When I was a kid a special type of books was very popular. The genre could be called romance with erotical scenes as the main reason for the books to be written. Housewives frantically exchanged those cheap paperbacks hiding them from kids and reading them by packs. The books contained no plot, no decent dialogues, no character development apart from characters being beautiful and having sex whenever the plot allowed.

Have modern thrillers taken the place of those books? Is there a target audience for whom certain types of books are produced? These audience oriented books contain a number of obligatory elements that are to be squeezed in regardless of the plot.

The Girl Before is a classic example of such a product. The story is so dumb its mere existence is possible only due to the real estate market being bad. The characters agree to follow the rules of a bizarre landlord because they can’t find anywhere else to live. Is the market in London really so bad or it’s just an invented factor?

Looks like the target audience of the book is supposed to be interested in:

• What the characters are wearing. All of them, always, everywhere, in details; color, material, shape, size, texture. Nothing of it is related to the plot.
• Men who serve as furniture for the book; “slick body under the shower water”.
• detailed sex scenes.
• OB visits, pregnancy tests, pregnancy symptoms discussed at length with no purpose for the plot.
• Parenting problems not related to the plot.

While many books are infected with a certain set of words that authors think make the dialogues sound more natural, in case of The Girl Before the infestation is severe. At one point the word “somehow”, the most popular parasite, is used 4 times by different characters within one scene. The same happens with “that’s all” which is plopped at the end of a phrase regardless of the situation. Somehow it’s just another bad book that’s all. By the end of the book there’s a risk of developing a strong allergic reaction to the words due to overexposure.

The behaviour of the characters often doesn’t match the situation. “I can never say if you are joking” says a character to the one who never jokes. Another character keeps gulping down tons of sadistically cooked food. It can serve as a demonstration of personal traits when done for the first time but it keeps being repeated along the whole book, probably to make the book more salient; hey, the plot was dumb as were the characters, but they had sex and ate live fish so now the book is stuck in my memory.

Surprising as it may sound, there are still two good things to be thankful for. The first one is that narcissistic people and sociopaths are described quite well. I believe many people can benefit from learning what those disorders are and how they manifest themselves.

The second nice thing happens in the audiobook. A complete silence is used to illustrate a situation. The silence creates such a powerful effect that I listened to it several times. I’ve never rewound any record before to listen to its silence. That silence is a brilliant idea. I hope more audiobooks will pick up this tool.

With this book I’m putting on hold my reviews of thrillers. I need some literary detox. There will be one more thriller-related rant but otherwise better books will be discussed. Stay tuned!

Genre: thriller. Stars from Goodreads: 3.89. Stars from me: 1

Do you know what the worst thing about a bad book is? It poisons your own language. The disfigured style plays in your head even after the book has finished. Just like the characters in the book you are no longer able to express your thoughts coherently. You suddenly find yourself squeezing in words you don’t need, making unnecessary sentences. As if you were now also cursed with having one wish only, and that is to hear the sound of your own voice.

The symptoms of the curse are phrases like these. (They are actual quotes!)

• “It doesn’t make any sense, but somehow it does.” It doesn’t sound like bullshit, but somehow it is.
• “Sometimes saying nothing says too much but somehow the words won’t come.” Sometimes writing nothing is better than writing something but somehow the nonsense still comes.
• “We all die in the end, I suppose”. We are all born in the beginning, I guess. Although some seem to have been dropped by storks.
• “We couldn’t get kids. We didn’t know why. The docs said it might be genetic.” Definitely dropped by storks!
• And the one coming from a comatose paralysed patient, “I mustn’t move. I mustn’t make a sound.”

If Stephen King suddenly got very much into drama, but lost all his talent for building characters and dialogues he could write this book. The plot, though, is also not of Stephen King quality. There are lots of loose ends sticking out from it like threads from an old tablecloth.

The author spins a few implausible characters in front of you, hoping to make you dizzy enough so that you wouldn’t figure out who the villains and the victims are. If you use the trick of ballerinas and focus on one point only, you’ll see through these juggles very quickly.

The plot itself got infected with the worst disease possible. The disease is called stupidity dependence. When this disease occurs the plot can develop only through the stupidity of characters and by the means of implausible facts. The intrigue at work progresses only because one character is an idiot who doesn’t notice things under her nose. A dangerous situation happens because a character is dumb and does not warn another one. A complicated scheme works out because apparently you can post two cat photos to a new Twitter account and get viral overnight for a gossip. Stealing drugs from a hospital and poisoning anybody with them, including hospital patients, is easy. Nobody notices because the plot is sick with stupidity dependence.

