Random House Book Club Forum April 26th

Random House representative Ron Shoop will be presenting book club recommendations April 26th at 6:30 at the Ygnacio Valley library.

I went to this last year (click the label link below) and thought it was a relatively ok experience. The presentations of new books are well done, informative, and at times entertaining. Although, he did give some REALLY bad advice on the Thomas Steinbeck novel In the Shadow of the Cypress which was a horrible use of paper and ink.

There was also a raffle at the end. I was hoping that the winner would be able to have a pick of books. While that was not the case, I (the winner) did get a bag of books. This was pretty nice, although only one of the books looked interesting, I wound up giving all of the books a way (which was not a easy task I assure you). By the way, I'm pretty sure the only reason I won the raffle was because I was the last person to put my card in.

Regardless of all the shortcomings, I do intend on attending this event and recommend that you do as well.

In the Shadow of the Cypress by Thomas Steinbeck

With some books you can tell after reading the first few lines that they are going to be good. This was not one of them - quite the opposite in fact. As I read In the Shadow of the Cypress I had to keep encouraging myself to keep reading. I had to keep telling myself, since I was reviewing it; I needed to finish it in order to give an accurate review. With that said, I can say with the utmost confidence and sincerity that In the Shadow of the Cypress is one of the worst books I have ever read.

Every aspect of this book is painfully, gut-wrenchingly, eye-stabbingly boring. The dialog, the narration, the story, everything was bad. In fact the only positive I can think of is that, thankfully, it’s less than 250 pages. This book is basically a poor effort at a Dan Brown-esque mystery about the Chinese discovering America before Christopher Columbus. It sounded like a very interesting premise and coupled with the recommendation by a Random House editor that Thomas Steinbeck wrote like his father (John Steinbeck; Of Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, etc.) I was incredibly excited to read this book.

What I got instead was a ‘mystery’ that required very little thought and a book that read like a final paper of a freshmen community college creative writing course. Thomas Steinbeck seems to be an author who loves his extensive vocabulary more than putting together a quality story. It is very clear from reading this book that he made several trips to his ancient Oxford thesaurus to pick unnecessarily academic words and had a checklist that included the task of writing at least four to five descriptive words before every noun or verb.

After the arduous task of reading the book I have come away with three conclusions. One, Thomas Steinbeck is not his father. Two, Thomas Steinbeck is probably only a published author because his last name is Steinbeck. Three, you should stay far, far away from reading this book.

Latest Book Review Online

My latest book review is now available online if you'd like to check it out. It is a review the Thomas Steinbeck book In the Shadow of the Cypress.

here is the web address:

http://www.ourcommunityfocus.com/view/full_story/9669911/article-In-the-Shadow-of-the-Cypress-by-Thomas-Steinbeck?instance=lead_story_left_column

There are also two other reviews available on the site with more back issues to come at some point in the future.