Category Archives: books

books, Minimalist Reviews

Of Mice and Men, a literary novella by John Steinbeck

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By James Gilmore

Book cover for Of Mice and Men, a literary novella by John Steinbeck, on Minimalist Reviews.

Of Mice and Men might as well have been called “the ranch of broken dreams.”  Presenting itself like a stage play in all but format, author John Steinbeck maintains Aristotle’s unity of place and time by focusing our attention on a microcosm inhabited by two men who share a single hollow dream.  Ultimately, their dream collapses due to their own human weaknesses and those of their fellow men.  The fundamental core of the story illustrates how human beings latch onto hope, real or imaginary (but in either case perceived as actual), as a goal to strive for, as a reason for living, and how and why reality seldom plays out like our dreams say they ought.

Of Mice and Men packs brutal emotional impact through realistic, layered characters and relationships in this structurally sound novella.

Readers will find Of Mice and Men much more accessible than Steinbeck’s far more brutal Grapes of Wrath, and should be required reading for any serious reader or storyteller.

Rating: 5 / 5

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Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon, a novel by Jules Verne

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By James Gilmore

Among the great works of literature by Jules Verne are such classics as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in Eighty Days and The Mysterious Island.  What you will not find nested among those works is a novel called Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon (La Jangada is the original title)—and for good reason.  One wouldn’t be so surprised at the quality (or lack thereof) of the novel had it been Jules Verne’s first attempt at the craft, but it mystifyingly appears at the very heart of his career alongside the greats.

Book cover for Eight Hundred Leages on the Amazon, a novel by Jules Verne, on Minimalist Reviews.

Despite pretense of adventure, 800 Leagues is for all intents and purposes a family melodrama with only trace amounts of “adventure.”  The novel is a dull read and hardly believable.  Sorely lack in conflict, the text is often insultingly redundant, the author reiterating known facts in such a fashion that the reader can’t help but feel like he is trying to fill space in a balloon filled with hot hair.  This effectively reduces the pacing of the novel to that of a dying snail.  The linear, predictable story submarines the uneventful plot with rare exception.  Any changes in the story occur entirely by means of deus ex machinae, which leaves the hands of the characters out of events almost entirely, save one or two instances, scuttling their raison d’être.

Overshadowing the weak dramatic impact of the book is the fact that it reads like a pedantic love letter to the Amazon River, like a wan excuse to wax poetic about this illustrious body of moving water.  Although informative, it reduces the novel’s literary value to a mere historical survey of Amazonian river tribes who would cease to exist a century later.

The characters in the novel tend to be shallow in depth and over dramatic.  The antagonist is the most interesting and compelling of the cast.  Unfortunately, his presence is minimal.

Despite some interesting tangents concerning facts about the Amazon River and a few florid descriptions, the novel is thin, flat, artificially contrived and obvious.

A caution to all who tread here: Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon is Jules Verne’s worst.  Despite a 5-star rating (from 2 reviews) on Amazon.com at the time of this writing, place this novel on your list of “books to avoid at all costs.”  Feel free to sample the free Kindle book (if you dare).

Rating: 1.5 / 5

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The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking

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By James Gilmore

Book cover for The Grand Design, a pop science physics nonfiction book by Stephen Hawking, on Minimalist Reviews.It is not my habit to review non-story materials but I thought a brief experiment might be acceptable.

The Grand Design is yet another book by the mastermind Stephen Hawking concerning the makeup of our universe.  While a fascinating read, the book spends almost its entirety on the history of the field which built the foundation for quantum physics.  A Layman’s History of Physics would be a much more apt title.  The book only expresses one real opinion which is made plain at the very end—essentially that M-Theory rocks and everything else sucks.

Not Hawking’s best.  A tantalizing and thought-provoking read nonetheless.

Rating: 3 / 5

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Damned, a novel by Chuck Palahniuk

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by James Gilmore

Damned by Chuck Palahniuk follows the idea that every cliché you’ve ever heard about Hell is absolutely and completely true.  And Hell isn’t really that bad of a place so long as you don’t expect it to be like Heaven.  All it needs is a little optimism and some long-overdue re-landscaping by the supernumerous tenants.

Book cover for Damned, a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, on Minimalist Reviews.

The book is creative, thoughtful and entertaining, and is probably more broadly-appealing to readers than most of Palahniuk’s other, more shockingly gruesome works.  With trim, lean writing the author creates the most sympathetic, likable protagonist of his career.  To his credit, the 13-year old female protagonist is thoroughly authentic in thought and viewpoint, which allows Palahniuk to lead the character to a number of unusually profound conclusions.  Like the protagonist, every member of the supporting cast is similarly illustrated with sympathetic—if not tragic—human weaknesses.  As the backstories of these characters are revealed the reader becomes continually haunted with the idea that there is no Heaven at all, and that Hell is for everyone.

Despite its strengths, Damned is not Palahniuk’s best.  His trademark technique of using repetition in changing contexts fails to fulfill its purpose in this novel.  The result is frequently negatively iterative, if not, at times, indulgent.

The structure of the final act is particularly weak as well, giving the impression that the novel was cut short of the full story the author was trying to tell.  Virtually without warning, we are ushered to a rapid climax which dissipates with an anti-climax.  The pivotal idea to the story’s final revelation—that the main character is driven by free will—is hindered by the poor structure and ultimately results in invalidating all the story which preceded it by making it feel pointless.

Damned is worth a read, especially for those who love anti-fundamentalist and anti-liberal satire.

Rating:  3 / 5

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Babbitt, a literary novel by Sinclair Lewis

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by James Gilmore

Book cover for Babbit, a literary novel by Sinclair Lewis, on Minimalist Reviews.

