The Grouchy Editor

by Eric Hodgins

Mr. and Mrs. Blandings want to build their dream house on Connecticut’s Bald Mountain, but somewhere beneath the grounds of their serene and scenic property lurks a roiling, mischievous stream of water.  I can’t think of a better analogy for Hodgins’s clever prose, which is all propriety and elegance on the surface – and a whirlpool of repressed anger and despair down below.

That’s a blueprint for high comedy as we follow the hapless Blandings, two city slickers who run afoul of country anti-bumpkins in their quest to build the American Dream, circa 1946.  Try as the Blandings might to fit in with their new neighbors, alas, it is not to be as tensions on both sides of the cultural divide threaten to – and periodically do – erupt during construction of the jinxed house.  

This might not say much for human nature, but as an observer it can be wicked fun to sit back and read about someone else’s misery.

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Jonathan Yardley

What a great book about books.  Yardley, a literature critic at The Washington Post since 1981, has an infectious writing style; I couldn’t decide what I enjoyed more, the prospect of digging into some of his recommendations, or the reviews themselves.  Yardley praises the majority of “notable and neglected books revisited,” but on occasion he unfurls critical claws, most memorably on Steinbeck (“too often, for me, reading his prose is like scraping one’s fingernails on a blackboard”), Ulysses (“a book I simply cannot read”), and The Catcher in the Rye and The Old Man and the Sea (“two of the most durable and beloved books in American literature and, by any reasonable critical standard, two of the worst”).  He also has some choice words for the National Book Award:  “I read Morte d’Urban not long after it won the NBA; in those years that prize still occasionally went to books that deserved it.”  But mostly, Second Reading is a love letter to the 60 books and authors in its pages.  I’d say more, but I have to get reading.

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Urban Waite 

Dear Stephen King: 

You suck.  And I hate myself, too, because twice this summer I’ve suckered in to your brain-dead book recommendations.  This is what you wrote about The Terror of Living:  “This is one of those books you start at one in the afternoon and put down, winded, after midnight.”  Uhh … no.  This was one of those books I put down after 124 pages, exasperated, wondering if perhaps there might not be some merit in book burnings, after all.  “A hell of a good novel, relentlessly paced and beautifully narrated,” you gushed.  Were you referring to the gripping scene in which first-time novelist Waite describes a bad guy as “the man with the funny smile” – eight times in two pages?  Were you referring to the so-bad-it’s-funny dialogue, which reminded me of the so-bad-it’s-good movie, The Room?  Or perhaps you enjoyed Waite’s labored, pretentious attempts to establish a macho “style,” in which no sentence fragment goes unloved.

This is a dreadful book, amateurish and dull beyond belief.  The title alone should have scared me away.  And Mr. King, do they pay you to write these glowing blurbs for young authors?  If so, maybe next time you could actually read the damn book.

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Jason Zinoman

If you are a horror-movie fan, and I am certainly one of them, Zinoman’s biography of the men behind Hollywood’s second “golden age” of horror, the 1970s, is an essential read.  Shock Value is a nice blend of explaining what makes guys like Wes Craven and George Romero tick – and how those ticks show up in their movies.  But I’m sure every fright-flick aficionado will have nitpicks with Zinoman’s critique, and so here are two of mine:  Zinoman points out that most of these directors flamed out after initial success, but he doesn’t offer much of an explanation for why that happened.  William Friedkin (The Exorcist), Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), Romero (Night of the Living Dead) … what the hell happened to these guys?

My other complaint is more subjective.  I happen to believe that Bob Clark’s Black Christmas was the most terrifying movie of the decade, and that John Carpenter (who, incidentally, comes off as a Grade-A jerk in this book) shamelessly stole concepts and techniques from that movie to use in his blockbuster Halloween.  Zinoman touches on this directorial “borrowing,” but inexcusably devotes little text to Clark’s woefully underappreciated, eerie masterpiece.

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

  by Janet Evanovich

More of the same from the Evanovich moneymaking machine that is the Stephanie Plum series.  There are some very funny bits involving the goofball “Mooner,” but otherwise this entry is interchangeable with the 15th book, or the 14th, or the 13th ….

