Okay, I've been meaning to do this forever, but what better time to start than now. I'm going to start rolling through books I've read and make brief comments and assign them a semi-arbitrary rating on a scale from 0 to 10. (Worse than 5 means I regret reading it, I'll say, so pretty much nothing will be below that).

In the Woods by Tana French



For the first half, I really liked it - it takes place in Ireland and features the narrator, a homicide detective and his partner attempting to decipher to separate murders which happened in the same place, one that happened recently, and one that happened 20 years again, which the main character has a connection with, unknown to the rest of the department except his partner. They made slow but gradual progress through the case, and ferret out interesting leads and suspects, wondering whether or not the cases are related. Two things happen towards the end of the book - one, the older mystery is never really solved, and second, the main character becomes an utter douchebag. The first I could probably live with - even though the book is billed as a mystery by my library, which led me to believe it would be the type of things in which everything at least gets vaguely wrapped up, I'm fine with if done well, things being unsolved. The second I couldn't live with. By the end, I was forcing myself to read it because I knew if I stopped, I wouldn't want to again, because the guy just, and I feel like there should be a more eloquent way to say this, but maybe there isn't - pissed me off. Maybe this sounds juvenile, but I've read many, many books where the main character isn't particularly sympathetic, and this one particularly irritated me, I think maybe because, for the first half, he seemed nice enough and then just became a brat. Okay, so maybe that's an utterly simplistic reason to not like something, but fuck it, it's good enough for me. Also, the ending was too easy - not the actual solving of the murder that was fine - but the personal consequences for the main character, and I couldn't stand all the parts in the book where the narrator (writing from the future) would refer to the past and say, oh, things would great then, and it got all fucked up - I'll find out about what happens when I get to it - those hindsight reflections added absolutely nothing to my experience.

6.0

Atmospheric Disturbances - Rivka Galchen



This book had a great premise, which is a large part in why I decided to read it (it was somewhere on amazon's top 100 books of 2008) - a man wakes up one day and decides his wife has been replaced by a nearly identical carbon copy which is not her. It's brilliant. Now maybe that raised my expectations, and particularly since this is a relatively short novel, about 250 pages, I shouldn't have expected any kind of opus or huge winding conspiritorial narrative, but even considering that, there just wasn't enough there. Just not enough happened in the book, and it got a little repetitive - it didn't move enough from where it started - and there just seemed to be a limit on how much could happen without diverting from the great central premise, when the story is only told from his point of view. I just wish there was a litte more to it is all - when I realized I was getting to the end, I was thinking to myself, how can this be satisfactorily moved along, and as so often happens, it couldn't have been - a little type of ending was squeezed into the last few pages, but it was incredibly unsatisfying - then again, it is short - a definite benefit.

6.2

Clockers - Richard Price



Okay, I really don't bash everything, as you're about to see. Clockers was excellent. I had initally known about Richard Price as a writer for the Wire, then read his latest book, Lush Life, and I decided to dig further into the ouvre with what seems to be his most well-known book Clockers. (I also had no idea that the Spike Lee movie Clockers was about the book - it is now on my netflix queue). It makes perfect sense, after reading the book, why Price was hired to write for The Wire. The subject matter is similar for one - Clockers is the story primarily of a drug dealer who is frustrated with the limitations of his position and wants to either move up or move out, and a homicide cop who has lost the drive he originally had when he came on the force, and a murder that brings their stories together. More than the subject matter though, the book shares with The Wire an insistence on crisp, realistic dialogue (not that I really know what drug dealers talk like, but so they say, and anyway it sounds realistic - good enough for me) and generating an ambiguouity between the good guys and bad guys - sure cops are good, and the drug enforcers who kill people are bad - but there's a lot in between - cops who take bribes, kids who have no other way to make it in the world than working on drug corners. Now, of course, this message has certainly been done before - but this general tone interwoven with an engaging story, three dimsensional characters and just good writing. I look forward to reading another one of Price's books in the future.

8.7