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Everyman is a rather depressing narrative about an old man coming face to face with his physical vulnerabilities and eventually, his own mortality. The book opens with a funeral scene at a run-down Jewish cemetery, where the protagonist's family is gathered for his funeral. The beginning sets the tone for the rest of the book. At times, it seems to be a never ending narrative of someone's predictably uninteresting medical history. There is not much that even the best of writers can do to make hernia followed by appendicitis followed by carotid artery surgery and angioplasty and six stents interesting. At other times, it is his attempts to come to terms with the life he had lived, for the decisions he made, for the family he could have had.

Perhaps, this is where I let my own personal judgment cloud the literary appreciation of the book, but I just couldn't identify with the protagonist enough to appreciate his worries, anxieties and vulnerabilities. A womanizer who leaves his first wife and two resentful sons for a woman, who by his own admission, was his perfect companion, whom he leaves again to marry a Danish model nearly 20 years his junior,...

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Two reviews of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union over at The Guardian. In the first Jenny Diski, describing the novel as "ecstatically smart and sassy" writes

Chabon is a spectacular writer. He does a witty turn reinventing Yiddish for the modern Alaskan Jews - of course the lingua franca of Jews without an Israel - just a little of which I, with only faintly remembered childhood Yiddish, could grasp. (...) Nothing is described as just the way it is. Nothing is let be. He writes like a dream and has you laughing out loud, applauding the fun he has with language and the way he takes the task of a writer and runs delighted rings around it.

In the second review, Adam Mars-Jones finds the book "a brilliantly written fantasy with a not-quite-fatal flaw at its heart."

The real problem with the book is the piecemeal way Chabon introduces his alternate reality. It's an unwritten rule of the genre (well, it's written now) that you should be able to define the difference between the parallel world and ours in a single sentence.(...) Readers can't hope to be absorbed into the delicious texture of the writing if they're subconsciously waiting for...

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Edward Marriott reviews Rose Tremain's tale of an economic migrant in "The Road Home"

For a writer more accustomed to the distant past of the historical novel, the story of a modern-day economic migrant is a bold move, but Rose Tremain does not disappoint. The Road Home is thematically rich, dealing with loss and separation, mourning and melancholia, and what might underlie the ostensibly altruistic act of moving to another country to earn money for one's family. As always, her writing has a delicious, crunchy precision: plants sold in a market are 'fledgling food'; winter is described as having a 'deep, purple cold'; new buds on larch trees are 'a pale dust, barely visible to the eye'.

Joe Hill likes Chuck Palahniuk's writings, just doesn't like his latest effort "Rant".

His latest novel, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey, is even more ambitious, but here Palahniuk's swirl of characters and plotlines never gels, and the story lurches dangerously toward incoherence. The tale defies simple description, but concerns a country boy, Buster "Rant" Casey, who kills several relatives with poisonous insects, starts a fast-spreading, nationwide rabies epidemic and becomes a legend in a new counter-culture sport, "Party Crashing."

Eagle's Path reviews Karl Sabbagh's Dr. Riemann's Zeros, a book that tackles the enigma of mathematics along the lines of Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture.

Writing a book like Dr. Riemann's Zeros is harder, I think, than writing a popular science book. Explaining the weirdness of quantum physics is difficult, but physicists thrive on analogies, physical explanations, and mental images, many of which are within the grasp of the lay reader. Mathematics, particularly the deepest problems in mathematics, are another matter.

...
This makes Dr. Riemann's Zeros more a source of interesting facts and trivia than a clearly structured book. But, for that drawback, it's informative, respectful, and best of all, not sensationalist or condescending to the reader. Highly recommended if you are interested in problems of pure mathematics, and generally recommended to anyone curious about mathematics and unafraid of a few complex numbers and infinite series.

Nic has a lengthy review of Hal Duncan's "Vellum " (the first of two volumes collectively called 'The Book of All Hours' ) which he finds an "utterly exhilarating reading experience"

It soars with confidence, with great ideas, with luscious prose, above all with a joyously unbridled celebration of human imagination and its expressions through the ages: all the stories that have gone before, all those yet to come, all those that might have been. Just don't approach it expecting to have a bloody clue as to what's actually going on...

Ben Dooley is not impressed with Haruki Murakami's latest "After Dark". He reviews

The problem confronting Murakami's readers has always been that, despite his otherworldly talents, he has nothing to say. Nothing of any real interest or significance, at least. Although his stories often hint at a metaphysics of unreality, the books are mostly surface and, unlike one of his professed influences, Raymond Carver, seem to lack any insight into the human condition (or any other condition, really).

(...)

After Dark is no exception: characters loaf, they engage in small talk, and something weird happens on TV (but not nearly as weird as "Flavor of Love.") The one major departure from previous novels is the style, which is somewhat reminiscent of a screenplay.

Antiblurbs has a similar recommendation

If you've read and liked Murakami before, go ahead; if not, you'd be better off with some of his earlier works

Eve's Alexandria's exhaustive review of "The Needle in the Blood" find the book "mind-bogglingly good."

It is what Sarah Bowers does with this material, perfectly mundane in itself, that raises the piece from a romance to literary historical novel. Her narratorial style is initially disconcerting - a kind of omniscient third-person in the present tense, reminiscent of children's books - but is quickly reconciled and her prose is honestly quite startling.

(...)

The novel is like this through and through. Languid and deliberate in its telling, vivid and tangible in its world-building. Characters are similarly well-made, composite pieces and shown rather than told.

"Do you have the talent to be happy? Then on no account waste it here!" Had these been the opening sentences of this grim and dyspeptic novel, they might have served as fair warning to the reader, or perhaps as a challenge: “Enter this enchanted wood, ye who dare!” But they appear on Page 62.

Joel Agee warns us of the recently released English translation of Elfriede Jelinek's Greed in a review at The New York Times. He goes on

Nothing is farther from Jelinek’s mind than advancing a plot or even just telling a story. Her business is social dissection. Not vivisection, for none of her specimens are alive. To be alive — or to seem so — a person must exhibit at least the appearance of autonomy, and none of Jelinek’s characters have enough consciousness to surprise themselves or the reader in the least.

Jelinek has described herself as a kind of scientist who dispassionately “looks into the petri dish of society.” But her procedure in "Greed" is more like that of a prosecuting attorney in a trial of the indefensible, with effigies standing in for the accused, no judge or jury, no court protocol and of course no...

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Kehlmann has the contemporary novelist's fascination with territorial politics and the poetics of space (...) Measuring the World's power is all the more acute because it harnesses to this spatial turn the sense of history in process which is key to the best historical novels.

That was Giles Foden reviewing Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World. The review itself spends more words on the actual story of novel than on giving us an idea of the style, the quality and the issues with the writing, for which we could rely on Tom LeClair's review in The New York Times

Kehlmann is a little self-conscious about playing with history and authority. He has Humboldt complain about “novels that wandered off into lying fables because the author tied his fake inventions to the names of real historical personages.” “Disgusting,” agrees Gauss. An admirer of magic realism, Kehlmann takes some liberties with biography. His portrait of Gauss’s son Eugen as a dunderhead, for example, (...)

More problematic than “lying fables” is this novel’s slim size. While one might not want Pynchon’s “Mason & Dixon” to be a page longer than its 773, “Measuring the World” can’t calibrate with much robustness or precision two...

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