THE DOUBLE BIND (Chris Bohjalian) - April 24/07

An exceedingly well-written though distinctly overlong mystery from Bohjalian. The inclusion of several characters from The Great Gatsby initially had me baffled, though the twist that the central character had essentially gone crazy after the rape/mutilation and was making everything up was a nifty one. But the whole thing is just much longer than it needs to be. Still, Bohjalian is an amazing writer and he does a fantastic job of developing the characters and their surroundings. *** out of ****

INCENDIARY (Chris Cleave) - April 8/07

Written entirely in the first person by a protagonist whose grasp on the English language leaves something to be desired, Incendiary is a fantastic - albeit thoroughly bleak - novel revolving around the exploits of a young mother whose bomb-squad husband and young son are blown up in a terrorist attack. Cleave does a fantastic job of peppering the proceedings with extraordinarily vivid set-pieces - including the initial attack, a fake attack that results in a panic later, etc - and it's certainly easy enough to overlook the poor grammar. But it's hard not to wish that the central character would've eventually gotten better; the book ends with her still seeing visions of her young son and awaiting her arrest (she almost killed the doppelganger that was meant to come out with the truth). Oh, and that twist that "THEY KNEW" is pretty fantastic. This should hopefully make for an amazing movie... **** out of ****

ON THE ROAD (Jack Kerouac) - Late March/07

Kerouac's infamous stream-of-consciousness style is initially interesting but ultimately disastrous. The main character isn't developed beyond his most superficial attributes, and it becomes increasingly difficult to care about his adventures. When I realized I was glazing over most of the pages - this was starting to feel like work - I stopped around page 45. No rating.

WORLD WAR Z (Max Brooks) - Early March/07

Brooks takes a fascinating premise and squanders it by emphasizing different characters every 10 pages or so. This is meant to be an oral history of the zombie war, but since it never actually happened, it's impossible to care about any of these individual stories. Brooks fails to realize that you can't really do a book like this without at least one actual character; there's otherwise absolutely nothing here for the reader to become invested with. No rating (stopped around page 70).