Mystery - Hakan Nesser - Mind's Eye (1993)

Ah, Sweden. So many great things come out of you. Minecraft, Swedish Chef, Stieg Larsson (full disclosure: I've never read one of his books, but I hear they're popular?), Pirate Bay... uh, Minecraft... Listen, there's a lot about Sweden I don't know. But does that mean I can't read a mystery translated from Swedish?

Apparently.

Don't get me wrong. I get that this is supposed to be really good. But because my formative reading years were spent steeped in the lore of R.L. Stine, I can't help but prefer mysteries that I can try to figure out on my own, not waiting for the author to reveal it all with some information he withheld.

And listen, I know that maybe they do mysteries differently abroad. But for about seven-eighths of the book, I had no goddamn idea who the bad guy was supposed to be, and the last eighth was spent explaining how this guy was the bad guy.

Let me paint the picture for you: A guy wakes up super hungover and having blacked out a lot of what happened the night before. He discovers his wife dead in the bathtub. The trial follows and he is convicted of having killed her, primarily because it doesn't seem like anyone else could have. Then he winds up dead in his room at the mental institution, where he had been sent because he couldn't remember whether he had killed her or not.

There were a few things that could have made this better, and I'm taking it on faith that it wasn't just lost in translation. (For the record, this isn't the first translated novel I've ever read. That would be Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. So I do have an idea of what a good translation can do.)

The first thing that would have been nice is if the main character, Inspector Van Veeteren, had been sure all throughout the trial that Janek Mitter had killed his wife. Then, when he turns up dead later, we could have had some development in the form of questioning his resolution and being unsure of his ability to do his job. It would have been nice, at least.

The second thing? Some goddamn proper nouns. For fuck's sake. A lot of chapters, a lot of chapters, begin by talking about "he". Who the fuck is he? You have an almost exclusively male cast. Who the fuck is he?! I had to frequently skim ahead a couple paragraphs and even pages in order to get a single idea of who was being talked about here and there. If Nesser didn't specify in the original text, I would not have been grumpy if the translator had slipped a couple proper nouns at the beginning of those chapters so we as readers wouldn't be sitting there shouting "Huh?".

The third thing I mentioned already. I prefer mysteries that, if I really sat and thought about, I could maybe figure it out. And if I couldn't, it being clear enough that I can go "Ohhh" and complete understand where the author was going. In this case, the author divulges a bunch of unknown information at the end that made no sense in relation to the rest of the book. Incestual affairs? Since when? And it's some character we haven't even had mentioned yet in the story? Go to jail.

It's obviously not the worst book in the world, but I didn't find it super great. I was also irritated with how preoccupied with badminton Inspector Van Veeteren was while trying to do his job. Listen. I don't give a shit. Solve the mystery, dammit.

3.0/10

Fantasy - A. Lee Martinez - Divine Misfortune (2010)

I have a confession. You know that saying, "Don't judge a book by its cover"? I totally do. What do you expect from me? The cover is on the outside. Sure, I judge a book after it's in my hands on the synopsis on the back, or maybe even the first page, but it's the cover that gets it into my hand. I'm not proud of this. But it's worked well for me over the years. And with this one, a giant fist descending from heaven to crush a tiny man, I had to pick it up.

In case you can't tell from the title and cover, this book is not for the religious types. Not ones who can't laugh at the whole establishment, anyway. And certainly not ones who can't read science texts if they don't preach your church's version of the creation of everything, or consume any media if it doesn't reaffirm your particular sect of religion to be the right one.

However, this book is just right for me, an atheist. Hearts!

The premise of this tale is that society is driven by a partnership between humans and the immortal gods they worship. People pay tribute in various forms to their god: blood, sacrifice, money, services, lodgings, food; and then the gods work within their own realm to favor their follower. The main characters, Phil and Teri, are in the market for a god, so of course they turn to a god-follower matchmaking website on the internet. They sign up for the services of Luka, a raccoon luck god, who shows up on their doorstep with a suitcase. Hilarity ensues. Also, there is a primordial god of oblivion and chaos who hates him and a goddess of heartbreak torturing some hapless girl.

Did I mention that this book is fucking hilarious?

