Sock, by Penn Jillette

This novel by Penn Jillette (from Penn & Teller) is more autobiography than fiction.  There is a thin plot around the hero catching a serial killer, but the book is mostly rants from Penn which I enjoyed.  The story is told from the point-of-view of a toy sock monkey which is a novel device.  It is made even better at the end when we are told the sock monkey is a metaphor for god, i.e. an imaginary friend that you feel closer to than real people.  I don't think I'm giving away anything because we had to be told the metaphor instead of it being demonstrated by the plot.  It's a great idea--it's just too bad Penn didn't show it as part of a nicely developed plot rather than telling us his thoughts disguised as a novel.

On a cool side note, I read this book on my new Kindle.  At first I thought my Kindle was broken because random ink splotches appeared on a few of the early pages.  Then I realized that Penn put fake printing press mistakes into the e-version to make it look more like a real book.  Very cool.

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, by Victor Hugo

Ayn Rand suggested reading this book for an example of great plot construction, and I can see why.  It integrated the actions of the major and minor characters beautifully with all of them coming together at the climax.  Hugo also has a beautiful style that gives wonderful details.  I especially liked the metaphor of the fly getting caught in the web.

 Hugo states at the end when justifying the addition of some chapters which were left out of the first edition that all the chapters are necessary and none are included without purpose.  This is a requirement of a first-class plot.  Hugo also wrapped up all the conflicts nicely during the climax which is very satisfying for the reader.  It reminded me of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiam.  Is Larry David our Victor Hugo?

Don't Stop the Carnival, by Herman Wouk

This book is about a New Yorker who buys a hotel in the Caribbean and runs it as sort of a mid-life crisis. I kept waiting for this book to have an interesting conflict. When it finally came in the middle of the book, it was over after about fifty pages, and then it went right back to pointlessness. The character development wasn't very deep, even for the main character. And the dialog of the natives was tough to read because it was mis-spelled the same way they mis-speak.

I guess I didn't like this book at all.

Previous Book Review List

Previously, I kept a list of books that I'd read on my personal home page. Click here for what I read from 1999 to 2007 with my very own 1- to 5-star ranking system.

The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown

Don't worry, this is a spoiler-free review. However, if I did tell you the big secret, you might not read the book. I mean, come on, that's the big secret?! Yeesh! I know Mr. Brown had a difficult task after The Da Vinci Code, but if he couldn't come up with anything better than that, maybe he should have tried a different genre. But then again, the book sold like a bajillion copies before it was even released, and I bought a copy, so who got the last laugh?

Literary-wise, the book had decent suspense but I never cared too much about the characters or even what happened to them. The only mildly interesting character was the bad guy, but he was such a wack-job, I didn't even like reading about him much.

I guess I'm done reading Mr. Brown. I had hoped I would learn something about how to create suspense by reading this book. However, the only thing that kept me reading was to find out what the "big secret" was, and now I just feel disappointed and let down that the book didn't pay off.

Plum Island, by Nelson DeMille

The book was billed as very suspenseful, so I read it to learn how it was done. The book is a basic murder mystery with the added suspense of Plum Island, an island off of New York used for biological warfare research. The book was a good story with a good deal of suspense, but it wasn't quite the page-turner that I had hoped for--maybe my expectations were too high.

Here's what I learned about plotting out a suspenseful novel:

• Reveal the information little by little; DeMille did this at the beginning with one clue per chapter.
• If it's necessary to set up an event in the middle to make the ending work, make that event part of a different story-line so it fits in and doesn't draw too much attention to itself.
  
• When DeMille introduced a minor question (like the significance of a clue), he answered the question a chapter or two later.
• For major questions (motive for murder, who dunnit), the action was tied into those questions. He also had the main character thinking about the questions and considering possible answers.
• After things go well for the characters, have something bad happen quickly to rebuild suspense. Happy, contented characters are boring.
• DeMille used only a little bit of foreshadowing. However, he was limited because the book was first-person and so we only knew what the main character knew.
• Pure action is boring. The only part that was boring to me was a boat chase chapter that was all action with no character development or mysteries introduced/revealed.
  

Pacific Vortex! by Clive Cussler

Clive Cussler is rich and famous and this is what he writes? That's what I thought about half-way through Pacific Vortex!. The fact that he uses the exclamation point in several of his titles is a good indication of his style--exciting things are happening so it must be exciting to the reader. Apparently it is for millions of readers, but it sure wasn't for me. Pacific Vortex! is about thin characters doing and saying ridiculous things. It has a lot of action, but I never really cared what happened to the people. It reminded me of an action-packed adventure movie that people yawn at because the action has very little significance.

I read this book to get ideas about how to build suspense in my writing, but it ended up showing me what not to do. This is apparently the first book in the series but was not released first because Cussler knew it was sub-standard. Maybe I'll give another one of his books a chance, but it's hard to imagine that the others are dramatically better.