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STAN SMITH'S BOOK REVIEWS MY PROMISE TO YOU: I will review EVERY SINGLE BOOK I READ THIS YEAR....um, starting in April. These are either books people have sent or just happen to be in my rotation. If you have an advanced copy of your book, send it to (912 Cole St. #286, SF CA 94117) and I'll probably review it. THE RULES: The dates are based on when I finished a book, and they are all in real-time order. No skipping or adding stuff in later, or reviewing books I read a long time ago. I pledge to review every single book I read, no matter how pointless or embarrassing over the next year. All books are given a numerical grade/rating from One to Ten Stans, based on widely accepted international guidelines. INTERNATIONAL "STAN-CLAD" BOOK REVIEW GUIDELINES (Also available in Esperanto) 10 Stans-Astonishingly good. Powerful. Beuatiful. Will read it to my grandchildren, an absolute masterpiece.
9 Stans- Pretty damn great. Innovative, daring, honest. Totally in command of it's craft and intent. Just slightly below a true classic.
8 Stans- Has style, chops, verve, poise. There were a few glitches in tone or consistency, but this is still exceptional writing.
7 Stans- A variety of solid stuff that made me want to like it more than maybe I
really did. Needs some direction. Endearingly flawed. Still totally worth reading, and probably a better book than most.
6 Stans- I liked some of it okay. At least four or five good ideas. Still, a
lot of it was tiresome and I was sorta glad when it was over.
5 Stans- Harlen Coben, but without the subtlety or depth.Made me sleepy and suddenly nostalgic for James Frey.
4 Stans- Pointedly off. Bad idea, bad prose, bad binding. Bad.
3 Stans- Gave up in less than a chapter.
2 Stans- The sort of moldering tripe that makes you wish you were on an airplane reading the in-flight magazine.
1 Stan- Only one Stan! The Absolute Worst Book Ever Written! I threw this into the ocean, and it washed immediately back. A sea turtle ate it and it gave him the burning shits for two months.
8-6-08
The Big Oyster by Mark Kurlansky 7.7 Stans
7-30-08
Voodoo Heart by Scott Snyder 7.1 Stans
7-23-08
One Shot by Lee Child 6.0 Stans
7-19-08
God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens 7.0 Stans
7-10-08
The Bobby Gold Stories by Anthony Bourdain 5.9 Stans
 | Well, I read it in about an hour and a half, so that's something. Even for a neo-noir toss off, this baby is pretty thin. It's also riddled with cliche and ludicrous wise-guy talk. The stuff Bourdain really seems to know about, like running a club, or badass prep cooks, is actually pretty good and a few of the kitchen scenes are rendered in amusing and believable hard boiled prose. The other stuff, like dealing with the Aryan Brotherhood, learning to fight in prison, shooting guns that give off "the smell of cordite" (only comes from Civil War-era cannon fire) and "negotiating a sit-down" are straight out of D-grade Joe Pesci.
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6-30-08
St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves by Karen Russell 6.6 Stans
 | Probably not a good idea to read this on the back of Steve Millhauser's The Outer Limit's style stuff, since this is even further on down that road of floating sisters and ghosts talking and rampant anthropomorphism. I felt bad, since the title story is a truly original and beautifully written piece, but a lot of the rest of it really got on my nerves. The other stories all felt like very self-aware but lesser variants on that first.
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6-23-08
I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down by William Gay 8.6 Stans
 | For starters, any book that takes it's title from a song by Jimmie Rodgers is automatically currying a good deal of favor with me. And then, you know, there's the writing. I really love these stories. There's an honesty to the voice that you can't learn, teach, buy, sell, fake, or steal. Even the few that wore a bit thin or were clumsy in passages had so much going for them that the flaws were easily ignored. I'm sure these stories are often referred to as "Faulkner-esque", which I don't think could be further from the truth. To me they are a hybrid of Cormac McCarthy, Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, Roy Acuff, and Howlin' Wolf. Couldn't recommend them more.
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6-20-08
The Knife Thrower by Steven Millhouse 6.9 Stans
 | I bought this because I thought his story in the 2008 Best American Short Stories was one of the better included. Also, I've had his novel "Martin Dressler" on my bookshelf for lord knows how many years and have never read it, so reading his stories insteea assuaged that guilt. I really like his straightforward style of investigating a certain very American version of magical realism. But, I also tired of the main characters turning out to be married to life-sized frogs, and able to fly on Aladdin-like carpets and so forth. After a while, I found I longed for a story about a guy who goes fishing by a lonely stream and page-legth descriptions of making fires and cooking pork and beans. The story "Air Balloon Flight, 1870" was actually pretty great, though, and by far the best in the collection.
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6-16-08
The Breezes by Joseph O'Neill 6.9 Stans
 | It was interesting reading this on the heels of "Netherland". Unsurprisingly, the former is quite a bit less focused and polished, while still maintaining a similar style and voice. This is a much less ambitious novel which deals with the Unluckiest Family In Britain. It's like a Cleese sketch. The luck runs so foul, the reverses so predictably awful, it's hard to care much for the characters. They're doomed. They know it, we know it. There are many great lines and I particularly liked layabout Steve Manus as a nicely drawn ancilliary character, but mostly this felt only partially inspired and pretty weightless on the whole.
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6-10-08
The Boat by Nam Le 7.0 Stans
 | Every story in here has something impressive in it, either a scene or line or characterization, and they're all well written. Somehow, though, they felt a little forced to me. I liked how Le made fun of himself in the first story, at least the idea that some of his success is owed to the current trend in "ethnic lit" and asking questions about whether it is appropriate to mine the horrors of his parents background to lend weight to his writing (which he then does in the title story). Most of his stories do not deal with Vietnam. Instead, they're all over the map. Self-consciously so. Columbian street kids, a woman in Tehran, Aussie surfers, a NY painter with hemorrhoids. There was something unconvincing about this balancing act.
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