Vicious

Vicious

By V.E. Schwab

Victor and Eli started out as college roommates―brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong.

Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl whose reserved nature obscures a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other super-powered person that he can find―aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible power on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the archnemeses have set a course for revenge―but who will be left alive at the end?

About a third of the way into the book, I told my fiance that I wasn't sure how much I liked it, as it was "unpleasant".  That's the problem with anti-hero books sometimes - there's nobody in the book that you want to spend time with, or see succeed, so any storyline is going to fall a little flat in the face of your "don't-even-care" -ism.  What happened in Vicious, to make me enjoy it, is that in then later parts of the book, Victor becomes less monstrous and more sympathetic (possibly because we just spend less time inside his head in the second half) and you start rooting for his side to win, if only because Sydney and Mitch are basically innocents in all this (the least bloody hands of the characters, shall we say) and because everyone can agree that a killer who is a religious hypocrite is, like, just the worst.

I don't know that the structure of the book - flipping back and forth from the present to various points in time of the different characters' stories - was necessary, or added anything to the book.  I think the struggle is that you want to create some tension between the "pre-EO" transformation, and the current revenge rampage events, but the problem is that, while necessary to show the relationship between Victor and Eli, the "pre-EO" events are not all that exciting.  It's a lot of Victor being weirdly obsessed with Eli, and, as I mentioned before, it's a fairly unpleasant viewpoint to inhabit.

It's only as we focus more on the final showdown between Eli and Victor that things ramp up, and the book becomes more engrossing.  I will say that although I did enjoy the ultimate resolution and how things worked out, I found it kind of silly that, on the eve of their great battle, both Victor and Eli decide to fill the hours by...tracking down a completely new EO with an unknown skill and looking to recruit or kill him, respectively.  Like, how you do decide that shortly before you face your nemesis is a good time to go hunt and kill some other rando?  Like, "Oh, I've got a few hours to kill.  Let me decompress and prepare by going to a bar and killing someone else." Or conversely, "I have a few hours to kill.  Let me track this rando down and hope that he'll miraculously (a) be useful to me and (b) want something desperately that only I can provide, so as to convince him to join me."

The whole thing felt very deus ex machina, and kind of unnecessary, like, why introduce this new guy at the eleventh hour? But ignoring that (and the original deus ex that involved the two sisters somehow hooking up on opposite sides with Victor and Eli to begin with) it's still fun to watch all the pieces come together - and the small hoodwinking of you as you discover in the final pages what Victor's plan really was, all along.

I was originally thinking I would read the sequel but the reviews have dissuaded me - this stands perfectly well on its own, and no sense in gilding the lily. 


18: A Book About Someone With A Superpower

Ten Second Reviews

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride

By Cary Elwes and Jay Layden

Essentially Cary Elwes' behind-the-scenes look at his role and interactions in The Princess Bride, and, although it certainly has the benefit of a built-in, forgiving audience, it also manages to tread the same fine line of the movie, that is: it's sweet without being sappy, funny without being mean, and gentle without being weak.  It gives you the same "This world may be populated with fundamentally good people after all" feeling that The Great British Bake-Off does.  It makes you nostalgic, and definitely in the mood to re-watch the movie.  Even though it's not "juicy", there's plenty to make you feel like you were there during filming, and you do get a sense of the various personalities on set.  A lovely, nostalgic, easy read.

The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone

By Jaclyn Moriarty

Ten year-old Bronte receives the news that her mostly absent adventurous parents have been killed by pirates - and that their Last Will and Testament requires her (under pain of her town collapsing) to visit her father's ten aunts and deliver gifts to them.  But as she visits orange orchards, dragon hospitals, cruise ships, water sprites and musical kingdoms, she begins to realize there's more going on that she originally suspected. This one was delightfully plotted - although the generous hints throughout the book mean that you'll probably guess what's happening long before we get to the reveal (except one where I was completely surprised - happily so) there are so many strings and sub-plots that it's never boring.  Plus, in addition to the book-long narrative, each aunt is like a mini-adventure, including a crime puzzle, an avalanche, tidying up for depressed people, fleeing pirates, saving babies, and learning magic.  It's a real confection of a book, as Bronte's instructions include many restaurant recommendations along with travel tips, and the master spell reads like a recipe.  There's some darker points as well, which, although it makes sense there would be, given that the book is about events set in motion by the murder of her parents, does feel a little off sometimes, given the upbeat and candy-colored attitude the rest of the book has.  Given the large cast of characters, it also doesn't get confusing or crowded, and it's a pleasant and ultimately feel-good way to spend an afternoon. 