During the course of the book, there were several genuine LOL moments for me. In no particular order:

• Hades losing at a ninja video game to Phil
• Horrors of hell resigning themselves to watching a baseball game
• Chaos god referring to his followers as douchebags
• Zeus in a tracksuit

Did you catch that last one? Zeus. White flowing beard, big guy, lightning bolts, wearing a yellow tracksuit. Fucking awesome.

There were two books in particular that my mind kept calling back to: Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, and Small Gods by Terry Pratchett. Good Omens was more set in modern times, like this book, so it matched up more for me. But it was Small Gods that gave me pause.

I've mentioned before the Black Jewels trilogy is my favorite series of books. What I didn't mention was that Small Gods, even being part of the Discworld series, is my favorite book. I won't get into it now, just in case there is a book drought for me and I have to go through and just reread the books I've already read, but it brought up questions of where the gods' powers come from, a question that is resolved in that book, and similarly answered in this book. It's a mechanic I love, and for that reason alone, you should get both of these books.

Divine Misfortune raises its own questions, which go mostly unsolved, but let for the reader to decide for themselves: in a world populated by humans and gods, who is responsible for what events? Oh man, it's just so delicious!

There is one, and exactly one, thing keeping this book from being a ten out of ten. The ending. Pfft. What utter bullshit. Have you ever heard the song by Lemon Demon, "Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny"? Here's a link to a video if you need a reminder. The part right before Chuck Norris gets defeated by fucking everybody on the planet? That was essentially the ending. What a crap, cheap climax. It was shit.

Still, you should get it and read it. I mean, it's still getting a good score.

9.5/10

Fantasy - Gail Z. Martin - The Summoner (2007)

I got this book a while ago. I don't remember when. Within the past year, for certain. I know that I bought it primarily because my little brother Steve suggested I read it. That should have been my first hint as to how my experience with it would be. Guy loves high fantasy.

For the sake of full disclosure, I will tell you that I occasionally stopped reading this book in order to play The Witcher. Not the new one, the old, buggy-as-fuck one. And this book inspired me to buy it. Why?

Because this book is a video game. Sure, it has pages and words and goes on a bookshelf with other books and was purchased from a bookstore, but it's a video game. A role-playing game, to be exact. There are monsters traveling the wilds, several groups of human baddies to justify being in the wilderness in the first place, and scenes of such high magic followed by a blackout that it may as well have been a cutscene.

"But Tabetha," I can hear you say, "a lot of high fantasy follows that formula. Isn't that why you don't like it?" That's true, faceless and nonexistent blog reader. I do tend to dislike high fantasy on the fact that it is formulaic. But the more I think about D&D and the campaign I'm building, the less I'm beginning to mind high fantasy. It has its place. Unfortunately, that place is more often in games. And this book doesn't even get to be a book. It's a game.

The gang's all here: the exiled prince-turned-mage, a roster of interchangeable fighters, a flamboyant bard, the grumpy female healer, the chosen-one princess-paladin, even a trickster thief in the form of Berry. And their travels and adventures are straight out of any game. If this had been written as a script instead, it would have been out on Steam for everyone's enjoyment with little changes.

But you people aren't here for video games. You're here for book reviews. And honestly, with that wall of text up there about how this book is high fantasy, you shouldn't be surprised when I say that I didn't really enjoy it. The cast was too big for this author, who often had characters fade into the background so much that, when three characters left the main cast to go do something else, I didn't even notice. I thought they were just being quiet.

Two couples are made in the course of the book, and they are so predictable I wanted to choke and die. Of course the two people who fight a lot will bone. Of course the female chosen-one and male chosen-one are going to do it. Also, how many Chosen Ones are you going to have in one book? It's ridiculous.

The thing I hated the most about this book is the fact that this lady doesn't seem to know how to end chapters properly. Surely you've read a book or two in your lifetime? You know that a chapter is a length of book to mark at least one change to the story, at whatever length the author wishes. You also know that they usually end on a cliffhanger, in attempts to tempt the reader into moving on to the next chapter without stopping. That is, of course, the gold standard for writers: a reader who would rather read the whole thing in one sitting then do something else.

This lady doesn't understand that.

Many of the chapters, especially the early ones, have the climax happen in the middle of the chapter, and the resolution finding its own conclusion before the end of the chapter. Then the chapters usually end when a person goes to sleep. As a result, the reader has no stake in what happens next. Nothing is driving them to the next page. That was another reason I kept putting this down. Because, why shouldn't I? Why should I care about these cardboard cutouts?

1.5/10