they were getting into, since very few of them agreed to go help. I didn’t even agreed. I came back from teaching a group of kids English and was told that tomorrow I had the privilege of going to help chop sugar cane.

If you ever use sugar, I think that perhaps you should spend a morning cutting sugar cane on a sugar cane farm in the cold rain while someone yells at you in not your mother tongue. After one morning, my hands were cut up, my clothing was ripped, I was wet through to my internal organs, and one hundred percent sheer miserable. I can see why “suddenly” our Tico friend had no one to help cut his cane. It’s ridiculously awful work that no one in their right mind would do unless there were few-to-zero other options.

So we get to Queen Sugar, a book where an LA woman (as in Los Angeles) inherits an LA sugar cane farm (as in Louisiana woman). As I can attest, sugar cane farming is hard work. So there’s the typical will she lose the farm plot line, a few cardboard basic villains, family drama, love interest, and a Deus Ex Machina plot resolution at the end. It’s basically a Lifetime Movie plot put into the book. There’s no real depth to any of the characters with backstory (divorce, teenage pregnancy, drugs, dead spouses) used as character development, rather than actual character development. Baszile doesn’t seem comfortable enough in her writing letting the characters go as dark as they need to (for example Ralph Angel or the white sugar cane farmers who lurk around the edges trying to get the protagonist to sell). The same with race, which is treated almost flippantly and not of much consequence, even though it’s race that plays a large part in the dénouement of Ralph Angel’s plot line. Baszile is a starting author, so I get it — it can be hard to go deep without letting backstory or anger about race relations take over. But the story could have gone deeper. As it is, the stakes that should feel high don’t. Of course, it’s nice in life to have everything work out, but in a book, the lack of meaningful conflict, I don’t want to say bores because that is too harsh, so maybe provokes disinterest in me is what I’ll say instead.

There are my other judgy things: too many metaphors, interesting characters not used as much as they could be, etc. But then there are moments of pure life, like how the sound of Gulf of Mexico water against a boat goes glup, glup, glup. That is the sound. Now, I’ve only heard Florida and Belize Gulf of Mexico water lap against the sides of boats, but it’s true, it goes glup. It’s somehow soothing to know that water makes the same sound in Louisiana.

There are a lot of books I read where I think, when I’m done, my mother would like this. I think my mother would like this book. Whereas I found a the flatness of the conflict and urgency monotonous, I know others would like the lapping glup, glup, glup of calm progression. Like The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared, Queen Sugar has the same feel: book club faux literary, mildly heartwarming, and some people are going to love it.

Not me, but that’s okay too. I’d love to read Baszile three or four books down the line when her confidence has skyrocketed. That’ll be something to look forward to.

Queen Sugar by Natalie Baszile went on sale January 27, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Until Women of Karantina, I haven’t had much luck in Arabic literature. Granted, having read only two books originally published in Arabic (In Praise of Hatred and Girls of Riyahd), that’s hardly a statistical sampling. So now, with book three that I have read from Arabic, I can proclaim Women of Karantina to be the best book translated from Arabic I have read (to the best of my knowledge – maybe I read another book translated from Arabic when I was a kid but the fact that I don’t remember it, even if I did read one, likely says it wasn’t very good).

Reading, I kept being reminded of something. It took a good third of the way through the book for me to figure it out. Women of Karantina was reminding me of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Both have a family, although in Women of Karantina, some members are bonded by blood, others bonded by proximity. They have exploits, wild, crazy, revolving exploits, in Alexandria, whirling up and pulling more and more people in, like being swept down a drain or swept up in a sandstorm. The whole thing is a folly, the silliness and the megalomania and the scheming and the treachery and every plan failing and succeeding marvelously at the same time. Is it as polished and magical as One Hundred Years of Solitude? No, but it comes close.

Once he told his Mama that he felt like a zero before the decimal, like something worthless.

