Cephalopod Coffeehouse: August 29

Oh my people! August 2014 has been a terrible month for books. I hardly feel I can join the "Best Book of the Month" discussion. It's as though I've been hanging out at the salad bar at Wendy's ("I highly recommend the dry rubbery cottage cheese with the wilted iceberg lettuce and a shot of that excellent cleaning-grade white vinegar") when I could have been nomming up all the good things at Momofuku.

OK. That being said, things were not entirely awful. I'm nearly done with Tigerman, which I picked up because an NPR reviewer practically had babies with it. "How do you know when a book has hooked you? When it really gets you in the guts and won't let go?" he gabbled. "When you can't stop telling people about it. When you catch yourself inserting the title of the book into conversations where it has no place, breathlessly insisting to all your friends and relations that they need to read this book right now, and waving it around on elevators and hoping that someone asks you about it." Crikey. It's like he's found religion, or a really great sex toy.

But nothing can compete with that kind of build up, it turns out. Or probably something could, but not Tigerman. I'm 95% of the way through so it's possible the last few pages will just knock my tiny socks off, but given what I've digested so far, it's only OK. I put it down without regret and must remind myself to pick it up the next day. While I appreciate many passages, Harkaway spends way too much time in his narrator's mine, ruminating. Like a cow chewing her cud. This is what's happening. This is how I feel. This is what might occur next. This is what it all means. Dude, seriously, put the brain down and pick the gun up. I would never offer that advice to a real person, but you are the narrator of a thriller: stop philosophizing and do things.

Love the Chip Kidd designed cover, though!

The other three books I read were not exactly shake-a-granny good, either: Will Grayson, Will Grayson, The House of the Scorpion, and Hugh Howey's Dust. None were terrible, really. I even gave two of them 4 whole stars on Goodreads. But it says something that when I tried to dredge up the memory of what I'd read in August, I had to turn to Goodreads to flippin' remember. It took less than 31 days to entirely forget each book I'd read. I feel like part of the problem is that the older I get and the more books I've read, the pickier I become. Everything I read this month belonged to a genre: Contemporary Thriller, YA, YA, and Dystopian Thriller, respectively. And it's OK for a decade or two, I suppose, but you begin to cotton on to patterns after a while, don't you? It all becomes entirely predictable. This is not to say new genre novel won't come along and just rattle my bones, but it's been a while.

Dear genre fiction ... I love you, but we need to see other people.

To see the other Coffeehouse reviews, which hopefully will be more enthusiastic, go to our kindly host's page. Happy reading!