Category: Literacy 2023

Book
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

Synopsis
Four residents of a retirement community formed The Thursday Murder Club, where they look over cold case files and try to find some kind of justice for victims of unsolved crimes. When someone close to their community is murdered, they’re compelled to investigate, in unofficial cooperation with the local police.

Pros

• Compelling and more quick-moving than you might expect from the premise.
• Cleverly structured to stay in sync with the reader — loose ends are tied up, and potential suspects are cleared away, right as they need to be.
• Deftly walks the line between “ghoulish fascination with lurid details of murders” and “bringing a sense of justice,” which is one of the problems inherent in the whole idea of a “cozy” murder mystery.
• Clear sense of good guys and bad guys, and more significantly, which characters deserve depth and which are left as caricatures.
• Gives each of the main characters a history and a depth to their present.
• Deeper themes run underneath the murder mystery, asserting the dignity of the elderly as complex human beings in a particular stage of their lives, instead of existing only as “old people.” Goes into the details of their relationships, their fears, and how their current lives overlap their previous ones.

Cons

• Aggressively cozy. Obviously, “cozy murder story” is the whole pitch for this book, but it threatens to make everything feel too artificial.
• Feels like a bit of a cheat to have a character who’s essentially a super-hero, but with the advantage of adding a Poirot-style character into a story that could’ve easily been just four Miss Marples.
• Some of the revelations late in the book seem to come out of nowhere — they’re foreshadowed, but the reader gets no clues to deduce them.
• Ends up being more of a “crime story” than “murder mystery,” as you’ve got a vague idea of suspects and red herrings, but not enough clues to solve the mystery yourself.

Verdict
I was prepared to write this one off as “quick but shallow,” but halfway through, I was completely won over. I’d expected it to be just a case of a successful celebrity taking a stab at writing, taking advantage of his name-recognition to launch it into best-seller status. But it’s charming and often moving, a solid read as a murder mystery story, with just enough edge to its characters to make them appealing. I enjoyed it a lot, and I’m looking forward to the next three books in the series.

Book
The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

Synopsis
When Emily Inglethorpe, wealthy owner of a manor house in a small English village, is murdered in a locked room in the middle of the night, retired detective Hercule Poirot is entreated by the victim’s family to help investigate.

Pros

• The definition of a classic murder mystery, with a house full of suspects, each with their own private scandals and agendas and intrigue that Poirot has to sort out along with the murder itself.
• You’d never guess this was Hercule Poirot’s first appearance, as he seems to be a fully-formed character from the start, already having all of his eccentricities, mannerisms, benign condescension, and tendency to disappear for chapters at a time only to reveal his discoveries at the last minute.
• Once the case is solved, Christie goes back through the details to demonstrate how she played fair the entire time. All of the clues are there, even though they’re buried under a mountain of red herrings and subplots.
• The most relevant clues are repeatedly mentioned, so as everything was tied together, I almost always thought, “oh yes, I remember that detail.”
• Cleverly throws suspicion among its characters, making the reader feel as if they’ve gotten a solid “vibe” about whodunnit even if they can’t provide any real evidence.

Cons

• Even if you notice all of the clues, and even if you make the correct deductions from them (e.g. realizing that someone was obviously wearing a disguise), the actual chain of events that Poirot explains is so convoluted that it would’ve been impossible to guess.
• Unlike Christie’s later books, this is extremely dated and unmistakably a product of its time.

Verdict
Not my favorite Agatha Christie mystery, but it’s a solid and entertaining story that illustrates just how much she was a master of the genre. As I’ve been reading and re-reading her books this year, I’ve been amazed at how experimental she could be and at how timeless her work could be. The Mysterious Affair at Styles is neither timeless or experimental, but it does feel as if it shows her interests: it seems that an intricately-constructed murder mystery came easy to her, and she just used them as the backdrop to create interesting characters and tell their stories.

