Lost

Rating: 3.5
The Kill (The Kills: Book Three)
A Novel by Richard House
2013 / 256 Pages

Fate up against your will

The Kills is a 2013 Man Booker Prize nominated volume from Richard House which is comprised of four stand-alone novels. The Kill is the third of these novels.

Richard House is about to put an extreme amount of faith in you as a reader, but the real question is how much do you trust him as a writer?

As book three of his addictively mind-blowing epic The Kills gets underway, it appears as though House has hit the pause button on his tale of military conspiracy in order tell a completely different, yet just as interesting side story about a grisly murder that takes place in the basement of an Italian palazzo. Trust him. Even if this drama seems unconnected to the main narrative that’s been building for the previous 500+ pages in the series, this detour will eventually make some sense.

(more…)

Rating: 4.0
A Tale for the Time Being
A Novel by Ruth Ozeki
2013 / 432 Pages

Ruth Ozeki’s third novel A Tale for the Time Being, is a meta-fictional work that features an alternate version of the author as one of the story’s two main protagonists. When Ruth finds a Hello Kitty lunch box washed up on the beach near her home it sets her off on the path of an amazing adventure. Inside the box are several items, the most revelatory of which is the diary of a suicidal sixteen-year-old Japanese girl named Nao. Desperate to unlock the truth and determine what became of the girl, Ruth begins reading.

The novel starts out with this rather straight-forward idea, but somewhere along the way it begins to transform into a fascinating piece about writer’s block and the constant push and pull relationship that exists between an author and their readership. Oh, and it also features a surprising amount of dog balls and cat ass. We’ve sprinkled some quotes throughout this review for your … enjoyment? Look, there’s one now.

(more…)