I had an audiobook version. Do you know the difference between an actor and a narrator? The narrator of this audiobook doesn’t. She dramatically breathes into the microphone through most of the lines, but if there are modal verbs she has to cry them. Like “I have to open the door but I CAN’T”. Whenever there’s a dramatic situation (and there are lots of them) she gets super intense. She literally sobs through some of the lines which made me want to calm her down rather than continue with the book. There are also lots of kid rhymes at supposedly scary moments and she makes it sound even more cliche because she sings them like in an outdated horror movie.

The only thing I’m thankful for is that there was no quasi-suspense like in Something in the Water. No actions were cut midway by a boring Wikipedia article. Instead, every time an action was interrupted a previously interrupted one was resumed. That’s the only thing that helped me move through the book. This, and a colony of ants I had to battle with on my balcony unable to press a stop button without contaminating my headphones.

I didn’t expect to have a one-star book so soon on my blog. I choose books carefully but I was tricked by an almost 4-star Goodreads rating and an interesting description. Sometimes I Lie is indeed not boring, but is still not worth your time.

Genre: novel. Stars from Goodreads: 4.35. Stars from me: 5.

A Man Called Ove is a fairytale for adults. There are no dragons or harry potters, but its purpose is the same. It soothes and lulls you while telling you a story of kindness where good conquers bad. In this way, it’s similar to Woody Allen’s movies where the plots are clear, characters are understandable and the events develop according to the old school rules of story telling.

A man called Ove is a grumpy old chap, created so perfectly he annoys you as much as he annoys his neighbours. The book then goes on to show what happened to Ove to make him who he is, and who he actually is.

Not only does the book make you laugh and cry, it makes you do so simultaneously. It’s heart-wrenching and heartwarming at the same time.

The story is written so well that I eventually gave up on writing out the quotes. I liked them all. I ordered a printed copy, and when it arrives I will probably underline each phrase in the book. The author, Fredrik Backman, does overuse similes (similes are phrases like “when she giggled she sounded the way Ove imagined champagne bubbles would have sounded if they were capable of laughter”), but they are so good you just want them to keep coming.

The audio version, though, doesn’t do the book justice. The narrator can read, of course, but only comparing to people who cannot. He ignores even obvious leads from the text. The text says “she hissed”, the narrator groans, the text says “he mumbled”, the narrator screams. This oxymoronic reading screws with your brain. It’s tiring to be constantly watching the actual words and ignoring narrator’s intonation to adjust the perception.

I found out the book was made into a movie. The movie is also Swedish. According to my humble taste movies from that part of the globe are worth watching, especially movies based on such books. I was also excited to learn that there will be an adaptation starring Tom Hanks. He would be perfect for the role!

The book gets five stars from me and I would suggest checking out the movie too.

Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. Good news is that I got a reply via Twitter! Bad news, no audiobook is coming my way. I’ll have to find another audiobook. Suggestions?

The book got critical acclaim, Man Booker Prize in 2017! In such situations it’s so easy to start thinking there’s something wrong with you. But I’d rather accept there is than listen to a single more minute of it. Maybe a big part of the problem was that it was an audiobook. Had it been a usual book with actual pages and words, I would have been able to take pauses, study the paragraphs trying to figure out crosseyed with confusion what the hell was going on.

There are, you see, one hundred and sixty-six voices in the audiobook! Calling it “the best audiobook of the year”, Audible still had to mention that the book creates “immersive cacophony effect”. Immersive cacophony effect it surely is. It is a romanticised way of saying that it bloody hurts your brain! The voices infest your thoughts, cripple your ability to think clearly or even to press the stop button when you can take it no more. The story in the beginning is composed of paragraphs cut out from different other books and documents, glued together the way kidnappers in old movies glued ransom notes from newspaper letters. There is even a computerized voice that reads all annotations to the clippings, loud and monotonously, and there are very many of them.

I should have given in to my suspicions early on, when I saw the book being described as “experimental”. A book may be described as experimental when it simply fails to fit basic aesthetics of writing. Besides, this book surely did feel like an experiment. On humans.