Book
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Synopsis
A man returns to his childhood home and feels compelled to visit the farmhouse at the end of his street. While there, he remembers the first time he visited the farm as a seven-year-old, when he met his friend 11-year-old Lettie Hempstead, along with her mother and grandmother, and went on an errand that brought back something horrible.

Pros

• Neil Gaiman in his element, writing about all the things he does best: magic, myth, wonder mixed with terror, childhood, and the melancholy of adulthood.
• Doesn’t pull its punches, feeling genuinely dark and horrifying but without crossing the line into gratuitous violence or edginess.
• Combines all of the flavors of terror unique to childhood: fear of monsters, fear of getting in trouble, fear of loneliness and abandonment, and the sinking feeling that you’ve done something wrong that you can never take back.
• Feels epic and weighty in scope while remaining a focused, concise story — it feels exactly as big as it needs to be.
• You only realize after the fact that there is a non-magical explanation for everything; the story as presented seems so much more matter-of-fact and more real than any attempt to explain what really must’ve happened.

Cons

• A little bit too vague for the sake of maintaining a sense of mystery. This is absolutely not a book about the “rules” of magic, and is instead meant to evoke feelings and the sense of impossibly ancient forces at work. That said, I still wish that there had been more of a sense of structure to what was going on, instead of characters constantly speaking in riddles.

Verdict
This is Neil Gaiman doing what he does best, and it’s one of his most satisfying books. He has a talent for writing about childhood and magic that conveys the full weight and melancholy of adulthood, but with a sense that as grown-ups, magic is only mostly dead to us, not entirely.

Book
Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

Synopsis
In 1954, African American veteran Atticus Turner returns to his hometown of Chicago on a summons from his estranged father. When he arrives and discovers his father has gone missing, the trail leads to a small town in New England. Atticus sets off on a road trip with his uncle and a childhood friend, eventually getting pulled into the machinations of a centuries-old cabal of wizards trying to perform a ritual to summon eldritch powers and bring about the apocalypse.

Spoiler Warning
Mild spoiler warning below about the format of the book, which surprised me and ended up being one of my favorite things about it.

Pros

• Clever, funny, genuinely horrific, with characters that you can’t help but root for even when they’re being abrasive.
• Somehow has all the fun readability of pulp and genre fiction, and illustrations and accounts of the tragedies and injustices of living in the US in the Jim Crow era. The sci-fi/supernatural horror and historical fiction aspects of the book inform each other and are perfectly intertwined, without sacrificing any of the fun of one or any of the weight of the other.
• The characters are smart, capable, and possibly most surprising, sci-fi and astronomy nerds. It feels like one of the most pernicious stereotypes in popular media that African Americans aren’t interested in the kinds of nerdy stuff that tends to be depicted as only appealing to white males. Even “nice racism” tends to suggest that black men and women are just too cool to be interested in science fiction or horror, which is, of course, complete bullshit. (And yet, when I saw “Tightrope” for the first time, I still found myself surprised that someone as cool and drop-dead gorgeous as Janelle Monáe made a three-album concept series inspired by Afrofuturism and casting herself as an android).
• Because of the above, all of the characters are matter-of-fact and practical when faced with supernatural horrors, making the story work as horror and action/adventure as they find a way out.
• The format was such a wonderful surprise: the initial story is relatively quickly resolved, and then the book becomes more of an anthology of inter-related stories, each focused on a different main character. This allows the book to have sweeping changes in subject and tone — ghost story, sci-fi fantasy, supernatural heist story, body horror — all of which feel as if they’re part of the same story but never slowing down the pace.
• Each story brilliantly acts as a parable/illustration of the injustices African Americans faced in the Jim Crow era: redlining, sundown towns, needing the Green Book to travel safely, the Tulsa riots, etc. It refuses to obfuscate or sugar-coat any of these topics, but it also never feels too heavy-handed. The topic is always given a supernatural twist, where the reality of life in the US is often at least as harrowing as whatever cosmic horror the gang is faced with this week.

