The Well of Lost Plots
I would like to note that the unpublished novel in which Thursday stays is no longer unpublished – the story eventually became The Big Over Easy. I actually think my having read that book first made this one more enjoyable, since I knew the nursery rhyme characters would sooner or later be infiltrating the generic detective story. It was also fun to see the plainer origins of the often zany characters from that series.
A note on the audio: This may be better in paper form, since so many of the jokes are in the forms of footnotes and misspellings, but Sastre was up to the challenge and I never felt confused.
by Marisha Pessl: When the daughter of famously reclusive director Stanislas Cordova turns up dead of an apparent suicide, journalist Scott McGrath finds himself determined to learn the truth. On the way he picks up two unlikely companions, meets a host of strange folks, encounters black magic and hallucinations, and uncovers a large number of strange coincidences. The mystery and suspense are thick the whole way through. Is Ashley Cordova leading him somewhere from beyond the grave? Is Stanislas Cordova a bigger monster than anything that appeared in his horror films? What happened to the actors he worked with? Why is there such a wall of secrecy around the man? Pessl’s gift is writing with such realism that you want to check IMdb.com for Cordova’s name just to reassure yourself that he doesn’t really exist, that this really is fiction. The plot is masterly woven, and though certain parts of the resolution are left to the reader to decide, this feels deliberate rather than lazy. I’ve complained in the past about “open-ended” books that feel like the last chapter was somehow left off, but the ending here is both open and satisfying. I personally prefer the more fantastic explanation offered, but either way this is the sort of story you want all your friends to read so you can share your theories. Truly un-put-downable. I hope Pessl is already working on her next novel.
by Mary Doria Russell: Emilio Sandoz, Jesuit priest and only survivor of the first expedition to an inhabited alien planet, is returned to Earth and immediately removed from the public eye while he recovers from grave injuries. His fellow priests desperately want to know what happened on the planet, but he is unwilling to talk, clearly traumatized in ways they don’t understand. The story of the expedition is told in flashbacks, from how the characters first met through the discovery of the alien radio signal to their adventures on the planet Rakhat. Since you know from the start that every other member of the crew eventually dies, much of the book is read with a sense of deep foreboding that only worsens the better you get to know and like them, and the longer they spend on Rakhat.
by Markus Zusak: Underachieving taxi driver Ed Kennedy lives a pretty uninteresting life until one day he receives a playing card with three addresses on it. After visiting these addresses, he learns that he must can change these people’s lives for the better. As the weeks go by, he receives more cards with more situations to put right. The individual situations themselves are wonderful to read, and I liked and sympathized with Ed. However, the ending left me a bit sour. I was unimpressed with how the mysterious card-leaver was revealed. Still, the book was quite good up to that point, so it’s certainly possible that other folks would really like the somewhat unconventional resolution.
by Thomas Harris: Will Graham is good at catching serial killers, but the stress forces him into early retirement from government service – until a new one emerges, killing entire families at a time. In some ways this is your standard thriller, with the cops racing to catch the bad guy before he kills again, but the killer himself has an interesting and somewhat tragic backstory. Even more fascinating to me was watching the crime solving done with early pre-DNA technology. It’s a similar appeal to the Sherlock Holmes stories, solving mysteries without fingerprinting. Of course, these were all written with the then-latest technology in mind, but that adds an extra layer of interest to me as the years go by. I suppose if you’re only interested in the latest and greatest, this could come across as slightly dated. All the same, I really enjoyed it, even if The Silence of the Lambs was, in my humble opinion, a lot better.
by Sue Townsend: Adrian has declared himself to be a misunderstood intellectual who has fallen in love with his classmate, Pandora. He is pretentious and irritable and a bit slow on the uptake – in other words, a pretty typical teenager. I found much of this book quite funny, but mostly because I was reading from an adult’s point of view. I have no idea how many of the jokes I would have understood had I been reading this at Adrian’s age (which is generally the audience to which the book is marketed). I also don’t see many adolescents reading this because it’s so very dated: for example, there are several references to Margaret Thatcher and a big party to celebrate the marriage of Charles and Diana. That said, I could see it appealing to us adults familiar with British culture from that time period. I don’t know that I’ll seek out any other Adrian Mole books in the future, but this was a quick and amusing read.
by Mary Roach (unabridged audiobook read by Emily Woo Zeller; 8.5 hrs on 7 discs): This is a tour of the entire digestive system, end to end, from cat food tasters to fecal transplants. It’s told mostly with a sense of wonder, with the occasional bit of juvenile humor (because come on, really). The breadth of information is vast and most of the anecdotes are fascinating, but all in all I just could not get over the Ick Factor. As interesting or funny as the text was, I found I could not eat during any portion of this book. The mere mention of gastric juices was enough to put me off my breakfast. Still, it remains – as with all of Roach’s books – an unexpectedly enthralling survey of a subject you likely never gave much though to before. I just didn’t come away with the same desire to read more about any of the case studies presented because, you know, ick.
by Kate Mosse: Freddie is still grieving the loss of his brother in the Great War, and on the advice of his doctors he is touring around France to help his nerves. One snowy night he finds himself in the village of Nulle, suffering concussion and fever after a car accident. There he meets a mysterious woman named Fabrissa, talks the night through, and then loses track of her. Alas, the plot is pretty thin and I figured out the “twist” about eight years before Freddie did (or, I believe, the reader was meant to), largely because it’s been done so many, many times before. It was a decent tale despite its generic plot, and the description of the French Pyrenees was lovely, but it really should have been a short story.
by Ira Levin: When Joanna and her family move to Stepford, she quickly discovers that the women of the neighborhood are all quite boring: obsessed with housework and uninterested in pretty much anything else. I came into this already knowing the Big Secret, and could predict basically every single step in the plot, but it was still kind of fun. It was written in the 1970s, so the influence of the feminist movement of the time adds an extra dimension to the story. I found Joanna – as a woman, wife, and mother – to be written pretty believably, which is a refreshing change of pace for most male-penned science fiction. It’s not the most original premise, and could have easily been a short story, but as a novella it doesn’t overstay its welcome. It kept me entertained during a long plane ride, and that’s really all I expected of it.
by James Lileks: As a fan of