Not Recommended: "Imperial Bedrooms"

"Imperial Bedrooms" by Bret Easton Ellis is worthless. From a writer's standpoint, it's poorly written, purely plot-driven, shallow, soulless, and completely banks on shock value. From a reader's standpoint, it was mildly entertaining but fell flat, and was mostly just disgusting. The narrative follows a screenwriter from LA named Clay who's hedonistic and self-involved. He is constantly having sex with random young girls (and sometimes young boys, too) by promising them that he can get them roles in movies, and of course he never follows through. Then he finds out his long-time best friend, a guy named Julian who works as a pimp, is dating the girl Clay has been pursuing. So Clay does what any normal person would do: he drops Julian off with a violent killer to be murdered. Then he rents a house out in the desert where he spends days violently raping and torturing a young girl and young boy, until the boy turns evil and the girl goes out of her mind. The entire book is completely devoid of emotion, and Clay lacks remorse for everything he does, discussing these horrific acts the way a person would talk about going grocery shopping. But the cold-hearted, detestable main character didn't bother me as much as the bad writing. Don't waste your time with this one.

in my Top 10: "In Cold Blood"

Truman Capote's writing holds a special place in my heart. Whether he's talking about a love affair or murder, his writing is just shockingly beautiful. It's like a really beautiful song that you just love hearing. This book is non-fiction and is about a family-- husband, wife, youngest daughter, and son-- who are murdered during a robbery by two men who are eventually tracked down and sentenced to death. Although all the factual details are there, it reads like fiction. Capote spent years researching this case and personally interviewing the killers while they awaited execution in prison. He got so close to them, in fact, that he befriended one of them. His close friend, Harper Lee (author of "To Kill a Mockingbird") also took part in conducting interviews and collecting research, and you'll notice that Capote dedicated this book to her. Once he finished writing it, he was so disturbed and so drained from the experience, that he never finished another novel, although up until then he was a celebrity in the literary world (I have a copy of a photograph of Truman Capote dancing with Marilyn Monroe at a party).
     By the end of the book, you feel like you personally know the murdered family, which makes it even more heartbreaking. You know the killers well enough to see them as regular boys, and you start to wonder what the hell happened to them. You won't be able to sleep with the lights off; there are parts of the book that are absolutely terrifying, and the ending is perfect, understated, undramatic, just the right way to end something like this.
     And after you've read this book, you should watch the movie "Capote" which earned Phillip Seymour Hoffman a best actor Oscar, and covers Capote's arduous process in writing "In Cold Blood."

Classic of the week: "The Sound and the Fury"

The title comes from Shakespeare's Macbeth, the novel is from William Faulkner. It's notable for its use of stream of consciousness, and is separated into 4 sections, each one narrated by a different member of an old-money family that's in a state of decay. The construction of the book is both impressive and baffling. In fact, if you're going to read it, you might want to do a little research on it first so that you can follow what's happening. Particularly because the first section of the book is told through stream of consciousness from the mind of a severely mentally handicapped man who recounts events completely out of sequence. Adding to the confusion is the double-naming; there are two different characters named Jason from two different generations, two different characters named Quinten-- one is a boy who commits suicide and the other is the illegitimate daughter of that boy's sister, and two different characters named Maury, but one of them is usually referred to as Benjy. It's not always clear which Jason or which Quinten is being talked about. In the literary and historical sense, this book was and still is significant, and worth reading. It's success contributed to Faulkner winning the Nobel Prize in literature. However, if you're not ready to tackle something so difficult but you want to read Faulkner, you might want to start with something a little easier, like his short novel, "As I Lay Dying," which is just as noteworthy.

Where do I start...

"Beat the Reaper" by Josh Bazell is... brutal? Ruthless? Don't read it if you have a weak stomach, particularly because of the extremely detailed part where the narrator slices his leg open, breaks his own bone and then rips it out to use it as a weapon. Yeah, that really happens in this book. I'm not complaining; I stayed up all night to finish the last 150 pages because I couldn't stand not knowing what would happen next. It's also really funny, witty, sardonic. The narrative is split between the main character recounting his youth when he became an orphan and was informally adopted by a mob family who ends up hiring him as their best hit man, and the present where he's working as a Doctor and is in the witness protection program for obvious reasons. There's so many jaw-dropping moments in this book I don't even know where to start, and I don't want to give away any of the good parts. Just read it.

Short, Tragic, Hilarious

Though just as tragic as any good Russian novel, "City of Thieves" was written by American author David Benioff. This one is a little over 200 pages and easy to read. The author was inspired by stories from his own grandfather, and used those stories as a jumping-off point for his best-selling novel. It's set in a small town in Russia that's under siege by the Nazis in WWII. The narrator is sent, along with a deserter of the Russian army, on an impossible mission by a prominent Soviet colonel. The boys' alternative to this mission is execution or slow starvation, so they cross enemy lines and encounter cannibals with human torsos hanging behind a bloody sheet, sex slaves held captive by Nazis, dogs rigged with bombs, a rogue group of Russian soldiers that are hell-bent on executing a certain important member of the SS, and finally actual Nazis that they have to out-wit in order to conceal the fatal fact that the narrator is a Jew. The bleak snowy landscape and depressing reality of what the Russian people endured is contrasted by the author's sharp wit and clever use of humor. The ending of this book is what really makes it so memorable.

More Non-fiction (?)

"Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," by John Berendt, was a #1 national bestseller. It takes place in the old southern town of Savannah, Georgia, and exposes the odd and eccentric residents as well as their dirty laundry. The book covers everything from transvestites to suicides, crimes of passion, murder, sweet southern belles and high society. If this book wasn't non-fiction, it might be kind of dull. But the fact that all these strange things really happened makes it far more intriguing. What bothered me was the author's note that he may have stretched the truth in some places in order to tell a fluent, interesting story. Though the narrator is a bit boring and up-tight, the people he encounters are very much the opposite, making the book scandalous enough to be worth reading.

in my Top 10: "The Devil in the White City"

Non-fiction normally doesn't sound too fun to me, but Erik Larson writes cold-hard facts as alluringly as if it were fiction. Not only is "Devil in the White City" extremely captivating, it's also a fascinating history lesson about the 1892 World's Fair in Chicago. For example, did you know the first Ferris wheel was invented for the Chicago World's Fair in order to compete with the Eiffel Tower which was built for the Paris World's Fair? The Ferris wheel had cars big enough to hold 60 people each, and the public was so enamored with it that many people tried to use the cars as a venue for their weddings. The narrative is split between this and another historical figure: a serial killer who builds a hotel and uses the fair as a method to lure guests aka victims. The real-life hotel was built as the perfect machine to trap, murder, and dispose of young women, complete with body-sized ovens in the labyrinthine basement. Sounds interesting, doesn't it?