(Oh Hamada, sometimes I feel like that too.) But, with the above quote, we can see how Women of Karantina isn’t as accomplished as One Hundred Years of Solitude; do we really need that added phrase “like something worthless”? That’s understood. Trust your readers to figure it out. There are also repetitions of certain phrases, characters changing personalities and tastes on a whim, a narrator that is sometimes a bit too intrusive for eir own good, and background about Alexandria dumped into the story when I would rather get back to the story of the main characters, not learn about how Alexandria once tried to ban tobacco and hookahs. We have dreams (but that’s clearly an issue I have no one else, since every book I read people talk about their dreams) as shortcuts for character development, and the cheap trick of someone’s friend turning out to be dum dum dum a figment of his imagination. Plus the use of faggot for virtually every insult. Oh my goodness, you have all of Arabic at your disposal, switch up the insults (or at least, drop the homophobic one for something else). So almost magical, but not quite.

As to the translation, my knowledge of Arabic hovers an epsilon away from zero, but often the verb tense didn’t fit. There’s a lot of the omniscient narrator using (and I had to look this up) present continuous in the story, i.e. “We are still in the early days of Spring” and “Inji and Ali are now satisfied that their path is secure.” Each time it happened, I was pushed out of the story. Perhaps this is how the present tense works in Arabic (come on Duolingo people, let’s get working on an Arabic course for me) and the translator wanted to keep the feeling of a tale originally spun in Arabic? I don’t know. It stuck out.

Still, for all my whinging in the last few paragraphs, I enjoyed Women of Karantina. Awful people doing awful things to each other, but still, it earns my smile.

Women of Karantina by Nael Eltoukhy went on sale January 15, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I’m not sure how I should write about A History of Loneliness by John Boyne. It’s a book that made me want to throw my kobo against the wall. I think that’s what Boyne wanted, for people to be angry about sexual abuse within the Catholic church, but my anger at this book wasn’t for that; my anger at this book was for how glossy it was. My anger at this book was for how insensitive Father Odran Yates, the protagonist, is. My anger at this book is just all encompassing and I want to stop reviewing and never have to think of it again. Every comment I made in the (electronic) margins on my kobo is caustic and rude and I am going to try and smooth them out and hopefully not give into the nauseated feeling in my stomach.

So we have a priest, Father Odran Yates. He is a good priest, feels the calling of God, enjoys his priesthood. There’s some unnecessary intrigue when he’s sent to the Vatican and is embroiled in the deaths of Pope John Paul I and whoever was before Pope John Paul I (my Catholic family members are pretty embarrassed for me right now, not knowing who came before Pope John Paul I). The novel suggests that Pope John Paul I was going to do something about some nascent scandal within the Irish Catholic church, which the reader assumes to be the rampant sexual abuse, and hints that Pope John Paul I was murdered for this. The novel then becomes quite scathing against Pope John Paul I’s successor, Pope John Paul II. Less hints this time: That man hates women. Direct quote. There’s also some unnecessary back story about Yates’ brother who drowned and Yates’ widowed sister with dementia that could be excised completely without much fuss, although I suppose it’s meant to counter the argument that people with lousy upbringings will do lousy things, like rape children. Because Yates had a lousy upbringing and still managed to keep his penis to himself.

Back to Father Odran Yates, who, for the most part, is upset regarding the unrestrained sexual abuse by priests because it makes him look bad. It means people don’t respect him on the Luas. It means men are angry with him in coffee shops. It means that he grows tired of having a chaperone when he talks to his altar boys. For something like eighty percent of the novel, Yates does not seem to understand that this is not about him. People are rightly angry because of the years of abuse perpetrated by the church. He has no compassion for the victims of sexual abuse, instead painting himself as the true victim in all this. This infuriates me. I am incensed. It’s taken me hours to write this review because I get so angry and I have to walk away. I suppose he comes around when he realizes that his friend, another priest, sexually assaulted Odran’s nephew (which he then makes about himself, visiting the nephew even though the nephew has cut off all contact with Yates, because Yates needs the nephew to absolve him. Yep, back to what Yates needs rather than what anyone else does), but for a priest who goes on and on about how this is his true calling, he seems to have no ability for humility and no compassion. No Matthew 9:36 (Seeing the people, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd) for Yates. This is all about him. The book ends with Yates realizing he must have known about other abuses, but chose to look away. The End. No self reflection or anything about this. Just stop.