And that is a shame because the “cacophony” did bring in interesting voices from time to time. I even wrote down one of the lines. It’s about a meat dish that’s being taken away after a big party is over.  “…the animal carcasses, the meat […], trucked away to who knows where, clearly awful now, honest partial corpses once again, after brief elevation to the status of delight giving food”. That is genius, George Saunders can definitely write! I wish I was able to paddle through what he has done to his writing.

Genre: horror
Stars from Goodreads: 4.2
Stars from me: 3

Dear Mr.King,

Who can I suggest your book to? Shall I say it’s for those who love detective stories and for those who love horrors, but these two groups should read different parts of the book, then meet in the middle, hug each other and have dinner?

I understand it is my fault that I expected Miss Marple from a book that said “Stephen King” on its cover. Only, the book danced along the classic lines of a nicely knit detective story, for the most part of it. Like a naive idiot I was piling up evidence, reading between lines and suspecting all characters at once. Then, suddenly, Miss Marple started growing horns, a scaly tail and whatever other attributes that are usually ascribed to creatures from the netherworld. Just for the record, it’s a metaphor.

For the remaining part of the book I was sent on the unbelievable trip of star watching. That is, I was watching stars falling from the rating I was initially ready to give to The Outsider. There were originally four solid stars, then three and a half, then I had to battle with myself to keep at least three. I have no problems with horrors, but I object to being ambushed by a scaly Miss Marple while I was unsuspectingly picking up clues to solve a crime with her. Do you see what I mean? It would be the same if I gave you a bowl of ice-cream scoops with a spoonful of aspic hidden beneath. Why would I do such a thing? I would have to be either a prankster, or a sadist or a chef with two unmatchable dishes and with an urgent need to get rid of them. Is that what happened to your book?

What I enjoyed was the swarm of characters interacting. They just can’t shut up, can they? I don’t know what black magic you use to keep the creatures locked within the pages, but on those pages they definitely acquire minds of their own. I’m sure those are living beings, I cannot imagine a person being able to create such intricate dialogues, even if the person is Stephen King. There was absolutely no use in those characters explaining the story lines to each other, but I couldn’t stop watching them do this. They gave zero interest to the fact that I just learned what had happened, they needed to recite the story to each other again! Completely unnecessary for the plot line, but what an art of a dialogue!

Mr. King, it’s a bit awkward that one of your characters is trying to remember if John Lennon was already dead when she was younger. It’s not even important how many years younger. She’s somewhat my age, and I saw John Lennon only in black-and-white as he was long dead before I was born.

The desynchronization between what the main character Ralph does and what you say about him is quite uncomfortable. He behaves like a narrow-minded bully, who doesn’t let in any other version of events but his, no matter the amount of evidence that he might be wrong, and yet you call him “a person of two minds” who at one moment even “wants to believe, but can’t”. Nothing in Ralph’s behavior or words suggests he wants to believe any other opinion but his own! On the contrary, whenever Ralph gets the microphone back he restates that to him there’s still no other truth but his. This kind of literary gaslighting is disturbing.

I found another moment quite unexpected. It’s a very old trick to use a clichéd scene and then to refer to it as clichéd in the attempt to rinse the cliché off the scene. When people hold hands and run from bullets “like a group of friends in some romantic movie”, when a person helps his abuser back to his feet, “like in a Bible story”, those are clichés and the attempts to cover them up. When cliché is played around as a conscious move, it can sound forgivable to many. It is still a cliché, though, and the move is a cosmetic repair to the scene.

I also have a question to Will Patton, the narrator of the audiobook. That’s the question I started googling even before I finished the book. What the HECK is wrong with Holly? I now discovered that she’s a character from other series, so is there something that happened to her that made her sound like that? Honestly, part of the time I was sure the plot twist would be that she’s a robot. Why does she speak with a voice of an old Apple computer? “I…might! have? sooome neeeeew information? for! you…” I got so exhausted hearing these schizophrenic jumps in timbre, I nearly dropped the book. Holly’s deformity is even more surprising taking into account that other voices are made so perfectly, the performance felt like a radio play! I loved knowing who the following action would be about because the voice would already change into the character’s accent and mannerisms even before the character himself went on stage. I wasn’t surprised to find out that Will Patton was once called a Narrator of the Year.

Overall, after finishing the book, I felt like those fans of Lost TV show who patiently waited for the finale to get all answers only to find out that nobody cared enough to give them any, and the main purpose of the series, all along, was just to keep the audience glued to the story while it lasted. The Outsider is not that dissatisfying, but it came close.