by Joe Schreiber

Whenever a new SW book comes out, of course I’m going to buy it and read it, but when it’s written by a first-time SW author, I’m always hesitant. Death Troopers is Joe Schreiber’s first. It starts out great with a nice pace then quickly deteriorates into a story that contains stereotypical horror genre monsters. I really liked the characters and the beginning held so much promise, but then Schreiber introduces well-established SW characters, so it ruins the story’s ending long before it ends. This sci-fi/horror (stereotypical horror, remember) cross genre is incredibly LAME. Big disappointment.

by Ben Mezrich

The title sums up the entire story, other than the how. Don’t worry — this is definitely covered. Unfortunately, and ironically, the story isn’t as well-told as the movie, 21, which it inspired. It’s a quick read so it isn’t a huge waste of time, but the way the story is written seems more like poorly written fiction than mediocre nonfiction.

If you can get past the “a guy I know who was a card counter said he’d tell me his story as fodder for my next book” aspect, which is admittedly difficult, then go ahead. Too bad the third person narrative reads like this: “this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, and this is how you count cards.” (The main character, “Kevin Lewis,” includes an essay on card counting at the end of the book, probably the only believable and interesting thing here.)

The characters are 2-dimensional, even Kevin Lewis, who struggles with his double life and whether or not to come clean to his hard-working, half-Caucasian, half-Chinese immigrant father who gave him every possible educational opportunity. This is never resolved. The students are depicted as highly intelligent, but come off as highly intelligent spoiled brats.

Other than the decadent interiors of the casinos in which the story takes place, there’s a strong lack of detail such as Kevin’s apartments — surely there’s a difference between the place where he started and the place(s) he moves into when his card-counting career gets underway. I would have liked to see more of the rags-to-riches aspect. Then again, Kevin was from an upper-middle-class (or higher) suburban family able to afford to send him to an elite and expensive prep school, so it’s more of a riches-to-riches story.

A discrepancy in the timeline confuses the reader as to when the events took place, particularly because this comes at an important time in Kevin’s career. The year 1996 is skipped altogether, though the story takes place from approximately 1993 – 1998. Also, the title claims that 6 MIT students fleeced Las Vegas, yet their blackjack “team” was composed of a dozen students, then later, a core group of 7.

If you can get past the first 50 pages, go for it. If not, rent the movie. I suggest you skip the book altogether and rent the movie instead.

by Lionel Shriver

What’s it like to raise a child who winds up wounding and murdering some of his high school classmates, including a teacher? Is it because of your lack of maternal skills, maybe even a dislike of your own child? Is it because he was born with an inherent malice so strong it drove him to commit this act? He isn’t an outcast, teased by his classmates and the last chosen in a game of kickball. He’s incredibly intelligent, almost frighteningly so, and comes from an upper-middle-class suburban family. So how did this happen — not why but how?

These are the questions Eva Khatchadourian ponders in a series of letters to her estranged husband Franklin: was she a bad mother, or was Kevin born evil? Eva recounts other, milder but no less disturbing events surrounding Kevin throughout his life, each gaining in maliciousness and lead to his final act of murder. Her story begins even before Kevin’s birth, when she and Franklin discuss whether or not to have children, and the circumstances of his conception seem to arise from a whim.

Though We Need To Talk About Kevin is a page-turner, the narrative doesn’t read like correspondence; they’re so detailed and include information that Franklin would presumably already know, framed in reminiscence. The epistolary form isn’t truly achieved because the story reads like a traditional novel. But it works. I enjoyed this book very much.

by Patrick O’Brian

What in the world possessed me to read yet another book about a bunch of British guys on a ship (the Royal Navy) in the late 18th century, immediately after reading an edition of Joseph Conrad’s short story, “The Secret Sharer” (complete with representative works of critical essays), that’s also about a bunch of British guys on a ship (the merchant marine) in the late 19th century, which I absolutely hated?