Ignoring the repugnance of the plot, the writing is all right. Not spectacular, and I’m still biased towards spectacular Irish writing after my time with Frank O’Connor earlier this winter. It’s really slick, the writing. It’s not uncomfortable the way it should be to reflect the content. I know that seems like an odd criticism, that the writing is too smooth for the context, but I can think of no other way to put it. Facile maybe? I know people are going to connect with this book and it’ll likely sell millions of copies (the author also wrote The Boy in the Striped Pajamas), but there’s no depth. It’s like a puddle rather than a sea.

You want some amazing writing about Ireland: read Frank O’Connor. You want a meaningful fictitious book on sexual abuse within the Catholic church: read The Bishop’s Man by Linden MacIntyre instead.

A History of Loneliness by John Boyne went on sale September 11, 2014.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

On Netgalley the other day, after checking off I reviewed The Book of Strange New Things, I mosied on over to the Graphic Novels or Comic section or whatever it’s called. I don’t think I’ve ever really looked there before, since there is really no point in reading comics on my teeny kobo and I generally can’t be bothered to read things on the iPad. So I wasn’t expecting much, but then:

A Katamari comic! (NB: this picture is not from the comic but from deviantart.)

Even better, a Katamari comic that I didn’t even have to request. It was free free free to anyone who wanted it. You better bet I was going to roll that comic up into my life.

(For those unfamiliar with Katamari Damacy, it’s a series of Japanese video games in which one is a diminutive green prince with a sticky rolling ball that collects objects on Earth under the watchful eye and abusive tones of his gigantic king father. It’s quite Japanese and beneficial to play prior to visiting any place in urban Japan. I’m pretty sure the only thing that got me through my first two jetlagged days of Tokyo was pointing out, ad nauseum to Geoff and Lydia, objects that I had, at one point, rolled up in a Katamari game.)

The book brings together a collection of webcomics, a few story arcs, and a few one-offs (including flow charts on whether or not you are trying to roll things up with a Katamari or a blueberry). The stories are cute and very much in the style of the Katamari universe. There is the king, a cameo by the queen, many cousins, Michiru (the little girl who is always talking about feeling the cosmos in the first game), Jumboman, cutie animals, they’re all there. The colours are as vibrant and the corners, metaphorically and literally speaking, are as cutely rounded as they are in the game. Comics are a logical step to continue the Katamari universe; I can only imagine the sheer number of adjectives necessary to write a Katamari novel. There is a lot of detail in the panels, most of which I overlooked until I read the creators’ commentary; the book is structured a bit like a “director’s cut” with Culang and Castro writing little blurbs on most pages about the story or what is hidden in the panels. Generally, I don’t read comics correctly as I only ever read the text bubbles and never give the pictures more than a peripheral glance, so having reminders to actually look and see what is happening is helpful to text-intensive lovers like me.

The commentary, however, ends up a double-edged sword. One joy of Katamari is how genderless it can feel. There are a slew of male characters, but, outside the story line, the game is not testosterone-driven, angry, or violent (other than the cops that shoot at your Katamari and a few Hey’s, no one quite seems to mind being rolled up). It’s just a colourful, fun, way to spend a few hours. But the commentary of the creators lends a definite lad feel to the whole comic, likely not in an intentional or an exclusionary way, but there’s definitely a more masculine feel to the comic than to the series. While there are some girl cousins chosen to go on the adventures (Daisy and June in particular) and Michiru is around, I still get the default to male feel, i.e. that anything that isn’t specifically gendered is masculine. Then, once I started thinking that, I couldn’t stop. Then not even the colours of a Royal Rainbow could cheer me up.

