Evan J. Mandery

The unlikely hero of this hilarious science fiction novel is a young Presidential aide named Ralph Bailey, whose primary duty each day is walk to the Blimpway and purchase for the President a ham and Swiss sandwich. However, in the course of this story, Ralph meets a lovely law student named Jessica, has his first encounter with aliens who are for some unknown reason presumed to be Jewish, and is appointed to be number nine hundred forty-ninth in the presidential order of succession. Meanwhile on Rigel-Rigel, home of the newly arrived Alien Ambassador, life goes on about the same as it does on earth, with the wife of the Ambassador to earth getting in a fender-bender, worrying about her husband being away from home, and dealing with PTA meetings. The novel continues with the first meeting between the aliens and the President.

Chapters are titled with lines of songs, and the author occasionally inserts his own commentary into the narrative, which works well in this context. This is a fun and light-hearted read, but also makes you think, just a little bit, about how ridiculous some of our human rites and assumptions are.… (plus d'informations)

DFN a 23%

¿Quiero saber porqué el protagonista viaja al pasado para decirse a si mismo que no debe casarse con Q? Sí.

¿Tengo tantas ganas de saber como para soportar seguir leyendo? No.

Terrible escritura. Algunos dicen que es una comedia, y no estoy segura, porque aunque los diálogos son ingeniosos -debo admitir que la escena del mini golf comunista fue muy ocurrente- ninguno me causo ni siquiera el asomo de una sonrisa.

Nada.

Los personajes no me importaron. Y el protagonista habla DEMASIADO. Es aburrido. Y eso que yo amo las tramas que involucran viajes en el tiempo.

Tal vez más adelante se ponía mas interesante. No sé, no hay nada lo suficientemente fuerte que me impulsara a seguir leyendo y averiguarlo.

Tal vez la película logré ser más entretenida. Eso espero.… (plus d'informations)

Q by Evan Mandery

Premise: Time Travel - Is it possible to make our current/future lives better by changing our past?
MC's older self(ves) go back in time, returning to his present time, in order to give him advice on how to make his life better. The first self who visits him tells him he should not marry the woman he is deeply in love with. He is given a good reason; however, the reader can see right away that it would be really unnecessary to follow that advice. He follows it because for one thing, ignoring the advice wouldn't make a good story, and secondly, the protagonist is a dope. Likable, but a dope nonetheless. He needs a keeper.

I love the premise of this book as well as the lesson I took away from it when I finally reached the end; however, the plot itself was nearly nonexistent. At least, the story surrounding the characters was shrouded by all the extraneous twaddle that encompassed a good 3/4 of the book itself. A major--MAJOR--portion of the book is spent within the protagonist's current magnum opus or whatever he professes it to be. We are, oh, good Lord, forced to read the main character's novels as he is writing them. He describes his genre of writing as the "counterhistorical exploration of the unexplored potentialities of...(fill in the blank)". Basically, what would happen if a famous person from history did something else with his/her life? Became famous, or not, for something else? Sounds reasonable, right? Especially when it doesn't involve vampires or zombies. Ahem.

Unfortunately, the ridiculous material wanders all over the place like a 5 year old picking flowers in the outfield at a T-ball game. The subjects of the MC's novels range from the "full potentialities of a full William Henry Harrison presidency" in full detail...to Sigmund Freud's obsession with the male genitalia of eels, not to mention his own mother. Chapters and chapters and chapters and chapters focus on Freud's imaginary parallel life, his loves, and how it all takes him on a different path than what he is known for. (I'm pretty sure I'm making it sound much more interesting than it actually was when reading about it.)

