Happy Thanksgiving! In addition to feasting on food, I spend the holiday feasting on books. After a few long reads, I plowed through some things I’ve been meaning to get to for a while. Enjoy!
Y: The Last Man ****
I was excited to finally read this, being a big Brian K. Vaughan fan and being intrigued by the premise. Stephen King blurbed this as the best comic he ever read. The TV show looked good and I wanted to get in on it.
And it’s…good? Really good at times. Not great. Which is fine for a first book. But Ex Machina and Saga hooked me hard. This one didn’t. I want to read more if only to watch the show but I’ll probably plow through more of Ex Machina before I return to this.
Mrs. March ***
I’m gonna give this 3-stars. It’s the definition of a 3.5 star read. Really could go either way. I’m gonna lean 3 because I give out too many 4s against my better judgment.
This book is hard to define. A domestic thriller? Domestic horror? Kinda sorta a murder mystery? What’s the deal with the lead? We know but not really? The writing is good enough but idk if it all came together. It did end well. Just a weird book.
Quarry’s Vote ***
Part of the reason I put off reading the Quarry series for so long is because I assumed they’d be those cliché-ridden crime tales with toxic men and bad dialogue. I was pleasantly surprised to find this to be untrue.
Yet here, a fish-out-of-water tale written in the 80s is just that. Tough guy dialogue. Homophobia. Dames.
So I had to knock it down a star but it’s still a fun read. And it’s wild that I read this after reading the Huey Long bio and seeing the new alt right candidate guy on Succession. Max Allan Collins’ take on how fringe politics move to the mainstream is surprisingly astute.
The Man Who Came Uptown ****
I’m impressed with how well Pelecanos keeps up with the times in dialogue, politics, and atmosphere. He deftly explores the changes in DC without forgetting the people left behind. Some of the dialogue is expository but otherwise, this is a good addition to his character-driven crime tale oeuvre.
Hit List ****
But how I do love Lawrence Block so much. He makes the banal interesting. I don’t care for tales about hit men but the Keller books are fun because it basically allows Block to expel his wanderlust through a traveling hit man who’s basically an everyday guy. There’s a thread here that’s not in the first book but Block knows how to tell this story and is smart enough to know when to center it and when not to. A great series.
The Overlook **
This one was written in the post-9/11 24 Jack Bauer craze and I wonder if Michael Connelly caught the fever. It reads like a rejected script of the TV series. Possibly the shortest of the Bosch books, it’s also far and away the worst I’ve read. Connelly takes a lot of narrative shortcuts he usually avoids and it makes me think he put this one together quickly.