Sucker Punch is the second novel in the “Cal Innes Series”. I didn’t read Banks’ first Innes novel Saturday’s Child but didn’t feel lost reading Sucker Punch which felt like a very self contained novel. I appreciate a writer who can write a series and make each book feel unique, all too often writer’s in this genre write fractured stories with an eye to the greater series, Banks resists this temptation and delivers a solid and complete novel.

Sucker Punch is at its best when it’s immersed in the world of amateur boxing, the closer to the ring this book gets the better it is. Unfortunately the book takes an extreme left turn about three quarters of the way through that really threw me. It’s jarring and really derailed the momentum of the book. Banks’ does ultimately pull it all together after that serious mis-step and it’s not enough of a mis-step to prevent me from recommending this book, but it would have been a better book without it. The twist also arrests the natural story arch and results in a key conflict not getting the resolution it should have.

If you’re a fan of boxing or enjoy the gritty world of sweat soaked gyms and tough guys Sucker Punch is definitely worth checking out.

I’d been mulling over the Kindle for quite sometime. I first saw the Kindle “in the wild” at Wordcamp when Josh Bancroft(of tiny screenfuls) whipped it out of his bag and into my hands. I was honestly quite impressed at first by the device and a few weeks later I even had a Kindle 1.0 in my Amazon cart $50 Oprah coupon in hand, just about to expire. But the reason I didn’t pull the trigger then is different than why I decided to cancel my pre-order now.

With the Kindle 1.0 I knew full well I would be paying to be an early adopter. For years I’ve pledged that I would step off the bleeding edge and let other people go through the pain and suffering of a first generation product. This pledge has served me well (I do own an iPhone, but happily waited until the 2nd Generation 3G was released).

So when the Kindle 2 was announced I decided it was time to take the plunge. I hopped onto Amazon and put in my pre-order to ‘save my place in line’…and then I started to think about it.

Why was I ordering a Kindle 2? Well first off, it’s no secret I am passionate about reading. I read almost every single night, exhausted or not. So why not step up and invest in a device that is centered around reading? In addition to being a big book reader, I am also a very faithful newspaper reader, and this winter I found myself paperless more often than not. So the idea of getting the paper digitally delivered sounded fantastic.

Yet I enjoy sitting with my morning paper, flipping through it in a way no device enables me to. I’m not searching for information when I read a paper, I’m stumbling through it. I’m sure the newspaper as we know it is an endangered species. So why hasten its demise, why give up something I really enjoy.

As I thought about carrying around a device that holds several thousand books, I really thought about my reading experience. With music I love being able to switch between thousands of albums at a click of a button. Music is whimsical – at one moment I may be in the mood for one song and then for another. Books on the other hand aren’t. I’m extremely ‘loyal’ when it comes to a book. I pick up a book and read it cover to cover. I don’t start up other books, leave one half read while I start another. So what’s the real benefit of carrying around so many books?

I am also a night reader, and the digital paper, while fantastic for day reading really doesn’t have any real benefit at night. I’d still be clamping my old book light to the device.

Then there’s that city square block of books called Powells that we have in our fair city. It’s absurd how blaze Portlanders get about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah a whole city block of books…been there…done that… But it is astounding, and I derive a lot of pleasure walking through the stacks of physical books, out to discover a book I may know nothing about. I just couldn’t see giving up that experience and dedicating all my book business to Amazon. Not that I don’t like Amazon, I do, but after investing $350 in a reading device I’d be hard pressed to justify buying non-Kindle books.

Lastly there’s that price tag – $350. It’s not that I couldn’t justify it. I work extremely hard and I do make it a point to reward myself, and so if the Kindle were something I really wanted and needed I’d do it. At $350 the Kindle is really an investment, and at that price if you’re going to buy it, you need to be serious about using it.

For what it is I think the Kindle 2 is a pretty impressive device, G3 whisper-net updates, long battery life, possible over the air sync-hing with other devices, RSS delivery and more. Amazon should be proud of their new product. But for me, as a lifelong reader, I’m just not ready for it. Tonight I plan to curl up with Tom Petrota’s The Abstinence Teacher for the last 50 pages and at the end I’ll triumphantly close the book, set it down on my nightstand and pick up Ray Banks Sucker Punch. It’s the same book I easily toted with me today and read while my kids were at their Kung-Fu class. I didn’t get any ooohs and ahhhs for reading it, but I can say I enjoyed every minute.

At the start the book is a fascinating musing on the difference between what actually happened and how we remember it. But the novelty of this device ultimately tires and we are left with a brutal account of an ultimately unsympathetic character who makes it nearly impossible to root for him.

Night of The Gun does have it’s high points, but most of them come in the first half of the book. The backside of the book is an exercise in endurance with Carr turning his focus to the tragedies of the people around him and an account of him watching his carefully constructed world fall a part.

At the end of this little experiment of a book I came away feeling exhausted and unfulfilled. The conclusion I reached was that I’d rather read the mostly true recollections of someone going through he’ll than the blow by blow reporting based on the mostly true recollections of others.