A Gentleman in Moscow

A Gentleman in Moscow

By Amor Towles

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

Allow me to briefly rave: I think this was one of the most engrossing and well-written books I've read all year. I read the whole thing in a day and felt immensely satisfied.  [I will admit, that with a few days' distance, it feels less monumental, more ordinary.  I do think though, that it's a book that would hold up well to re-reading.  There's so much detail and digressions that someone who really wanted to savor every single line would be in hog heaven.]

As always, the books I enjoy get short shrift in these reviews - how many ways can you say: "plot, yes, characters, yes, writing, yes, good, good, good, checks all boxes"?  To paraphrase another great (Russian) author: "Good books are all alike; every bad book is bad in its own way."  So while I can nitpick and critique endlessly on other books, what is there to say here to won't be repetitive?

Well, nothing is perfect: here are some nitpicks to soothe your heart:

I was originally put off by the very poor map at the beginning but not to worry: you don't need a map of Moscow because everything takes place inside one building. Why there is a map of Moscow in this book, I don't know, what we need is a floorplan. Except not really, because most of the action takes place in a few rooms.  But (here we wind back into plaudits again, my apologies) the genius of Towles is that we don't feel cramped by the setting.  As readers, we're taken along with Rostov on his emotional journey, from his lovely suite on the lower floors to the abandoned servants quarters up on six when get gets sentenced, and the tightening of his life, until we reach the nadir in 1926, when he decides to join the staff, and the world opens up again (figuratively - I mean, he's still stuck in the hotel).

I do think though that you can clearly tell the book wasn't written by a Russian - there's a lot of humor in it that isn't pure black. It's a much gentler book than I think would be written by a Russian.  It is certainly possible that Mr. Solzhenitsyn's style has overriden my averages, but it feels impossible that Gentleman in Moscow and Cancer Ward take place at the same time (although Gentleman covers a much longer period of time) and while it's definitely interesting getting a feel for the changing (and the unchanging) political forces in the USSR, Gentleman seems like a dream compared to Cancer Ward's reality. 

In fact, while I appreciate the polite eliding over of the bad times, when Moscow was first under siege and then under conditions of extreme hardship throughout the rest of the war and after, and the horrible political and social ravages of Article 58, as not in keeping with the tone of the book, it is kind of a cop-out. As William Golding said in The Princess Bride: "What with one thing and another, five years passed." Skip the boring parts! Or in this case, the parts of extreme deprivation and hardship, fear, repression, and tyranny.  Is it fair to say that Towles needed to include these when telling a story about one man in one hotel? Maybe, maybe not.  After all, Jane Austen manages to avoid the Napoleonic Wars, and she wrote 6+ books set in that time period.

This book is practically cozy.  Rostov is the ultimate gentleman/hero: polite, mannered, cultured, deftly managing relationships with waiters, OGPU (KGB) officers, actresses, American spies, and children.  There are set-backs yes, (and it almost feels like Towles feels bad that his novel is not more depressing, as he puts a couple of "what happened to them after this" misfortunes of ancillary characters into footnotes) but ultimately, you feel good at the end - the right people succeed, the bad people are punished, and there is a bright and shining hope and optimism.

It feels odd to think of it this way, and it's definitely a spoiler, but it really belongs up there with some of the other great prison-break novels of our time: Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, The Count of Monte Cristo (which I am so excited to read for the challenge later!).  This bears more resemblance to the Shawshank Redemption, in terms of the characters, motivations, lifestyles, and tone.  Rostov is not in for vengeance in the end.  Maybe because he knows how lucky he is to be merely imprisoned.  I never guessed it (I'm bad at mysteries) so one of the most poignant moments was when Rostov admitted to his dead friend's "widow" that the revolutionary poem that saved his life was written by his proletariat friend.  The subterfuge intended originally to save his friend from retribution ended up saving his own life.  Maybe it's saccharine, but maybe it's also important to have these moments in art, so that in life we can live up to the examples they lead.

40: Your Favorite Prompt From A Past Popsugar Reading Challenge
    (2017) 35: A Book Set In A Hotel

Behind the Throne

Behind the Throne

By K.B. Wagers

Hail Bristol has made a name for herself as one of the most fearsome gunrunners in the galaxy. But she can't escape her past forever: twenty years ago, she was a runaway princess of the Indranan Empire. Now, her mother's people have finally come to bring her home.

But when Hail is dragged back to her Indrana to take her rightful place as the only remaining heir, she finds that trading her ship for a palace is her most dangerous move yet.

I.e. Hail is summoned to come back home as the prodigal heir after her sisters have been killed and her mother has space madness.  Once she gets back though, it's very clear that whoever killed her sisters wants to kill her too. Blah blah blah, evil cousin who has been "helping out" in Hail's absence set all this up to take control.  One aborted coup later, Hail is crowned empress.

This was somewhat less "in space" than originally anticipated - although it feels very much like a space sci-fi book, our main character, Hail, spends all but the first few chapters on her home planet. It started out interesting enough, a good hook of former-outlaw-turned-missing-princess, set in an Indian subcontinent-inspired world, but the follow through is lacking. 

