Reviews – Page 6 – couldreads

Delicious Foods, subpar parental leave

In several major ways, James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods sets itself up for failure. After all, the book’s main character, Eddie, is discovered in its first sentence spearheading his own vehicular escape from a farm—but has no hands. No matter how the rest of Hannaham’s second novel plays out, it is from the inaugural page a story catching up to a conclusion, a narrative climax in pursuit of rising action.

On top of starting at the end, Hannaham also employs a narrator I wouldn’t normally indulge: Scotty, also known as crack-cocaine, who relays the story of Eddie and his mother, the Scotty-addicted Darlene, as though opining on the circumstances of old friends—which, in some respects, Darlene kind of is. Wry and observant, Scotty is the anchor of this ambitious book, the slice of novelty that cuts through even its most tedious moments.

I would not have survived the ’70s and other lessons from Please Kill Me

Earlier this week, Joseph Corré—son of designer Vivienne Westwood and late Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren—announced festive Thanksgiving plans. On November 26, Corré says he’s going to burn his entire collection of punk memorabilia, worth an estimated $7 million.

The bonfire coincides with the 40th anniversary of the release of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” and is meant to be a protest of more official 40th Anniversary of Punk celebrations in London. “The Queen giving 2016, the Year of Punk, her official blessing is the most frightening thing I’ve ever heard,” Corré said this week. “Rather than a movement for change, punk has become like a fucking museum piece or a tribute act.” He’s urging others to burn their punk memorabilia as well. All in all, a pretty punk move.

The birth of punk music may go back 40 years, but one of the genre’s most definitive histories was published a bit more recently: Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.

I was wrong, The 5th Wave is not a British boy band

There isn’t much to say about Rick Yancey’s The 5th Wave that hasn’t been said before, about The Hunger Games or Divergent, The Maze Runner or The Age of Miracles, The Host or Station Eleven. Unsung hero teen becomes front-and-center protagonist in the wake of a world-ending catastrophe. Family and friends are lost, heroic survival efforts are embarked upon, challenges are faced, romances are forged. Things end inconclusively, not simply because such is the way of the post-apocalyptic world, where there are no guarantees, except that at least one of your fellow survivors is likely to be an attractive potential soulmate. Things end inconclusively because there has to be something left for the sequel.It should surprise zero people that T5W kept cropping up in my Amazon recommendations—for all the same reasons The OC keeps pushing itself at me on Netflix (like, back up Seth Cohen! I’ll watch when I’m good and ready-slash-bored). The 2013 novel, whose sequel was released in 2014 and third/final volume comes out in May, is already a big-budget movie starring a slew of wholesome-looking teenagers, plus also Liev Schreiber. T5W takes place in the wake of alien invasion: A mothership has been hovering above earth for years, unleashing wave after wave of human-race-extinguishing catastrophes, from natural disaster to disease. Those who remain are true survivors, and yet remain perpetually felled by the distrust The Others have sowed between them. Who is good? Who is dangerous? Who is human? You know, typical first-date questions.

Add Into Thin Air to your blizzard bookshelf

If I compiled a reverse bucket list of the dramatic experiences I have no intention of achieving before I die, climbing Mount Everest would surely be on it. Barely a fan of snow, I can’t see myself willingly combining it with wind, upper-body strength and bottomless ice crevasses. (To say nothing of oxygen deprivation; I can barely catch my breath after a particularly steep set of subway stairs.) Which is all to say that Into Thin Air, John Krakauer’s landmark accounting of the 1996 Everest disaster, is about as relatable to me as as a deep-sea diver’s description of the ocean floor, or an astronaut’s of the surface of the moon. I might as well be watching Interstellar.

I picked up Into Thin Air during last month’s blizzard: It seemed apropos to read about the extreme life goals of others while rendered inert by a mere foot of snow in Brooklyn. But Krakauer’s detailed relating of the Everest disaster—which left eight people dead after a blizzard that caught dozens of climbers on summit day—reaffirmed my snow-hermit tendencies in more ways than one. If this is as close to Everest as I ever come, I’m okay with it.

5 old favorites to kick off 2016

More than once in the past five years of writing this blog (sidebar: five years!) have I searched my own archives for a review of a book I later realize I read pre-2010, in those lackadaisical years before I decided to commit my amateur opining to the Internet. After all, I didn’t have ST in fifth grade, when I read Dean Koontz’s Watchers for the first time and truly fell in love with fiction. Or in ninth grade, when I read 1984 for the first time, thereby cementing a lifelong love affair with dystopian novels. I didn’t have ST the first time I read David Foster Wallace, or David Sedaris, or Chuck Klosterman. I didn’t have it when I read Middlesex, or White Teeth, or Running with Scissors, or when I went on that weird Ray Bradbury bender in late 2009. For five years and roughly 250 books (sidebar: !!!) I’ve had the pleasure of cyberspace ranting in such a way that I can parachute back into a novel I read last year almost as well as one I read last month. Before that though, it’s all just a literary stew: half-memories of plots from one novel cut with the characters from another, vague recollections of life lessons learned or at least considered in the wake of angsty Greater Messages. I know I read things—I must have—and yet all but a chosen few titles have been relegated to the dustbin of reading recollection.

So like Professor Snape (RIP) bequeathing his memories to Harry Potter, I give to you here my own old favorites, to slip into your Pensieve for lazy Sundays or late nights, long bus rides or beach-side binges—or wherever else you remember reading books about which you forget everything except that you loved them.