A Million Little Pieces may be filled with a million little white lies, but I enjoyed that book a million times more than this one. Memoir isn’t really pure nonfiction and that’s a good thing as a storyteller will always triumph a reporter when it comes to creating a compelling personal stories.

The set up for The Pearl Diver is extremely engaging, so much so that I was frustrated that the author didn’t spend more time with it. As such the loss of this world is less impactual than it would have been had we had more time to become immersed in it and I would have easily devoured four or five more chapters set in the world of the Pearl Diver.

Also fairly condensed is the many years the main character spends on the island of Nagashima. We experience over forty years in just a few hundred pages. Most books are painfully overwritten, but here there seemed opportunity for much more.

But the end is perfect. It’s lyrical, emotional and exceptional and show that although there IS room for more here, the author succeeds with a lighter, softer more minimalistic touch.

I’m interested in now reading Jeff Talarigo’s The Ginseng Hunter to see how he grows as a writer.

At its core The Wordy Shipmates is a very interesting book. Vowell takes a look at a very specific time and space in American History and shines a light into many preconceived notions of the Puritans and their experience in early America.

What’s missing from The Wordy Shipmates is Vowell herself. In Assassination Vacation, Vowell’s own journey was the glue which held the book together. Here that kind of journey is mostly absent and so the book often gets stalled in the historical content.

That all said, it is a fascinating book and Vowell is immensely talented. My instinct though is that hearing her read this story would be more enjoyable and entertaining than reading it, and this comes from someone who rarely listens to audio books.

So if you’re a Vowell fan, do check this book out, albeit with lower expectations as it’s no Assassination Vacation.

I’ve often found Michael Ian Black to be hit or miss with his humor, and while not all 50 essays in the book are genius, most of them are pretty funny. I appreciate the fact that Black takes risks with his work in the book and writes about topics people just don’t write about (Like coloring his genitals with permanent market). Wild, sick, perverse and laugh out loud funny My Custom Van is a must read for fans of severely biting humor.

Lori Handeland’s Any Given Doomsday feels like someone threw the top books of the genre into a blender and then tried to make something out of the mix.  The book is  jumbled and disjointed as it tries to hit almost every kind of were creature, daemon and vampire.  You know the book has hit the pinnacle of ridiculousness when one character turns to another and says a third is “one eight were creature”…. what?!?

What the genre really needs are fresh new voices, not imitators.

Walking Through Walls - A Painfully Bad Memoir

In Walking Through Walls: A Memoir Philip Smith doesn’t spend much time sanity checking the outlandish tales of his father and his ability to heal via telephone or speak to spirit guides. All this must be taken immediately on faith, which some readers might be able to do. I wasn’t.

But even if you do accept what Smith writes about his father, you’ll still be painfully bored at the countless variations of Smith’s telling and retelling of the same exact thing. OK we get it, Smith’s Dad healed people…but do we need to hear the indepth details about each and every healing.

Somewhere along the way Philip Smith lost sight of the story and instead defaulted into trying to do a blow by blow description of his father’s life. He fails miserably in a book that will leave you feeling more trapped than uplifted. By page 200 I was desperately wishing it would end, and when I got there I was surprise at just how little time was spent on a fairly climatic event.

There are so many better memoirs than Walking Through Walls, I’d highly recommend spending your time with them. I suggest: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir,  Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity, A Million Little Pieces (even though it’s fiction too) or Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction  – all of them infinitely better than this one.

Author Hideo Okuda does a fantastic job of weaving these short stories into a cohesive whole. Rather than a book of six short stories Lala Pipo is a complete novel where each character gets their own complete storyline and several events are seen from more than one perspective.

If you’re easily offended by sexuality then obviously Lala Pipo won’t be for you, but for people who think literature shouldn’t shy away from dealing with the sexual relationships between people Lala Pipo is worth checking out. I found it to be a well written, engaging and entertaining book.

Cain avoids a sophomore slump with a novel that shows her growth as a writer and her potential. In Heartsick Cain unsuccessfully intertwined two mysteries and filled her pages with so many descriptions that the story stumbled over them.

In Sweetheart she’s found a better finesse on her intertwined mysteries with a clear realization that the main story of detective Archie Sheridan and serial killer Gretchen Lowell is the reason readers will be coming back for more. Cain is growing as a writer and Sweetheart is a solid step in what should be a stellar career.

As much as I enjoy the dance between Sheridan and Lowell I don’t think I’d be all that interested in coming back for more. The characters have reached their natural archs and this book should be the end of the series. Unfortunately Cain seems to capitulate to the pressures in the publishing world to continue a successful series and softens the end, which could instead have been a shocker.

While not a perfect book by any stretch of the imagination, Sweetheart is a solid psychological thriller and is highly recommended for readers who were seduced by the Hannibal Lechter/ Clarisse Starling like connection between the characters in Heartsick.