Inferno by Dan Brown

Dan Brown's historical thrillers seem to be one of those fads, where everyone is talking about it and nobody is really sure why. Looking back on his previous novels, especially those featuring the mild-mannered Harvard professor Robert Langdon, it becomes increasingly unclear why Brown has been able to keep the blockbusters coming. The Da Vinci Code definitely captured the public imagination, but not with graceful storytelling and intrigue. Instead it boldly presented a bunch of outlandish old-wives tales as fact and dragged readers through exposition after exposition. After The Da Vinci Code (and it's insufferable yet inevitable film version) came The Lost Symbol, a novel with no particular plot other than what amounted to a mediocre treasure hunt.

As you would imagine, Robert Langdon is here for at least one more outing. Brown seems to have wanted to mix things up a little from previous works, mostly for the better. In the beginning, Langdon wakes up with a bullet wound and short term amnesia. A murderous sociopath is on his tail. A chase ensues. Most of this is very standard procedure, however some parts do seem to underline the writer's new found flair for comedy and witty quips.

The plot revolves around Dante's famous Divine Comedy and Inferno, which are being used by an unhinged scientist as... well nothing really. Inferno is mostly Langdon's guide to solving the series of mysteries separating him from whatever mad invention Zobrist, the scientist, had left hidden before his suicide. As I mentioned, there is nothing new here for people familiar with either Florence or the original Inferno, at least in terms historical background and literature. If you want to acquaint yourself with Dante in a more meaningful (but just as fictional) way, I would suggest Dante Club by Matthew Pearl.

The best part here is seeing Mr. Brown warp our expectations towards the end of the second act. Much of the intrigue at the end is more about things that seemed mundane in the beginning. There are quite a few clever twists that do keep the pace up even towards the end, when I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by the encyclopedean expose. Oh, and the ending did catch me off guard. Consider yourself warned, it may not be good literature, but Inferno does sometimes surprise and excite.

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

I've been reading a lot of Vonnegut lately, it seems. For the last few months, every time I've been to a bookstore, I've inexplicably found myself pouring through whatever novels they happened to have from the great American. Ooh, Slapstick, the impossible sci-fi madness that Vonnegut himself dispised. Ah, a new print of Slaughterhouse-five with the original hard-cover jacket and illustrations. Breakfast of Champions seems like the most logical thing to read after Timequake, a semibiographical work that a friend of mine said was "like Breakfast of Champions, only written twenty years later".

My curiosity aroused, I decided to take a look at Breakfast of Champions, and was definitely not underwhelmed. It is a beautiful tale of madness, Americana and authorship, and is laced in Vonnegut's sharp observations and witty humor, however black that may be at times. The book itself seems to be a sort of 50 year birthday present to the aging author (not unlike Timequake) and once again Vonnegut features prominently both as himself and as his long-time alter ego Kilgore Trout. All in all, Breakfast of Champions is not a departure from his style, and fans of his other work will immediately recognize some of the same characters that appear in his other novels.

Here I do have to admit that Breakfast of Champions is not an easy book to describe (especially since I'm writing this a few weeks after having finished it). It's one of those things that you need to see for yourself to believe. To Vonnegut fans, everything will seem familiar from page one, but to everyone else, it will seem confusing or unfocused. As a novel, it is strangely unconfined by most typical settings and almost seems to be in a category of its own. As for future readers, I recommend a healthy dose of other Vonnegut novels before reading this one. Those with little taste for black humor need not even bother.

A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin

I'm not one to give up on epic quests, and one of the first things I did after reading A Storm of Swords, the third book in the fantastical series A Song of Ice and Fire, was to download the next book on my Kindle. I had been warned, however, that unlike the brilliant third instalment in the series, A Feast for Crows was too long, too slow and clearly not as much fun. I'm not going to dabble in the series of events going on in Westeros, however, I will warn anyone who has gotten this far through the 1k-pages-per-volume saga that A Feast for Crows will disappoint in terms of excitement, characters and action.

The reason I liked  A Storm of Swords in the first place was that it seemed to be going somewhere. And then at the end it truly wrapped up its plots in satisfying and surprising ways. All characters had enticing arcs and I felt a sense of purpose in the prose; Martin was going somewhere with the intricate explanations of a fantasy world in turmoil. A Feast for Crows seems to be a polar opposite of all this. The plot advances at a truly glacial pace during some parts of the book, and the ending seems for nought.

A pet peeve of mine is present here as well. I've read too many novels and seen too many movies, where the main character goes through an exaggeratedly complex series of events, fighting to prevent whatever disaster is currently imminent, only to be outdone at the very last moment. It seems to be some kind of contemporary twist on the Deus Ex Machina ("it was only a dream", etc.) made for a world of zombie apocalypses and The Da Vinci Code. It was also present in Dan Brown's Inferno (more on that later), and now it is here in A Feast for Crows.

If you previously loved A Song of Ice and Fire for its intricate plotting, enormous family trees and minute details of a fantasy world, you will be right at home with A Feast of Crows as well. Alas, if you previously enjoyed the feeling of unstoppable machinery stirring into motion and taking characters from remote parts of the world together to an epic ending, you will sorely miss the action, drama and irreversibility of the previous novel. A Feast for Crows, a surprisingly accurate name, is great pickings, but only for a certain breed.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

According to my conservative estimate, I've read over 200 books during my 20-something years. Most of them leave little to remember afterwards, even if the reading the book itself was pleasant enough, and some disappear completely from my memory only weeks after returning the book to the library. In many ways, this seems to be the case for a lot of things in the world today. Media is made for single consumption and for quick thrills that leave readers (or listeners or watchers) satisfied for only short periods of time. Our attention spans shorten, our minds focus on quantity over quality as we jump through links on our laptops, and skip over songs on Spotify.

In a world of throw away, good-enough objects and less-than-useful information, Freedom stands high over all else. Simultaneously, it is unlike anything that I have ever read and still encompasses everything that I've ever learned. It's a novel that makes sense of the world around us without being preachy and manages somehow to feel so humane and sincere while also showing us how we as people are hypocritical, satirical and outright mean. It made me feel sad, it made me laugh and felt real like my own life and for a while, I felt contented to live a double life inside its world.

Not a lot of books feel so powerful even after a second read, only Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22 come to mind, however Freedom is something completely different. It is an American novel through and through (perhaps even a Great American Novel), yet it has none of the mystery of The Great Gatsby or the heartland bigotry of To Kill a Mocking Bird. It is rooted in the banalities of daily life; the loves, the laughs and the envies. Its characters are struggling to find their places in a constantly changing world that doesn't always reward good deeds and almost never punishes bad ones.

Freedoms only problem might lie in its absolute fidelity to year 2010 America. Name dropping Conor Oberst felt unnecessary and fake coming from an author in his mid 50s. The world is full of young superstars vying for fame in the music world and there is no particular reason why this specific musician should be remembered decades later. However, complaining about something as beautiful as Freedom seems completely unfair; nobody would fault the Mona Lisa or Hamlet.

Freedom is a novel that made me see my life from a completely new perspective. For some that might seem like faint praise, but believe me, it is not. Too many times, I've noticed a snippet on a book's cover saying something along the lines of "This book will change your life". Normally I would skip those lines with the slight annoyance that comes with repeated appreciation. However, Freedom is almost deserving of that title. For a small moment or even a longer one, Freedom has changed my life.