I'm not sure if I am more annoyed by how cerebral it is written or if I enjoy it for that same reason. I think I actually felt neurons firing, stretching out and attaching themselves to other parts of my brain. Thank goodness the author knows how to incorporate "verisimilitude" into his novel because I almost believed half the baloney he referenced. Shoot, I don't know anything about quantum physics. I know very little about the migration route of whales. Who knows? Maybe Freud was a devotee of Charles Darwin's theories regarding evolution? Perhaps he was obsessed with humpback whales and the testes of eels. The author's skill made it so *yawn* *sigh* convincing that I failed to fact check and see if there was any grain of truth to it. Needless to say, I'm thankful I read this using a kindle app, because I needed my dictionary throughout. Unless you are a graduate of Hah-vahd or your name is John Green, you will too. Indubitably, that is an obvious axiomatic conclusion based on the evidence provided by the subject material.

Was Q's author getting paid by the word? I was actually starting to wonder if I was being Punk'd! à la Ashton Kutcher. Right when I was getting ready to write a letter to Mr. Mandery in protest and to demand a refund of my inevitable late-return library fee, the character's older self finally comes back and tells him, "Your novels are crap. No one is interested in them. No one will ever be interested in them." Huh. The author is so brilliantly talented, I guess, that he even feigned to bore himself. Masterful touch. Touché, Mr. Mandery. Your point.

All my snide comments aside, I did enjoy this book (minus the twaddle mentioned above). There were a few gems in there, such as the detailed and humorous description of a communist-themed putt-putt course funded by the Neo-Marxist Society of Lower Manhattan.

There were also some ideas thrown out there that struck me with their insightfulness:

Everyone believes he will act bravely when life presents him with his greatest test, but in the end there are few heroes.

This is how it is with bullies. They force themselves upon the world and shape it to suit their needs.

Sometimes circumstances will require sophistication. At other times simplicity may be needed. Creatures will adapt to whatever situation confronts them. This is Darwin's true meaning.

"Ultimately, meaning is up to the reader."

Touring a matzo factory: There are no chocolate rivers or Oompa Loompas, just Jews.

"I know this all seems foreign to you," he says. "You're thirty-one. You're young. You can't even imagine what it's like to be old. But time passes in an instant." He snaps his fingers. "In the blink of an eye you will be me. And then you will look back upon your life with the full measure of regret it deserves."

In summary, class, I think Evan Mandery is pretty darn brilliant. I would have rated this higher if it would have been edited down. I think the excessive "crap" part of the novel was written on purpose and left in there on purpose. Unfortunately, I was so distracted and annoyed by it, I couldn't wait to reach the end of the book. The dry humor of it, or its subtlety or whatever, was mostly lost on me because the "joke" went on far too long (kind of like my review). I will look for more of his books, though, because as a writer, there's obviously something really interesting going on in his noggin.… (plus d'informations)

This is my October book for BOTM. This is the story of time travel. The protagonist is met by his future self and is told not to marry the love of his life. It takes some convincing, but after much sou searching he listens to his future self. But of course the future is never what we expect it to be. So the man is constantly visited by different versions of his future self giving him advice on what he should do to be happy.
I didn't really like this book. It was an ok read, by that I mean it was readable, I didn't dread my weeks reading so it wasn't all bad. I feel like the writer, i.e. the man, was pretentious and Q was perfectly bohemian. I just didn't connect to the characters. I felt the man was jerked around by his future selves quite a bit, they kept changing what would make him happy.
There were these were these awful parts were Mandery inserted whole chapters of the Man's writing and it was just tedious, it really annoyed me. I wanted it to stick to the story. It felt lazy and as storyline filler to me.
SPOILER ALERT
So in the end the old man, goes back to tell his original self not to leave Q. There he meets old Q and they go off into the sunset. The ending really pissed me off. It was a pointless story, they end up together in the end and wasted all their youth and missed so much time with each other. In my mind after the book ends, like within a week or so one or both is hit by a bus, because that seems fair for wasting the life they could have had even with the tragedy. The whole reason the man didn't marry Q is their son has a horrible genetic disease and it destroys both the man and Q. I'm sorry, but the solution is called birth control, and if Q doesn't want to agree to that a vasectomy could easily be obtained and the whole problem avoided, then they could adopt! I was just a annoyed at the stupidity of the main character.
For additional reviews please see my blog at www.adventuresofabibliophile.blogspot.com… (plus d'informations)