First: there is a confusing number of players and names thrown at you, most of them appearing, or discussed, only briefly, so remembering and keeping track of the various people (and even whether they are loyal or disloyal) was difficult.  We spend the most time with two sarcastic but incredibly skilled "Trackers" cum bodyguards named Emmory and Zin, who are also indistinguishable from each other.  

Second: the plot, such as it is, is pretty much the obvious person, and everyone seems to acknowledge this fairly early on, yet the plotters still manage to stage a (short lived) coup.  I mean, Hail hates Ganda (with no explanation aside from, essentially, what an asshole she was twenty years ago) and it turns out Ganda is definitely plotting for the throne, and no one is even watching her! Let's think about, I don't know, keeping tabs on the people you know are scheming behind your back.  And also, Emmory/Zin's decision not to tell Hail that another bodyguard, Nal is almost definitely a traitor too, until Hail gets mad and fires her for some other reason? Like, maybe Hail knowing who she can or cannot trust (and who might be used to plant misinformation for the other side) would be a pretty useful and important thing to know.  But instead we get Hail conjuring up the leader of the resistance (who is conveniently not trying to kill her) in a matter of minutes and having a heart to heart about how she's coping with her sister's death.  Is this how the Indranan government is normally run?  If so, I'm somewhat sympathetic to Ganda.  This seems both unskilled and incredibly messy. 

Third: I just did not care very much about any of the characters or what happened to them.  Hail's sisters and niece are murdered before the book begins, and we come back to find her mother being poisoned, and honestly, I assume (and Hail tells us) that she loved her family, but there's very little connection that we get to see as readers: no flashbacks, no mementos, just a distance that, frankly, twenty years of never contacting your family would realistically give you.  But it creates a problem because that sense of defending a home isn't there: all these people are barely acquaintances, we don't revisit any childhood spots, Hail could have been running a long con and had the same emotional attachment to the outcome. 

I don't think it's bad, per se, I just struggled to stay interested and finish it.  It took me weeks to finish and I had to renew my loan twice.  I hope the next one is good - I have two more to finish before I can get to another light read, and I'm cranky about it.

20: A Book Set In Space

Montague Island Mysteries and Other Logic Puzzles

Montague Island Mysteries and Other Logic Puzzles

By R. Wayne Schmittberger

Solve logic puzzles AND play sleuth at the same time! This thoroughly unique book—written by the former editor of Games magazine—offers the immersive pleasure of a novel as it follows a group of friends who meet regularly to play murder-mystery games at the island home of a wealthy couple. As you go about completing the puzzles, you’ll learn more about the guests, the house, and the island . . . and uncover a secret about the mansion itself. Maps of the island throughout enhance the atmosphere and draw solvers deeper into the story.

So although I was somewhat incorrect in my original understanding of what this was, I still had a really good time solving the puzzles.  I originally though that this was a story-based book with puzzles to solve, which would require the solving of an earlier puzzle in order to arrive at the correct solution for later puzzles, and this isn't set up that way at all.  It does have a loose "story" (seven guests are invited to the island and solve puzzles, but every so often there's an allusion to some secret reason the guests were invited, which is resolved in the final puzzle) but none of the puzzles require information or answers from any of the other puzzles.

What I appreciated about this book was the variety of logic puzzles (some had maps, some were based on tournaments, some were very traditional, and I just skipped the ones that asked about card hands, since I don't have time for that) and the care the author took to keep the puzzles as little confusing as possible.  What I mean by that is, names weren't similar and didn't start with the same letter, clues and important categories weren't overly long or unnecessarily numerical or anything like that.  For example, there weren't any puzzles that required you to figure out if events took place in 1912, 1931, 1971, 1928 or 1952.  Maybe it's small news, but the online logic problem site I've been going to (puzzle baron, if you're curious) seems way too invested in small puzzles which are incredibly confusing for keeping the categories straight.

I liked that we followed the same group of people the whole way, although it took me a bit to get used to the "one of these people is lying" puzzles.  I would do a few puzzles a week, and with some pauses, it took me about two months to finish.  It felt substantial.   I also really appreciated the solution key in the back, along with the explanations, they helped me when I couldn't figure out what some of the early puzzles were.  I checked it sort of religiously, although I suppose that wasn't quite necessary, since the correct answers didn't impact any later puzzles.  In fact, if there would be one change for the next book, I'd love if one or more of the puzzles had hints which relied on previous puzzles.

It's not a normal book, and I'm not at all sure that I was really following the prompt, since this is more like a book of crosswords than it is a typical book, but it's one of my most enjoyed of this project, and I am already anxiously waiting on the sequel!

