Lawrence Block, Hit Me
The fifth book about hit man Keller comes after a five-year gap from the fourth, Hit and Run (I reviewed that, and the previous book Hit Parade, here), and returns to the style of the first three books: it's a fix-up disguised as a novel.
Hit Me doesn't explain whether or where its five pieces -- "Keller in Dallas," Keller's Homecoming," "Keller at Sea," "Keller's Sideline" and "Keller's Obligation" -- first appeared separately, though I can see that "Dallas" was, and still is, available as a Kindle Single. But they are all, structurally, separate stories, each with a distinct arc, and just shoving them next to each other and counting the chapters sequentially doesn't turn Hit Me into a novel. Luckily, it doesn't need to be a novel: it's an excellent fix-up made up of gripping stories, each one covering one job of Keller's.
At the end of Hit and Run, Keller had seemingly abandoned his old career, after a serious betrayal: he had a new name, a new wife, a new home and legitimate job in New Orleans, and a baby on the way. But, like the rest of us over the years 2008-2012, the economic crisis changed his plans, and sent him back into his old ways. More specifically, his philatelic hobby, and the money he needed to continue it the way he wanted to, gave him an excuse to earn large sums by traveling to other cities, meeting new people, and killing them.
Hit Me is actually more concerned with philately than with murder; Keller kills because that's what he gets paid for -- and he's good at working out ways to do it and get away quietly afterward -- but stamps are what he really cares about, thinks about, and schemes about. And, along the way, Keller becomes another one of Block's vivid portrayals of modern men -- never quite sure what they want, but always as sure as young Elvis Costello that they want it now. So this is a quieter, less showy book than you'd expect from a "novel about a hit man" -- but Block has never been one to write to expectations.
Heaven is a business, primarily devoted to the production of Xenon. Humanity was a side project of its distant, lazy, unmotivated CEO -- we know him as God -- but He's gotten tired of the whole thing and wants to destroy all life on earth so he can focus on his new project: a pan-Asian restaurant. But two angels in the Department of Miracles have a plan: if they can just call one shot -- get two New York schlubs who secretly love each other to kiss within a month -- then God will call off the destruction and let humanity live on. Oh, did I mention that the two angels' relationship is amazingly parallel to those two schlubs?
Back in my SFBC days, we had a cluster of books that sold well for years and that we periodically threatened to put together to promote -- the fabled "Blasphemy Flyer," which we never actually did. So we would have been very happy to see What in God's Name; I'm sure I could have sold this very well for many years.
But, looking at it with a less mercenary eye, it's even thinner than most of the books in this category: not as blasphemous or funny as God: The Ultimate Autobiography, smaller and less exciting than Waiting for the Galactic Bus, and definitely not holding a candle to Good Omens. (It's not really comparable to Towing Jehovah, since that one definitely wasn't funny, and Only Begotten Daughter wasn't really about the yucks, either.) It is a short, pleasant, mildly blasphemous afterlife fantasy by an up-and-coming comedy writer -- Rich is the author of two collections of short comedy pieces, including Ant Farm, which I enjoyed, and the novel Elliot Allagash, which has been optioned for a movie -- but not much more than that.
So, if you're looking for a novel you can read in an hour or two about a God whose more than a bit of a putz and two sets of would-be lovers too shy and odd to quite get together without a serious push, this will do just fine. If you're looking for anything more than that, keep looking.
This one requires much less explanation: you've either heard of it already (and, in that case, probably read it at least once), or haven't. If you're in the latter bucket, immediately put Cold Comfort Farm on your list of books to read -- unless you have a strong aversion to actually funny books or an unnatural attachment to the rural muck and torment of Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, and their ilk.
I've vaguely felt like re-reading Cold Comfort Farm for more than a year -- I actually pulled out my copy, just before Hurricane Irene, but didn't get to it before the flood killed it. But The Wife and I rewatched the movie -- which is also excellent, in a very similar way -- a couple of weeks back (though The Wife didn't remember seeing it before, strangely). And so, through the mysteries of Inter-Library Loan, I got a copy of this edition, with the Roz Chast cover and the Lynne Truss introduction, both of which I recommend.