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Spencer Quinn

Some people never seem to learn – especially me.  I’ve been burned before by Stephen King book recommendations, but I didn’t let that stop me from suckering in after reading this King description of Dog on It:  “Yeah, it’s cute, but not too.  There’s a real mystery here, and great suspense as well.” 

This detective story narrated by a dog is cute alright – way cute, and I say that even though I like dogs.  As for the alleged “mystery” and “great suspense,” well, I suppose so, if you are still into the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew.  Dog on It is the first book in a series about the crime-fighting duo of Chet (the dog) and Bernie (the human), and it’s fitfully amusing, but that’s all.

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

    by Shirley MacLaine

It’s tough to critique a book like this because, as a reviewer, you can’t really be “objective.”  You must commit yourself:  Do you buy into the author’s theories of astral planes, UFOs, and reincarnation?  Or do you think it’s a bunch of superstitious nonsense?  If you pooh-pooh the material, you can be accused of being closed-minded.  If you agree with the author’s claims, then you might be as loopy as she is. I happen to think there is something to this “higher power” business.

Out on a Limb is structured in two parts:  Part of the book details movie star MacLaine’s love affair with a married politician; the second and larger portion of the memoir depicts her journeys around the world, meeting with like-minded people in search of deeper meanings to life.  The love affair grows tiresome to follow, but MacLaine’s discoveries about past lives, karma, and yes, UFOs, are sometimes fascinating, sometimes annoying.

Did she convert me to her beliefs?  Not entirely.  But I won’t dismiss her concepts as groundless, either.  As a friend of MacLaine’s says of her spiritual quest, “It can drive a guy nuts, but it made me look deeper, too.”

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

   by Victor Hugo

As a rule, I avoid abridged versions of the classics.  If Tolstoy or Melville wanted me to read a 900-page novel, why on earth should I trust some modern-day editor who’s pared the thing down to 550 pages?  However … after slogging through 1,200 pages of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, I’m changing my mind – a bit.  That’s because Hugo pauses – often – in his engrossing tale of the cursed ex-convict Jean Valjean for interminable digressions about 1) the history of the Paris sewer system; 2) the origins of French slang; 3) convents; 4) the battle of Waterloo.  At times, I wondered if Hugo concocted the story of Jean Valjean and company merely as a pretext to interject his own musings on politics, religion, and philosophy.

But there’s a reason we call certain books “classics,” and Les Miserables certainly has memorable characters and a powerful story.  Hugo does resort to narrative cheats – unlikely coincidences, characters who suffer convenient memory lapses – but his writing is so sincere and heartfelt that when I got to the final pages I experienced something rare for me:  goose bumps.

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

     by Timothy Schaffert    

Ordinarily, if you tell me that a book is “charming,” “lyrical,” and set in small-town Nebraska, I’ll ask you to hand me the TV remote on your way out the door, but Coffins is an exception.  Schaffert’s plot is slight and a bit far-fetched:  A cornfield community gains notoriety when the national media descends to cover an alleged child abduction, while a publishing house chooses the same burg to surreptitiously print a Harry Potter-like book.

It’s the characters who matter in this novel, in particular three generations (grandmother, grandson, and his teen niece) of one family.  They reassure us that in 2011 Mayberry might be battered, bruised, and a bit less innocent, but its wholesome values survive – at least in one Midwestern town. 

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Samuel Beckett

This was named the “most significant English language play of the 20th century” in a poll of 800 British playwrights, actors, directors and journalists.  Do I agree with that?  Probably not.  I think that Godot’s exalted “significance” stems from the fact that Beckett’s play is open to so many interpretations.  Does the never-seen title character represent God?  Of the four main characters, does one pair represent capitalism and the other socialism?  Is the entire thing an allegory for the Cold War?  Who knows?  Apparently, Beckett didn’t confirm or deny any of those theories.

But that’s part of the charm of this two-act gem – you can read practically anything into it, and probably will.  The story itself struck me as an absurdist Of Mice and Men:  Two vagabonds spend consecutive days waiting on a country road for the mysterious Godot, diverting themselves (and us) with a mixture of fatalistic philosophy, slapstick comedy, and Alice in Wonderland wordplay.

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