The Grouchy Editor

by Robert Galbraith

I thoroughly enjoyed J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, but when I did have complaints about them, they were usually related to plot – there was often too much of it. Rowling’s characters were delightful, but her convoluted back stories could be challenging.

Ditto for The Cuckoo’s Calling, an old-fashioned detective yarn that Rowling wrote under the pseudonym “Robert Galbraith.” Cuckoo’s protagonist, a war vet turned private investigator named Cormoran Strike, is interesting and likable, and Rowling’s supporting cast is colorful. But when crucial plot points unfold near the end of the story, my eyes would occasionally glaze over; it feels like over-plotting when it takes the hero an entire chapter to explain how he solved the case.

I might be nitpicking because, as with the Potter books, getting to the end of the story is a lot of fun. The slovenly Strike sleeps on a makeshift bed in his tiny office, drinks too much, and bumps heads with the rich and famous in London as he investigates the apparent suicide of a supermodel. He is aided by a temp worker who becomes his girl Friday and, presumably, his potential love interest. Together, this duo makes Cuckoo a pleasure to read – complex plot be damned.

© 2010-2024 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard

Political firebrand Bill O’Reilly took a break from his TV show and returned to his roots – teaching American history – to co-author this lively account of Abraham Lincoln’s final days.  O’Reilly and Martin Dugard fashion their nonfiction books in the manner of fictional thrillers, and Killing Lincoln is certainly a page-turner. But as I turned those pages I had the same nagging question that afflicts me when I read most history books: How much “artistic license” did the authors take?  

Do O’Reilly and Dugard really know what ran through Lincoln’s mind as he stood on the deck of a steamboat and observed the bombing of Petersburg, Virginia? Were the authors privy to John Wilkes Booth’s inner turmoil as he lay injured in a Maryland swamp, just days after assassinating the president? And yet, no historian can expect to achieve total accuracy. Killing Lincoln at the very least does a fine job capturing the tumult and horror of April, 1865.

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by Janet Evanovich

I’ve been critical of Evanovich’s golden-goose series about bounty hunter Stephanie Plum because each new installment contains the same-old, same-old:  Cars blow up, relationships stall, and Stephanie remains the immature ditz.  And yet I keep on reading the books.

Maybe it’s because Notorious feels a bit fresher than recent entries – more introspection; fewer unrealistic situations – but I’m beginning to rethink my complaints.  I’ve been expecting the Plum characters to evolve, but really, should the goofballs on I Love Lucy have “evolved”?  Should Lucy have matured, Ricky calmed down, and Fred run off with a mistress?  Perhaps it’s better if some things never change.

© 2010-2024 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Leo Tolstoy

Let me nitpick at Leo Tolstoy.  His two great novels, this one and War and Peace, are simply too damn long.  This is partly because Tolstoy could not resist lengthy, off-plot digressions about the issues of his day (military strategy in Peace; agriculture in Karenina).  Also, in comparing great novelists of the 19th century, I prefer Charles Dickens, whose books feature something that’s rare in Tolstoy:  humor.

I’m done nitpicking.  There is a reason that Anna Karenina is considered one of the best novels of all time.  Tolstoy immerses readers in his characters’ minds and keeps us there.  Don’t think you can relate to a member of 1870s Russian aristocracy?  You will in this book.  Tolstoy’s description of Anna’s descent into madness, culminating at a train station, is one of the most devastating passages I’ve ever read.

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What, me worry?  Yes, unfortunately.  This coffee-table sampling of 60 years of MAD magazine disappoints on a number of fronts.  Many of the selected articles are incomplete; the type is often impossible to read without a magnifying glass; and, last but not least, there is not enough Don Martin.  There can never be enough Don Martin.

Another problem, probably one that could not be helped, is that much of MAD’s humor is topical – and topical humor tends to lose bite over time.  Marlon Brando jokes from the 1950s don’t quite cut it in 2013. 

It might have been a better idea to do what Dark Horse Comics did with old issues of Creepy and Eerie, and publish a series of books containing entire issues of MAD; if they had done so, I would have been happy to buy editions representing, say, 1964 to 1970.   But I don’t want to be too harsh on “the usual gang of idiots,” because there are a lot of funny bits in this 256-page collection, and nostalgia seekers will surely find some nuggets.

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by Charles Dickens

They say that people don’t read books anymore, and they say that the few who do, don’t read long books.  Especially long, old books.  So I suppose there isn’t much of an audience these days for novels like David Copperfield, Dickens’s 729-page coming-of-age classic, and that’s a shame, because books might not get any better than this.

Unlike Tolstoy (the endless battle scenes in War and Peace), and Hugo (an interminable description of the Paris sewer system in Les Miserables), Dickens avoids bloat in Copperfield.  It’s not “perfect” – Dickens’s affection for some characters borders on sappiness, and a few of his plot coincidences stretch credulity – but in the two categories that matter most, strong characters and story, I’m not sure that it can be topped.

Wait, I take that back.  There was a little book called Great Expectations ….

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by Janet Evanovich

Reading an Evanovich “Stephanie Plum” novel is a bit like watching an episode of I Love Lucy.  Everyone is silly and everything is far-fetched – and yet it’s often quite amusing.  Evanovich goes all supernatural on us in her “between-the-numbers” books, including this one, which makes the proceedings in Plum Spooky even more ridiculous than usual.

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