Cold Comfort Farm was Gibbons's first novel, published in 1932, as a takedown of the then very popular "rural novel" (Mary Webb seems to have been the exemplar of this now-forgotten subgenre), and it's as funny, and as endlessly quotable, now as it was then. It's a book about the triumph of thinking and planning over blind tradition and florid emotionalism, so I expect a lot of SFnal people will love it for that. But, most importantly, it's wickedly funny and deeply lovable, a joy to read and a joy to re-read and a joy to remember.
by Reginald Bakeley 
by Tom Hickman
by Loani Prior
by David Rees
by Hans-Joachim Neumann and Henrik Eberle
is his softest and quietest novel yet, perhaps driven by his heroine, Serena Frome. McEwan clearly wants us all to know that Serena does not have a top-flight intellect -- and there may be a buried intellectual argument in her intense love of novels, particularly those by mid-century British women writers -- and so he has first-person narrator Serena tell us so, and then demonstrate it, over and over throughout this fairly short novel. Serena is not so much unreliable as reliably dim -- not dumb, in any sense of the word, but not nearly as smart as (McEwan implies) she should be, or as smart as those around her. Not nearly as smart as McEwan, or his fictional stand-in here, certainly.
by Nicola Barker
by Nicholas Coleridge
by Nancy Huston
by Paul Mason
by Ben Masters
by Sam Mills
by Craig Raine
by Tom Wolfe.
is, how much it's an exercise in language. It is a retelling of Beowulf from the monster's point of view, yes, but it's even more so a Whitmanian barbaric yawp across the world, the cry of a creature considered barbaric and evil by its very existence, and furiously playing both to and against type the whole way. Grendel is not a book for any reader who just wants a story told plainly; this book is all in the telling and not in the tale.
and 
, both mid-'80s Vintage Contemporaries, with that over-designed look that signaled Smart and Literate to so many of us in those days -- as remainders not too long after publication, right next to each other on a table in a mall bookstore that's probably been gone for two decades. And they were just the beginning of a long, strange career, through six more novels and two non-fiction books (though one of those involved traveling the US, during an election year, with the ghost of Sally Hemmings, and the other was a similarly phantasmagorical story of another election year -- Erickson is as fearless when he tells the truth as when he tells stories) over the next two and a half decades.
. And, for those of you who are confused, this is a different writer than the epic fantasist Steven Erikson; this one was born with the name and was using it professionally a decade before the Malazan books started.
extends Erickson's world further, having perhaps the least focus on his homeland of any of his novels. It's the story of a failed LA novelist and former college professor, Alexander "Zan" Nordhoc, who now only works as a "pirate radio DJ" (which doesn't pay, of course), along with the rest of his family -- struggling photographer wife Viv, twelve-year old Parker, and their newly adopted four-year-old Ethiopian daughter Sheba/Zema, preternaturally aware and present -- who have been spat out by the recent financial crisis (it hit just after they adopted Sheba) and are waiting for either something good to finally happen to them or the banks to finally get organized to take away their over-leveraged, under-paid-for house away from them.
, in which that ever-cheerful character decides that starting a business farming chickens on the Dorset coast is the royal road to riches -- why, you can get the chickens and feed on account, and then sell back the eggs (dozens every day!) to your creditors and local conveyors of comestibles, quickly building a quick and easy stream of ever-increasing income without any outlay or hard work! -- and drags his boyhood friend Jeremy Garnet into the scheme. Of course it doesn't work as Ukridge expects, since nothing ever could, and of course there's a love plot for Jeremy, plus angry creditors, rural policemen, and wise but unheeded blue-collar types, since this is a Wodehouse novel.
his most enigmatic, least fathomable novel and his best, most characteristic books are 
, 
, and 
. 1Q84, instead, gives Murakami length -- the opportunity to stretch one of his typical plots out further than usual, to space out his sparse external events and vastly increase the number and importance of his dialogues and monologues about life.
a few years back and have been looking for more of his stuff since.)
-- the story of a young, emotionally closed-off person who is shocked into contemplating a new life when the closest thing to a significant other he/she has takes off for greener pastures on the other side of the country. 
