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STAN SMITH'S BOOK REVIEWS
MY PROMISE TO YOU: I will review EVERY SINGLE BOOK I READ THIS YEAR....um, starting in April. And pretty much continuing on past a year in to the next one. Or, really, all the books I read from now on.
These are either books people have sent or just happen to be in my rotation. If you have an advanced copy of your book, send it to (600 N. 36th St. Suite 330. Seattle, WA 98103-8699) and I'll probably review it.
THE RULES: The dates are based on when I finished a book, and they are all in real-time order. No skipping or adding stuff in later, or reviewing books I read a long time ago. I pledge to review every single book I read, no matter how pointless or embarrassing over the next year. All books are given a numerical grade/rating from One to Ten Stans, based on widely accepted international guidelines.
INTERNATIONAL "STAN-CLAD" BOOK REVIEW GUIDELINES (Also available in Esperanto)
10 Stans-Astonishingly good. Powerful. Beautiful. Will read it to my grandchildren, an absolute masterpiece.
9 Stans- Pretty damn great. Innovative, daring, honest. Totally in command of it's craft and intent. Just slightly below a true classic.
8 Stans- Has style, chops, verve, poise. There were a few glitches in tone or consistency, but this is still exceptional writing.
7 Stans- A variety of solid stuff that made me want to like it more than maybe I
really did. Needs some direction. Endearingly flawed. Still totally worth reading, and probably a better book than most.
6 Stans- I liked some of it okay. At least four or five good ideas. Still, a
lot of it was tiresome and I was sorta glad when it was over.
5 Stans- Harlen Coben, but without the subtlety or depth.Made me sleepy and suddenly nostalgic for James Frey.
4 Stans- Pointedly off. Bad idea, bad prose, bad binding. Bad.
3 Stans- Gave up in less than a chapter.
2 Stans- The sort of moldering tripe that makes you wish you were on an airplane reading the in-flight magazine.
1 Stan- Only one Stan! The Absolute Worst Book Ever Written! I threw this into the ocean, and it washed immediately back. A sea turtle ate it and it gave him the burning shits for two months.
2-7-10
Natasha by David Bezmozgis 0.0 Stans
2-7-10
Just Kids by Patty Smith 0.0 Stans
2-7-10
Let The Great World Spin by Colum Mcann 0.0 Stans
2-7-10
Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription by William F. Buckly Jr. 6.0 Stans
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Outtakes from the "Notes and Asides" section of the National Review over the years, this is a collection of Buckley letters and rants. Has all the usual gimlet-eyed Buckley wit and constipated erudition and plenty of new vocabulary worlds for any reader. I laughed out loud a few times. Enjoyable on the whole, conservative in the extreme, and frequently sounding like the man had just smoked a big fat joint. How do these thing co-exist? Got me. But you can practically hear him giggling and turning up the Zeppelin in the background. |
1-27-10
Slab Rat by Ted Heller 7.1 Stans
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Deliriously unkind. Mean as hell. Pretty hilarious take-down of the glossy magazine world and all the awful, shallow people who inhabit it. Including the narrator. There's been a lot of books of this ilk published in the last few years-insider destructions of everything from telemarking to advertising, so in a way this feels sort of stale. And it's definitely too long. But, it's entertaining. If you go into it with no expectations other than 300 pages of sarcastic laughs and biting set-pieces, you could do a lot worse than this novel. |
1-20-10
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle 7.0 Stans
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If this is more or less Doyle's transcription of someone he knows telling him the story of their life, it's interesting but sort of stagnent. If he just made all this up, it's brilliant. Really takes you to a time and place, like the best fiction, although that place is hard to read and depressing. |
1-16-10
Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion 8.0 Stans
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Some of these forty+ year old essays are downright brilliant. Didion has a way of snidely summing up the ludicrous and self-delusional in almost almost any subject she focuses on, and reserves particular, barely restrained bile for sixties counter culture, what we now call dirty hippies. She pokes a big ol' hole in the notion of the "Summer of Love" as being anything but a nostalgic lie, and she manages to do it while there, not decades later. People were lazy, confused opportunists searching for someone to follow or meaning amongst the meaninlessness just as much then as they are today. We will tell ourselves anything to pretend toward purpose, and Didion tells this fact to to us straight. |
1-11-10
Goodbye Columbus by Phillip Roth 8.4 Stans
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The title novella amongst these other short stories is fantastic. Roth captures a time, a city, and its frustrations so broadly and eloquently by focusing on a very narrow set of characters. It's a great trick, one that has been widely emulated with much less success for years. It's hard not to get depressed reading a book like this that more or less lays open the stupidity and ignorance of social mores from forty years ago with the realization that they're just as bad or worse now. We have learned little or nothing, except to effecting hide or prejudices, since the time Goodbye Columbus was written. We are just as vain, just as delusional, just as driven by a mixture of lust, station, and self=preservation. |
1-3-10
Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield 6.0 Stans
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A bunch of this mawkish memoir rang true as I am about the same age as the author and lived through the same general musical era that he writes about with varying degrees of wit and perception. A thin book that is really more of an extended essay on 90's pop music and the death of his wife that it is a memoir, I found this to be alternately endearing and tiresome. Joining the ranks of Chuck Klosterman and others championing lousy pop tunes and cultural artifacts dismissed by most as hopelessly commercial, he succeeds in making musical snobbery seem distasteful, if not self-delusional, for pages on end. Then I remember exactly which bands he's talking about, and my elitism comes rushing back in. I've always wanted to be one of those guys who could unabashedly love, say, Third Eye Blind, despite all their glaring talentlessness, and wave my lack of musical-related esteem like a red hanky in everyone's face. But I'm not. And this level of unabashedly narcissistic navel-gazing shouldn't be confused with a certain Lou Reed-ish literary profundity either. |
1-3-10
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins 8.0 Stans
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A thorough debunking of all things supernatural. An absolute refutation of "faith" as something to aspire to. An irrefutable treatise on the primacy of natural selection as an explanation for existence, and the basis for many other areas of scientific inquiry. Witty, if self-satisfied in parts, it's still a book pretty much everyone on the planet should read. |
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what i'm reading now
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