As for reading it on my iPad, not a fan. I have one other comic I got to read on my iPad, and then I think I’m done. The font is too small for my firmly-ensconced-in-my-thirties eyeballs, and it’s a hassle to have to keep zooming in and then zooming back out to turn the pages. It would seem that an iPad is a perfect container for comics, but maybe the ratios just aren’t right yet, or trying to smush a webcomic meant to be read on a big monitor into a tiny one is beyond the capabilities of current aesthetic technology. I think this book deserves to be big and glossy and coffee-table size for optimal viewing.

Still, KA-TA-MA-RI!

Katamari Volume One by Alex Culang and Raynato Castro went on sale January 2, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a type of book that you really wish you could rate in parts, like pages one through one hundred are 3/5, pages one hundred through three hundred and fifty are 2/5, and pages three hundred and fifty to the end minus one are 4/5. End isn’t the great. It’s a book outside my comfort zone (science-fiction and religion) and it’s a book that’s too long. It’s a book where some of the surprises are obvious and where one of the surprises manifested itself in a way I wouldn’t have expected (the Oasans physiology with respect to healing in particular).

So this is a book that goes here and there. A book where I got frustrated and then I got surprised and then frustrated again.

We are focused on Peter, a Christian preacher of indeterminate denomination (I think he says he’s not Baptist or Lutheran and he isn’t Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox) who is sent to another world to minister to the local species of a faraway planet, under the employment of a somewhat sinister, somewhat benign corporation. Peter leaves his wife Bea behind, but gets to communicate with her via a sort of internet contraption, which is seemingly the only nod to modern technology in the novel (that and the space travel, I have to concede). Bea on earth never mentions WiFi, rarely mentions cellphones, there doesn’t appear to be tablets or smart phones or Internet. Is this an alternate past? I mean, first world people freak out when they can’t get twitter for an hour, so one would assume that the first sign of societal collapse would be the collapse of telecommunication infrastructure, but that isn’t even mentioned. Perhaps Faber does what I aspire to do more of: live without all the trappings of constant contact, so this isn’t a concern for him in his books. But it’s the little things like this that make all of The Book of Strange New Things feel off.

Anyway, I started the last paragraph about Peter. We know that Peter is a complex person because he used to be a drug addict. Ooooooooh. Put in the scary Just say no kids music from those eighties drug advertisements. Then he found Jesus through Bea. And now he is definitely in the running for Most Boring Protagonist of 2014. He’s just completely bland. His struggles are, relatively, nonexistent. Bea graciously (at the start) accepts his interplanetary mission, the Oasans readily accept him and a large group are eager to learn about Jesus, he has a beautiful woman on the space base looking out for him and rescuing him from many of his more idiotic endeavors. Peter pretty much gets whatever he wants and chalks it up to his deep-rooted belief in prayer. I don’t understand Faber’s endgame here. Does he mean this book to be an active call to a Christian life? Peter gets what he wants because he truly believes and prays. When other people don’t get what they want, it’s because they aren’t praying hard enough. Then, when they do pray, truly and meaningfully, better things happen (like the impromptu garbage pickup Bea writes about; I know that sounds bizarre, it makes sense in the context of the story). Is it just a story? A Christian allegory? The meaning is muddled. We’re back to being muddled.

The scientists at the colony are cutouts that would be more interesting than Peter, but who aren’t delved into much. There’s a subplot about a linguist who goes missing that sort of peters out. Pages and pages are devoted to how well the vetting process is for the mission, only to have one character have a breakdown that exists, it seems, only to add impetus to Peter’s narrative. And then when Peter gets muddled, he prays (of course) and realizes the answer. Then the book ends, unsatisfactory, although the unresolved ending might be a way of setting up a sequel.

This book is very much like a flatline, slow burn. Much is said about how the terrain of the planet is flat, unchanging, soaking in and not giving back, all descriptors you could apply to this book. It’s interesting conceptually, but in practice, there needs to be more depth. The book needs to be simultaneously longer and shorter. And the book needs some of the characters to have at least a little more pizzazz, not just loner scientists and ministers whose pasts are supposed to make them exciting rather than having anything innately compelling in their own personalities.

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber went on sale October 24, 2014.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.