Cons

• Slow reading for me, as several parts made me so angry that I had to put the book down for a while. This might be specific to people like me who are super-sensitive to reading about injustices, having never been the target of them ourselves.
• Encounters with the real over-the-top eldritch horrors are wrapped up fairly quickly, which does avoid overly long and drawn-out descriptions of the indescribable, but also feels a bit anti-climactic.
• If you’re vindictive like me, you kind of want to see the bad guys made to suffer a bit more.

Verdict
I absolutely loved this book. While it sometimes made me so angry that I had to put it down for a couple of days, the anger at the injustices just make the victories feel much more satisfying. I’m even more eager to watch the TV series now, especially knowing that the novel was originally conceived as a TV pitch.

Book
You Can’t Be Serious by Kal Penn

Synopsis
Kalpen Modi writes about his upbringing as a member of an immigrant Indian family in New Jersey, his path to becoming an actor, his time on the Obama campaign and in the Obama administration, and his career afterwards.

Disclaimer
I really dislike memoirs, so I was predisposed to dislike this book. I’ve got an irrationally low tolerance for hearing someone talk about themselves at length, and I feel as if it takes an extraordinarily good storyteller or an extraordinarily interesting life to overcome my impression of narcissism. So instead of the usual “Pros” and “Cons” I’ll just make a list of observations about the book.

Observations

• Frequently goes from being toothless to dismissive without ever coming across as gossipy, and full of bizarrely specific details. All of that made it seem more like Kal Penn fan fiction than a memoir.
• It was interesting to see Modi describe his community in New Jersey as being diverse and intersectional instead of insular, since I’ve rarely seen immigrant communities depicted in the media and when they are, they’re almost always shown to be some kind of homogenous monolith that strives to keep to itself. Modi writes more about bar and bat mitzvahs than Indian ceremonies.
• The book was written with a ton of gratitude and respect for his parents for working so hard to give him a stable life where an uncertain career in acting could be possible.
• Has a much-needed reminder that being recognizable or even famous doesn’t always equate to being rich. He says that Harold & Kumar gave him a ton of notoriety but didn’t provide a runway beyond a half year.
• Generally, he talks a good bit about financial insecurity and having trouble finding work, but also seems to have a stability that I would’ve been very envious of in my college years and 20s.
• His description of the Obama campaign and the election was vivid enough to make me nostalgic about that time and the feeling of hopefulness that came with it. His respect for the Obamas and key people in the administration is evident every time he writes about them.
• Goes into absolutely no detail about being gay, the process of coming out, any discrimination he’s faced because of his sexuality, none of it. Almost all of the book treats it as a total non-issue. The chapter about his fiancé is all about NASCAR, to the point that it feels like he’s deliberately refusing to discuss it. Obviously, people can choose to be private and choose what they want to write about. But this book taught me the names of his middle-school classmates and that he has a tree-nut allergy, but nothing about his experiences that I might actually be able to relate to. It’s especially jarring when he’s talking about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell or marriage equality while seemingly refusing to talk about them as things that might affect him personally.
• The next-to-last chapter ends the book on a sour note, insisting that the fate of his series Sunnyside was due to systemic racism and a lack of support and promotion from NBC. Obviously, I don’t know the real story, but one thing I do know is that I’ve had a crush on Kal Penn ever since he was on How I Met Your Mother, if not earlier, and the trailer and the pitch still couldn’t get me interested in the series. It seems like working in TV for 20 years would have given plenty of examples of how sometimes stuff just doesn’t work.

Verdict
As I mentioned, I don’t like memoirs, so it says a lot about the readability of the book that I finished it at all. I saw it at a queer book fair last weekend, and I was surprised to see it on the shelf, since I had no idea that Kal Penn was “dating dudes” as he describes it. It turned out to be a humorous but infuriating account of how people of color are treated in the entertainment industry, and a bit of nostalgia for the days when you could actually feel good and hopeful about a Democratic presidential candidate. I just guess congratulations are in order to Kal Penn for being the one person in America to come out in the early 2000s and have it be a completely uninteresting non-issue.

