But that’s also kind of what I loved about it. It was just what the doctor ordered for the start of the summer: a funny book about a bunch of characters who seem like they’d be good fun to hang out with, which is basically what I did for the month I took reading it.

I’m a huge fan of Martin Amis–as in, ‘favorite living author’ huge–and that probably biases my review of this book a bit. His style strikes all the right chords with me. Reading it was like drinking a really great cocktail, and not getting a hangover.

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Await Your Reply is about identity theft and high-tech criminal enterprises. Think Tom Ripley, if he were alive and at large in today’s world.

But, and I don’t want to scare anyone off, it’s also about something much deeper: it’s about the very notion of identity itself, the impermanence of it.

It’s got the pacing and plotting of a good thriller, but it’s populated with very believable characters, and it’s written in beautiful prose. A very satisfying read.

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I’ve written a couple posts about my search for an application that would make moving web content to the Kindle a simpler process. I have found that application.

With Instapaper, you get a little “bookmarklet” (a little button that goes on your browser’s bookmark toolbar or in your bookmarks drop-down menu) that, when clicked, grabs the text from the website you’re reading (a story in the New Yorker or a long blog post, whatever) and saves it for later reading.

Later, when you’re ready to spend some time reading and digesting, you surf over to the Instapaper website, and there are all your saved articles. You can either read the text right on the website (it’s very readable once all the obnoxious webpage-y stuff is stripped out), or you can click the little button on the right side of the screen that will download all your saved articles into a nice little Kindle-formatted package. It takes the three or five or 25 articles you’ve saved, formats them for the Kindle’s screen, puts them into one file, and creates a table of contents. You can even create different folders to organize your saved articles before downloading them.

As a bonus, Instapaper has a “Browse” page that lists popular and recommended articles from around the web that you can add to your “Read Later” list.

Brilliant. I’m in love. Screw you iPad.

Turns out, Banks is quite well-regarded by readers of science fiction (Consider Phlebas is 100 percent space opera–frak-tastic space opera) as well as his more, er, literary efforts, which he writes as Iain Banks (no middle initial).

In fact, everything I read about his work was so positive that I began collecting his sci-fi books before I read even one of them. The problem was, Consider Phlebas is hard to find, and I wanted to read it first.

Finally, it came out in a Kindle edition, which I had preordered. One day it just showed up on my home screen, and I jumped right in as soon as I finished The Blind Side.

It’s a good book. The imagination on this guy and his willingness to see things through to their gruesome conclusions make for a sometimes jaw-dropping reading experience. It’s a quite good introduction to his work. I gave it four stars instead of five because it felt a little like he painted himself into a corner toward the end of the book, but even then he kept me interested.

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The Blind Side is obviously in the latter category, but that’s not all it is. It is also a fascinating story about the human spirit, class, and the American dream, as cheesy as that sounds. It’s not cheesy at all (I’m paraphrasing Malcolm Gladwell’s blurb a little bit here).

If you enjoy football at all, you’ll enjoy the discussion about the changes in defensive and offensive strategies. But you’ll also enjoy the unfolding of Michael Oher’s story.

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I’ve also been dipping into Richard Ford’s A Multitude of Sins and Hemingway’s Men Without Women. I downloaded Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It for the Kindle, but haven’t waded in just yet.

I’m enjoying Ford because I take a certain comfort in his style, and I appreciate his subtlety. Hemingway, of course, is always good. I was going to get to one of Meloy’s stories during the nap today, but Sean just didn’t sleep long enough. Maybe tomorrow or tonight…

The ingredients of a good Sterling novel are here, but he over-seasoned the dish. Perhaps in an attempt at satire, he essentially turned his novel into a long rant on the state of security (specifically cyber-security) in the post-September 11th world. And it gets tiresome.

You follow his hero, Derek Vandeveer, on his odyssey from the world of the dot-com into the world of bureaucracy. The plot, when it emerges, seems to come from nowhere. There’s nothing organic about the transition from cyber-warfare to space-warfare.

Worse than that, his characters are not believable, and his dialogue–which is usually serviceable–is terrible.

What more can I say? I’m hoping the next one will be better. The Caryatids is already queued up for Kindle download.

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The story follows a woefully innocent (you could say naive) young poet on his travels from the Old Country to the New. He meets a vast number of characters on his journey, many of whom seek to take advantage of his innocence (or take his life). His companion on his journey is a political agent (spy) who is deeply involved with the affairs of the Maryland government and its enemies. The scope of this novel, as you can see, is astonishing.

Many professional critics make note of how Barth satirizes the historical novel, here, but satire implies a target: something that must be taken down. I think, rather, that Barth is just winking at the historical novel. He knows how these novels work; he knows their cliches. So he incorporates those elements and transcends them so that they no-longer seem cliche or “played out.”

The Sot-Weed Factor is not serious literature. It’s fun. If you come to it looking for a great story and a good number of laughs and head-shakes, you’ll enjoy it.

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rating: 4 of 5 stars
Great book. King knows how to write a very good yarn: his characters are well-defined, sympathetic, and believable.

He also knows how to draw you into the story, into the world. He provides enough detail, but not too much. And he’s never boring. At least not here.

The Stand looks at what might happen after a terrible plague, but it’s not cold and cynical. King believes in things beyond what we can see first hand, things beyond what we can determine scientifically. He understands that some people believe things very strongly, that some people are agnostic, and that some people are full of doubt, and his characters portray that.

My only complaint about King is that he’s all story. There’s nothing deeper. No style. But every once in a while, that’s all I want: just a really good story.


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