I’ve decided to share my finds and the excellent reviews of my fellow book bloggers each Monday. Leave a comment with a link to your post or a trackback if you decide to play along.

The eleventh book to catch my eye is World War Z by Max Brooks, which was mentioned on LibraryThing.com (LT) by SpiralStar who has also posted an LT review for World War Z. In fact, there are a lot of reviews for this book and it’s pretty highly rated.

What caught my attention?

I’m not usually into zombie books as a genre, but I’m always intrigued when an author puts a new spin on a genre. This is not your average approach to zombies.

This book chronicles the events of a war between humanity and zombies, but in the form of interviews. Each interview focuses on a different aspect of the war – the initial discovery, the military response, the refugees, the relief to war-torn areas. Many different countries are represented, including Israel, the U.S., China, and Cuba; instead of focusing on a small group of similarly-oriented people, the reader is shown how almost the entire world reacts to this catastrophe.

SpiralStar mentions listening to this as an audiobook, which sounds like it would add to the book since it is based on character interviews. The broad scope that is covered is another thing that intrigues me about the premise. This book is reviewed by 91 people on LT and manages to rate a 4.23/5. That’s good enough for me to take a chance on it.

I, robot by Howard S. Smith tells the story of Suzuki Haruto, a Japanese police inspector, who stumbles onto a plot between Japan and Israel to exchange nuclear weapons for robot soldiers.

There is a lot of technical information in I, robot. In fact, the very first sentence in the book is followed by an abstract for a patent application for isotope separation. That’s a risky approach when you have mere seconds to sell a reader on your book as they browse the shelves.

The author seems knowledgeable of robotics and artificial intelligence, but much of the information is imparted to the reader in lecture- or presentation-format between characters. I would have found the robots just as convincing with less information and fewer diagrams to interrupt the flow of the story.

While the robots are convincing, the human characters are more difficult to grow attached to. The protagonist Suzuki Haruto is a rule-follower, which is integral to the book’s message. The point that this is the result of obsessive-compulsive disorder is not made convincingly until about 70 pages into the book, which is late considering the importance of this disorder to the events in the book.

Although there is a lot of action, the tension is defused because each time Haruto gets in a jam his karate or blind luck saves him. He also never suffers the repercussions of being shot a number of times over the course of the book (even after jumping into salt water mere seconds after being wounded there is no mention of pain or discomfort). These are things that I might overlook in a two-hour action movie, but not in a book where I spend several days with the characters.

The other characters in the book are flat. The women are of the I-need-a-man-to-keep-me-safe or I-need-babies-to-make-me-whole (or both) variety. Without background to support these attitudes in these particular characters, these mindsets come off as stereotypes (particularly when they are used for every woman in the book). Haruto has a particularly magnetic effect on one woman that left me flipping the pages to see if I missed something before she stripped naked and invited him “in”. Haruto’s love interest is nice to him, but there is not enough transition between being nice and being naked to make their relationship believable or interesting.

Another stereotype which cropped up repeatedly was that military generals are all overly-patriotic-with-a-quick-temper. Again, while there certainly are people like that in the military, it is not a given. Without the personalities being established I was confused when one general stared choking another in the middle of an argument, and another spontaneously began yelling at a subordinate, threatening him with all sorts of harm. There was no lead up to justify this behaviour from these characters.

Some readers will not care about these issues and some will. If you want to check the book out for yourself, you can download the first nine chapters of the book at Robot Binaries Press.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is a difficult book to review. I picked it up because the premise was revealed in another review, and I found the premise intriguing. I was disappointed to find that the premise isn’t really the focus of the story (I won’t tell you what it is because that would ruin the book for you). If this all sounds a little mysterious, that’s because it is supposed to be mysterious. At least, that is what the author intends since the premise is not mentioned on the book jacket.

Never Let Me Go chronicles the life of Kathy H. who grows up in a boarding school, Hailsham, that is very nice, if a little odd. The students learn much about literature and arts, but not much about the outside world, and strangely there is never a mention of parents or family. When Kathy H. and her friends eventually leave Hailsham, they come to realize what Hailsham is and their place in society.

This book is a coming of age story, and in that respect is very well done. It is intimate and heart-breaking and I would have enjoyed it more (particularly as a teen) if I had not had other expectations (which is why I’m not telling you what the underlying premise is).

Unfortunately, this book is classified as science fiction. I think that may keep its true audience from finding it, which is not the science fiction enthusiasts. While the classification is technically correct, there is very little exploration of the underlying premise (the science fiction part). The focus of the book is very narrowly on Kathy H. and her friends. While this does help maintain the mystery and presents a very intimate and personal view of the society, it is at the expense of exploring a very controversial issue that is, without explanation, uncontroversial in this fictional world.

If you like Kazuo Ishiguro’s writing (author of Remains of the Day and other novels), coming of age stories or explorations of loss, I recommend Never Let Me Go. Science fiction readers may or may not like it. I certainly don’t regret the time that I spent reading it, but I wanted to see the underlying premise explored more thoroughly than it was.