This: last November I saw the DVD, Master and Commander starring Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany, and loved it. (Both also starred in A Beautiful Mind.) Brian told me that our brother-in-law is a fan of Patrick O’Brian’s novels, and since I thought the movie was so awesome, then certainly the book must be even better. Because they usually are, right? Wrong!

Novels, because they aren’t limited to about 2 hours of film time, are far richer and offer background that is cut from the movies. In this case, we learn how Captain Jack Aubrey of the HMS Sophie and Doctor Stephen Maturin become friends. We have the pleasure of reading how Aubrey receives command of the Sophie while grounded in Minorca, and prepares her to set sail.

But instead of receiving orders to pursue and capture a French Naval ship and the setbacks and near misses and heroic battles wonderfully portrayed in full, Hollywood splendor, the Sophie only takes part in several skirmishes, none of which are…all that. About halfway through, the book was a surefire way for me to get to sleep and yet I continued doggedly, waiting for a full-scale battle only to reach an anticlimactic ending.

However, Aubrey and Maturin are well-rounded characters, neither of whom are perfect, which makes Aubrey, to me, especially endearing. If you have an elementary knowledge of Spanish and French you’ll either cringe or laugh at the way he horribly mangles both, using words from each language — plus English — when communicating with non-British characters.

The language O’Brian uses is mind-boggling — he really knows his way around a sloop and more than merely peppers the narrative with “mizzen” here and “topgallantsails” there, whatever those are. You get the full jargon and yet, even though I had no idea what the Sophie’s crew was doing at certain times, the story is so character-driven that it didn’t matter. For all I know, a “poop-deck” is how sailors referred to the ship’s litter box, since it was a long-standing tradition to have a ship’s cat for rodent control and crew morale.

Master and Commander is the first in a series of Aubrey/Maturin novels and although I was a little disappointed, now that I know what to expect, I look forward to reading the next one.

by Joseph Conrad, ed. by Daniel R. Schwarz

Unless you’re a student of turn-of-the-century British literature and/or of Joseph Conrad, there is absolutely no reason to read this book. “The Secret Sharer” is actually a short story about a newly-appointed captain on a British merchant ship who harbors (no pun intended) a supposed fugitive from a different ship. This edition includes a basic introduction to literary criticism, including a short biography of Joseph Conrad and a bit of history that allows the reader to place the story in historical context.

Of course I didn’t read any of that because the only reason I even picked this up in the first place is because, while watching the season 2 DVDs of E.R., one episode was entitled “The Secret Sharer.” Several E.R. episode titles have literary allusions, most of which I’m familiar with, but not this one. Brian said we own the short story and suggested I read it, and I agreed. Well, I watched that episode in, oh, September? I started reading the book shortly thereafter and only decided the other day to give up on it.

One of the types of literary criticism the editor discusses is reader-response, which is fairly self-explanatory: it focuses on the reader’s experience of the text in question, in this case, Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer.” While I am not using reader-response theory to write this, let’s just say that my experience was arduous. I couldn’t get into the story, which isn’t all that long, and had to start over at least 3 times. For some reason, I couldn’t get past imagining the arrangement of the captain’s L-shaped cabin based on Conrad’s description. I kept wondering what happened that the captain suddenly was promoted and had a crew to whom he was a stranger. As I finally made my way through the story, I began to wonder if Leggatt, the alleged fugitive, was really only a figment of the captain’s imagination and thinking that if that were the case, I’d feel incredibly gypped for the time I spent reading the stupid thing. I swore to myself that I’d read the story only.

Imagine my surprise when, after finally finishing the story, I went back and read the biographical and historical intro, found it interesting, and proceeded to read the intro to various critical theories, each of which is demonstrated by an essay analyzing “The Secret Sharer” in each of the types of criticism mentioned. I even decided to watch that episode of E.R. again to compare what I had read about the story as well as the story itself, to the episode.

Then I came to my senses and realized that what I was doing was homework. And since I’m no longer a student and no longer teach, I decided that I was done with the book. But I discovered that the scholar in me, however infinitesimal that part of me might now be, still exists.