Quick Summer Reviews

Hey everyone - it's been a while since I've posted any reviews. I've been reviewing some of the books I've read over at Visual Bookshelf on Facebook, and thought I'd post a couple of those here. Also, at some point in the near future, I'm going to get another eVite out for the next book club, a la fresco (am I using that correctly), at Laura's suggestion... so here are a couple of the better or more entertaining books I've read this summer.

The Likeness - Tana French

The Likeness is Tana French's 2nd novel. Like In the Woods, The Likeness is told in the first person and concerns a murder investigation outside Dublin. However in this case, French's protagonist is not Rob Ryan - who in the first book played a likeable murder detective with a dark past, but rather Cassie Maddox - a former undercover officer, and also Rob's partner, best friend, and in many ways, his soulmate. Cassie is on her own now, the fallout from the case covered in In the Woods driving her out of the murder investigation department and into domestic violence. She gets pulled back into both murder and undercover when a woman wgi us a doppelganger for Cassie, and using an identity Cassie used undercover, is found murdered. What follows is Cassie's deep undercover work, investigation, and delving into the odd relationship the murdered women had with her four housemates and university mates.

I really enjoyed In the Wood - a great blend of a crime procedural, mystery and psychological suspense novel. French's characters came off the pages and became real - to the point you could almost (almost!) predict how they would react in a given situation. Her settings were vivid, and the suspense palpable. I was having a hard time buying the concept of an undercover officer being able to insinuate herself into a group of very close friends and pulling it off, so I had little hope for The Likeness... but somewhere along the line, I started buying the plausibility of the undercover work, much as the dead woman's flatmates did. And then I was hooked. Cassie Maddox is a fantastic character, and the isolated group of friends she infiltrates were all colorful in their own right. As if this isn't enough, French manages to bring in the lingering resentment of the brutal British rule in the Irish countryside, and intelligent, esoteric and academic conversations... in a lot of ways, this reminded me of Donna Tartt's The Secret History - but since I already knew the protagonist from the previous book, I felt more at home with this novel.
Tana French won a well-deserved Edgar Award for In the Woods and I wouldn't be surprised to find that The Likeness also picks up the award for mystery writing. If you haven't read In the Woods - read it... and then read The Likeness. Both are excellent.

Nine Kinds of Naked - Tony Vigorito

This book was just pure, metaphysical fun... Linking an angry priest turned undercover agent, the overly intelligent and buxom love-child stripper of a sexually repressed man and free-spirited woman, an ex-con/ex-Army/ex-FDA policy wonk/purveyor of pipes and wisdom with a transcendental, time-traveling serf/sometimes prison guard and his ass, this book delves into chaos, awareness and meteorological phenomena. At times, this book was very reminiscent of Tom Robbins - perhaps Tom Robbins on acid.

I had a difficult time early on following the narrative, as it jumped from one character to the next, without any clue of how they would be linked and actually put this book down for about a week and read something else. When I came back to it, the characters were just as fresh in my mind. I had more time to devote to it per reading, and found myself sucked into the vortex of synchronicity prevalent throughout the book. The dialogue and 'coincidences' between the characters were hilarious, everything tied together and the cover art explained. What more could you want in a humorous novel?

Downtown Owl - Chuck Klosterman

Maybe it's because I grew up in the midwest (albeit in a town of 40,000) and was exposed to the simple lives of the agricultural society... My mother's parents lived on a farm outside Annawan, IL - a town of 800 people and 1 stop light. Owl, ND has more bars than Annawan... and probably a better high school football team, but I'd be willing to bet if you peel back the oak veneer on either of the two bars Annawan did have, you'd find characters just as interesting as those in Klosterman's Owl. Chuck Klosterman goes beyond the stereotypical small town venue to show the reason behind the stereotypes. His characters strive for what we all strive for - security, companionship, sense of worth - and are as befuddled by day to day life as anyone is... but mostly, Klosterman reminds us that they are human - with all of their small internal glories, fears, secrets... and mortality. While he's showing us this portrait of small town life from the inside, he's keeping us entertained with the principle characters' dialogue, humor, and their day to day hopes and fears... yet he reminds us that the outside image of a small town (or anything) is but a narrow slice of the depth and breadth of the people living on the inside.

The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook - A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal - Ben Mezrich

I'm not familiar with Mezrich's work - other than having seen the fictionalized movie adaptation of Bringing Down the House... but I was somewhat familiar with the origins of Facebook. The Accidental Billionaires is a dramatized account of this, told without the contributions of Mark Zuckerberg - the 'inventor' of Facebook (the author is up front about this). Although Mezrich does not disclose his sources, it's obvious that Eduardo Saverin and Tyler Winklevoss - both of whom at one point had lawsuits against Mark Zuckerberg - were his primary 'inside' sources. Conversations, impressions, events surrounding those two figurethe most prominently - and as you can imagine, they paint a sometimes less than flattering portrait of Mark Zuckerberg. I'm sure there's another side to this story...

But as a story, I was riveted. When I first picked up The Accidental Billionaires, I was not sure what to expect... but I didn't set it back down until I had read 125 pp - and I was hooked. Knowing Facebook as I do now, the 'humble' beginnings (if truly anything that begins in Harvard's hallowed confines could be considered humble) were fascinating, and the characters involved were interestingly dull and human. Mezrich even manages to make the ultra-elite Winklevoss twins (in addition to being in the 'elite' category of the socio-economic scale, they are also Olympic athletes) accessible and human. The one character in the book that seems somewhat less so is Mark Zuckerberg - and this is perhaps the biggest disappointment for me. As the primary inside sources become more marginalized (which, if you read as far as the subtitle of the book, you can figure out), there is less detail around the meteoric rise of Facebook. Still, the story kept me interested throughout and I'd recommend to anyone reading this - as you, by default, are Facebook users. As I said before, though- I'm sure there's another side to this story. Perhaps Sarah Lacy's forthcoming book The Facebook Story: The Stories of Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, which purports to be constructed from interviews with the founders will present the other side. In the meantime, The Accidental Billionaires is an interesting and fun read.

As a post-mortem note, the movie rights for The Accidental Billionaires have been picked up with David Fincher (Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Zodiac) attached to direct, and Aaron Sorkin (Sports Night, The West Wing, Charlie Wilson's War) writing the screenplay.

That's all for now - I've read several other books, some good, some bad, one great that I'll post at a later date. Happy reading!