Book
The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly

Synopsis
The Golden Bones was a hugely popular art book filled with paintings giving clues to the locations of tiny, jeweled bones buried all across England. The book brought fame and wealth to the artist, but a lifetime of paranoia to his daughter Nell, who’s been stalked, threatened, and attacked by the hunt’s obsessive fans. Now, on the book’s 50th anniversary, there’s a plan to create a modern version of the treasure hunt, launched with a publicity stunt revealing the final bone that had never been found. When the launch goes awry, it ties the family to an actual murder and puts Nell and her family in jeopardy once again.

Pros

• Brilliant concept, building off the real-world existence of Masquerade and, as the author describes it, “the human impulse to uncover secrets”
• Once it gets moving, it’s extremely compelling. I was up until 3 AM reading it last night, and couldn’t wait until bedtime tonight and had to finish it this morning.
• Juggles enough complications and revelations and escalations to make it feel as if everything is just on the edge of collapse, but without feeling too overwhelming.
• Does a good job capturing the style and tone of treasure-hunt and ARG message boards — everyone referring to each other by online handle, and the mix of people fully invested in the subject along those who are perpetually angry at the artists
• Pitch-perfect depiction of an egomaniacal asshole who is incessantly making cutting remarks, undermining everyone around him and passing it off as affection.
• One of the major revelations is astonishingly well done. You immediately have to turn back and read an earlier chapter, to see that all the clues were there all along.

Cons

• The depiction of an egomaniacal asshole was vivid enough to reawaken low-grade anxiety about people like that I’ve met in real life.
• Kind of a stumbling start to the book, as there’s a ton of necessary context that needs to be established, and it all gets thrown together in a bewildering mess of names and events.
• I just plain don’t like the main character; she’s self-righteous and a hypocrite. People kept pointing out she was being insufferable, and they were right, and she ignored them. There I said it.
• Not really a “con,” so much as mismanaged expectations on my part: the book is only barely interested in the puzzle-hunt nature of the premise, and is much more of a “Tiny Secret Whispers”-style family drama.

Verdict
This wasn’t the book that I wanted or expected it to be, but it was surprisingly good at being what it is. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a “can’t put it down” thriller, and this one definitely qualifies. It’s gripping even though there’s very little action or suspense; it’s all plot developments moving everything constantly forward.

Book
Eerie Tales from the School of Screams by Graham Annable

Synopsis
Children in a classroom are called on by their teacher to deliver an EERIE story to the rest of the class, and we get to see five of them play out.

Disclaimer
I worked with Graham at LucasArts and Telltale, but I would think his stuff is brilliant anyway.

Pros

• More of the creepy-funny feel of the Grickle animated short films he’s been making for years, but on paper.
• Suitable for kids — Or maybe more accurate to say that it’s aimed at kids but suitable for adults? I don’t care! — but there’s little sense of anything being watered down. This feels like the creepy stories real kids would tell each other.
• Graham is a master of expressions and poses; even after years of being a fan, I’m impressed by how he can get across a full-on mood and complete state of mind for a character by changing the position of a line by a fraction of a millimeter.
• The anthology format is great; it calls back to kids’ horror shows like Are You Afraid of the Dark? as well as adult horror anthologies, but also carries through the entire framing story.
• “The Face in the Forest” is my favorite of the stories, and it manages to be horrific and heartwarming at the same time.
• I love how it feels old-fashioned and modern at the same time; it feels like it’s not trying to be anything else.

Cons

• I read it too fast, so I’m only an hour from getting it in the mail and I already want the sequel.
• I’d been hoping for Principal Skeleton.

Verdict
I loved it. I wish I’d had comics like this when I was younger, “younger” including “in my forties.” If you’re a fan of Graham’s creepy-funny animated horror shorts, then this is a no-brainer. If you’re not a fan of them, then what is wrong with you?