Category Archives: Books
The Eternal Debate: Paperback or Hardcover?
Managing inventory at a bookstore was hard work, but when you’re managing inventory on your own bookshelf, sometimes you need a second opinion…
This is serious, so pay attention:
Also, the series is set in Detroit, so I thought I was being clever by buying as many of these through them.
Since I’d purchased the first in mass-market, I kept that up. Book fourteen, “A Smile on the Face of a the Tiger”
Here’s the deal though, then came to “Sinister Heights”
An author I know mentioned once that the hardcover and paperback rights to his first book had been bought by two different publishers, the latter allowing it to go out of print. So perhaps something similar happened here, and publisher opted not to put a paperback edition out.
Estleman is up to twenty-four books now, the latest, “The Sundown Speech”
I have a handful of other books to read before I need to make a decision, so I have a little time. Take a look at the poll below and let me know what you think; should I go back to paperback and hold out as long as I can, or stick with hardcover?
A Return to Amos Walker; a Review of Sinister Heights
After a break in my Amos Walker
This may be Loren Estleman’s
If you’re a fan of hardboiled mysteries, smart-assed private detectives or stories set in the Rust Belt, go back and take a look at Motor City Blue
Follow me on Goodreads for more reviews and to see what else I’m reading….
A Review of Jesse Ball’s “Silence Once Begun”
While “Silence Once Begun”
The style is haunting and… well, disjointed, I suppose is the only word I can use to describe it, but that isn’t quite right. Between “Interviewer’s Notes”, the protagonist’s interjections, the story is told through interviews, letters, and quasi-poetic attempts at the characters feeling lost and broken and searching. Every speaker warns the interviewer and reader not to trust the previous speakers.
In the last section of the book, on the verge of the big reveal, we’re told:
“You have to be careful whom you trust. Everyone has a version, and most of them are wrong. In fact, I can tell you quickly: they are all wrong. I am in a position to help you understand… the world is made up almost entirely of sentimental fools and brutes…
[I am] a sentimental brute, I suppose. One who means well, but has no feelings for others.”
The big reveal I mentioned isn’t even really the big reveal. That was. I just ruined the whole surprise for you, sorry. Because the underlying story, the Narito Disappearances, that ties all the characters together and keeps you turning the page, isn’t what this novel is really about, and it isn’t about silence either like Tue interviewer would have you believe, not as he understood it at the beginning of his search. It’s about trust.
The character of Jito Joo is taken advantage of by a man she trusted, she is manipulated into deceiving another in turn. Her punishment is to be forever alone, forgotten, unseen, unheard. The man who deceived her is similarly forgotten and ignored when his own deception is revealed.
So it is, that a silence once begun is a trust once betrayed, and, through pride or a sense of duty, even through love it is out inability to move beyond that betrayal. Instead, the silence becomes an abyss that swallows all memory of ourselves, until once begun we cannot find our way to stop it.
Gas Station Burrito 