Babbit by Sinclair Lewis is an all-but-forgotten literary masterpiece which espouses the hollowness of blind conformism.  At the surface, the novel appears to be about a successful businessman entering (and surviving) a mid-life crisis.  But more accurately, Babbitt is about a man whose identity only exists by means of his compromising conformity to everyone else.  He struggles between being the person everyone thinks he should be and what he really wants for his own life, although he has become so entrenched in the conformist society that he cannot escape.  In this he discovers that he is weak and pathetic, a living cliché, a human example of meaningless and futility.

Babbitt is a true character piece which explores every facet of the completely repressed individual in a society of demanding conformity.  The text remains engrossing despite constantly straddling the line between thoroughness and repetitiveness.  Unfortunately, reading the novel can be arduous due to its very slow story development.

Babbitt was internationally successful at the time it was published while domestically the novel’s brazen but accurate depictions and accusations of America offended or mystified many readers.  Every student of American literature should study Sinclair’s Babbitt.

Rating:  5 / 5

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Pygmy, a novel by Chuck Palahniuk

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by James Gilmore

Although all of Chuck Palahniuk’s novels satire American culture, Pygmy is perhaps the most pungent of the author’s bibliography. 

Book cover for Chuck Palahniuk's novel Pygmy on Minimalist Reviews.

Technically sound, fascinating and shocking.  And while many readers may take issue with the nature of certain violent events which occur in the story, these events are in fact appropriate to the story, even if they are presented in a fashion to maximize shock factor.

The audio book recording of the book is an excellent alternative for Palahniuk fans who wish to avoid the grammar headaches of reading the novel’s own form of pidgin English, which can be extremely laborious.

Pygmy is an absolute must-read for fans of Chuck Palahniuk.  However, strangers to his work may find the book distasteful if not virtually impossible to read.  On the other hand, adventurous readers should absolutely give the book a perusal.

Rating:  4 / 5

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Other Voices, Other Rooms, a literary novel by Truman Capote

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by James Gilmore

Other Voice, Other Rooms refers to shadows, memories—places people have been, voices that have sounded, ephemeral ghosts which burn brightly and then disappear, as if from a distant place and time. Once innocence is shed, you can never return to the past.

Book cover of Other Voices Other Rooms, a literary novel by Truman Capote, on Minimalist Reviews.

Rich, luxurious prose which reproduces in intimate the detail the cultural mores, mindset and isolation of the gothic rural American South. The main drive of the plot is the unraveling of the mystery of protagonist’s father’s identity, which ultimately leads to the loss of innocence and the realization that reality/life is a cruel and twisted master, of whom we only catch a sliver’s glimpse. Perhaps the most powerful strand of the story is the sub-theme regarding love and how it far more complex, and thus far more painful, than the youthful ideal of meet-love-marriage, as embodied by the character of Randolph.

Other Voices, Other Rooms should be considered a companion piece to To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. Both are colorful, insightful penetrations into the gothic American South in which both Harper Lee and Truman Capote are depicted as childhood friends and protagonists.

Rating: 5 / 5

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Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, a novel by Gregory Maguire

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by James Gilmore

Book cover for Wicked The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, a novel by Gregory Maguire, on Minimalist Reviews.

Wicked: TLaTotWWotW is a masterwork of storytelling on all fronts. It is an epic in the classic sense; a true Greek Tragedy.

Maguire’s re-imagining of Oz entails a complex plot cast against an even more complicated background, with multifarious–but utterly human–relationships which do not gloss over the less glamorous aspects of weakness, regret, and mistakes made. Furthermore, the author demonstrates an intimate understanding of culture, the succession of religions, humanity and the human condition (as is the subject of all great literature), and the oxymoronic fickleness of perspective and public opinion.

Woven throughout with a powerful spell of thematic material, which elucidates a living discussion concerning the nature of evil, the author presents us with an array of possible answers to its (non-)existence instead of a narrow, single-minded conclusion. The core of Wicked is best summed by a secondary character named Boq: “People who claim that they’re evil are usually no worse than the rest of us,” and, “It’s people who claim that they’re good, or anything better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”

Rating: 5 / 5

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Strange As This Weather Has Been, a literary novel by Ann Pancake

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by James Gilmore

Book cover for Strange As This Weather Has Been, a literary novel by Ann Pancake, on Minimalist Reviews.

Aside from being slammed in the face with a sledgehammer labeled “Mountaintop removal mining is BAD” every paragraph, Strange As This Weather Has Been delivers strikingly eloquent characters and prose with unparalleled craftsmanship.

Many elements illustrate or elaborate the themes in the novel quite well while far too many seem to serve no other purpose than redundant milieu. For those who relish character work and language this is the book for you, but general readership will find it a work of willpower as they struggle to overcome breathtaking boredom due to a near-complete lack of forward story progress.

Although an enviously gifted writer, Pancake should consider serious outlining before writing her next novel or stick to her specialty: literary short stories about Appalachia.

Rating: 2 / 5

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The Great Gatsby, a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Book cover for The Great Gatsby, a classic literary novel by F Scott Fitzgerald, on Minimalist Reviews.by James Gilmore

Calm, flowing prose on a near subconscious level floats the reader to a violent two-punch ending. Fitzgerald illustrates how careless wealthy people destroy those around them, even men destined for greatness such (as Gatsby), leaving everyone else to pick up the painful pieces. From another angle, Gatsby delivers a scathing opinion of capitalism by depicting it as superficial, debauched and criminal, as embodied by Gatsby himself, a man who came from nothing but gained everything through enterprising opportunism and less-than-legal means. It should have been a short story, but Fitzgerald dragged it out into a novel three times its necessary length, and somehow created one of the most recognized titles of 20th century literature.

Rating: 3 / 5