Random Thoughts

I’ve read quite a few books by Lawrence Block — they’re a bit hit or miss. That is, he writes well, but his plots often leave much to be desired.

This is from an early series, and I haven’t read any of these books before.

Well, yes, this is wittily written as usual. You can’t argue with lines like “Now is the winter of our discotheque”. But also like I kinda expected, the plot is basically one-thing-happens-and-then-the-next-and-then-magic-resolve.

And the hero in this book is as high concept as all Block’s heroes — it’s a spy guy that has a brain damage that makes it impossible for him to sleep! Catchy! Or not!

And jeeze, some of the plot elements are gross, even for a humorous spy thriller kind of thing from 1968.

True:

I was going to dnf this book at 85%, yes 85% that’s how bad it was. This series has steadily gotten worse and the culprit is wordiness, a lot of it. Something which could have been written in 2 paragraphs is drawn out to 15 pages – I kid you not.

For such a short book, it’s amazing how much of it is pure filler.

Here Comes A Hero (1968) by Lawrence Block (Buy used, 3.68 on Goodreads)

I was in the mood to read some cheesy detective novel today, and this was recommended for fans of Agatha Christie, etc…

… but my god! The horrors! The writing here is so awful. It’s not just that she’s heavy handed with the adjective and adverb sprinkling, but the way pronouns don’t always match up with what they’re referring to, and the weird similes, and the way the dialogues move…

Reading this is what I imagine having an aneurysm is like. Everything is strange and odd and nothing makes much sense.

I had to bail by page 30. It’s just too horrible.

Exactly:

As for the rest, the book didn’t live up to my expectations. Poor characterization simply killed the story for me. The characters were drawn in a strange way and their back stories were introduced awkwardly. I couldn’t understand their motivations and actions. Too often they acted immaturely (Yvette Nichol) or weirdly hysterical (Clara Morrow, Yolande). Dialog was very stilted at times too, often I had no idea what people were talking about and why they found certain things funny.

Still Life (2012) by Louise Penny (Buy new, buy used, 3.9 on Goodreads)

This is a collection of short stories from the Expanse universe. They were published concurrently with the novels, but I haven’t read them before this.

And I was thinking… “yay! an opportunity to spend some nostalgic time with all those characters I loved!” And this is not that at all.

Instead we get the backstories of a whole bunch of minor characters. Well — not minor minor, but not part of the main team. (Except for one story where we’ve kept guessing WHO COULD THIS KID BE IS IT ?!? and reader, it is.) It’s the kind of material you hope that writers have for their novels — that is, background material that’s used to inform what’s happening in the novels proper.

These stories just feel so unnecessary. Sure, they tell you the backstory about things you might have wondered about — like, just how fucked up could those people who killed the people at the Eros station be, really? (answer: “Yes”), but, like, none of it matters? Nothing we learn in these stories make us reconsider anything about what happened in the novels, or affect any kind of change.

It’s more like the tedious “lore filling” that you see fan fiction writers do, where they take a background character and imagine how that character came to be there, and there you are.

But oldee tymey sci fi TV series used to have what they called bottle episodes, where they took a week off of the main plot and focused on some character, and then they had a little side adventure. Sometimes that felt pointless, and sometimes it was fun.

And at least one story was made into a TV episode, or perhaps the other way around: It read like the novellaisation of a TV episode.

But: Are these stories fun? Yeah, they’re OK. None of them are anywhere near as good as even the worst Expanse novels (is that number four? the one they spend on the dirt planet?), but they’re OK. It’s got 4.4 on Goodreads, so people who liked the novels were fine with it.

Or as they say, it’s a let down, but it’s recommended.

The author(s)’s notes are somewhat grating, though. These aren’t deep stories, but they explain them at us anyway.

Memory’s Legion (2022) by James S. A. Corey (Buy new, buy used, 4.37 on Goodreads)