39: A Book Revolving Around A Puzzle Or A Game

The Woman Who Smashed Codes

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

By Jason Fagone

In 1916, a young Quaker schoolteacher and poetry scholar named Elizebeth Smith was hired by an eccentric tycoon to find the secret message he believed were embedded in Shakespeare's plays.  She moved to the tycoon's lavish estate outside of Chicago expecting to spend her days poring through old books.  But the rich man's close ties to the U.S. government, and the urgencies of war, quickly transformed Elizebeth's mission. She soon learned to apply her skills to an exciting new venture: codebreaking - the solving of secret message without knowledge of the key.  Working alongside her on the estate was William Friedman, a Jewish scientist who would become her husband and lifelong codebreaking partner.  Elizebeth and William were in many ways the Adam and Eve of the National Security Agency, the U.S. institution that monitors and intercepts foreign communications to glean intelligence.

In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman who played an integral role in our nation's history - from the Great War to the Cold War. He traces Elizebeth's developing career through World War I, Prohibition, and the struggle against fascism.  She helped catch gangsters and smugglers, exposed a Nazi ring in South America, and fought a clandestine battle of wits against Hitler's Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German operatives to conceal their communications.  And through it all, she served as muse to her husband, a master of puzzles, who astonished friends and foes alike. Inside an army vault in Washington, he worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigma - and succeeded, at terrible cost to his personal life.

This one was a gift to me from my mother, who sometimes gets me non-fiction books that I am less than wholly interested in, but this was a pleasant enough read.  It's a biography of Elizebeth Friedman, who was apparently instrumental in early American code-breaking.  I do sometimes struggle with non-fiction because in life, unlike in a story, you have to tell an interesting story from the things that actually happened - which can be sometimes very boring, and frequently changes are made of things that were pieced together through myriad small incremental details, which doesn't always make the most exciting narrative: "We're about to enter early married life - now let's describe the ten background characters who you need to know in order to understand what happened next - but they'll never be mentioned again!"  It's understandably hard to keep the balance between the actual facts and a good story in nonfiction, so I'm somewhat sympathetic when I inevitably don't feel the same "high" from a nonfiction as I do a good fiction book.  For example, I really enjoyed Show Me a Hero and Personal History, but was a little let down by Killers of the Flower Moon and The Radium Girls, both of which are boosted by built-in dramatic storylines involving death and cover-ups.  And Ben Macintyre's books, Operation Mincemeat and Double Cross, were both okay, but honestly I barely remember them.  I just don't generally find myself mulling over a good nonfiction book or wanting to re-read it afterwards, and I don't think TWWSC will defy the odds. Sidenote: it's interesting to me the similarities with A Personal History - both women quietly getting things done while their husbands suffered nervous breakdowns, although Graham's work came after and as a direct result of her husband's deterioration, while Elizebeth is just quietly getting shit done 24-7. 

So the good things: it's a well-told story, manages to keep your attention throughout, and doesn't feel too long.  If anything, it feels oddly incomplete, which is maybe not a total surprise when talking about a codebreaker whose work was highly classified until relatively recently.  But although we hear about Elizebeth's affinity for codes, only one or two types is broken down and explained to us as readers, and some of the leaps in deduction (figuring out what codephrase or book is being used for a code in another language) are so little touched on that they seem practically miraculous.  Maybe they were, maybe they weren't, but I can't help but wonder if the author left it out because he thought it would be too boring or difficult to understand to the lay reader, or if he himself didn't know how she did it - after all, her materials wouldn't necessarily have a step by step manual for her thoughts.  I think it would have made a good appendix - to walk us through a (short) puzzle and see exactly how some of these mysteries were cracked.

The other problem with telling Elizebeth's story is that, frankly, although she did an important and thorough job as codebreaker during the second world war, there were no threats or danger lurking if she failed, no personal stakes, aside from the ones she sets herself.  She gets in, is very competent, and then gracefully exits when the war is done.  The decisions about when to crack down on the South American spies was made over her head and by a separate department.  I'm certainly not going to fault Fagone for not having better facts, but it is true that it is just always going to be hard to write a gripping story about someone who went to work in an office everyday and then came home, even though (or maybe especially because) their office consists of a lot of detail oriented paperwork.  It's also sort of difficult because both big "breakthrough" moments for Elizebeth and William in the war - cracking Enigma and Purple, respectively, fall flat, as Enigma was cracked simultaneously by Bletchley Park, and Purple's decoding does nothing to prevent Pearl Harbor, because of government red tape.

Fagone's style is.... definitely something.  There's a strong modern feminist bent, and a few interjections of swearing, so you do get a little more personal than most biographies, but that adds to its charm, not detracts.  Hss pu hss, h nvvk zahya mvy zvtlvul thrpun h kpcl puav jyfwahuhsfzpz!

29 - A Book With "Love" In The Title (or sub-title, I cheated a bit on this)