Life is too short to read bad books.

Catch Me by Lisa Gardner, 2012

2012-01-16T15:01:00.000-05:00

Read as an ARC in 2012

Synopsis: Detective D.D. Warren is hard to surprise. But a lone woman outside D.D.'s latest crime scene shoks her with a remarkable propsition: Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant believes that she will be murdered in four days. And she wants Boston's top detective to handle her death investigation.

Charlie tells a chilling story: Each year at 8:00 pm on January 21, a woman has died. The victims have been childhood best friends from a small town in New Hampshire; the motive remains unknown. No only one friend, Charlie, remains to count down her final hours.

But as D.D. quickly learns, Charlie Gran doesn't plan on going down without a fight. By her own admission, the girl can outshoot, outfight and outrun anyone in Boston, which begs the question; is Charlie the next victim or the perfect perpetrator? As D.D. tracks a vigilate gunman who is killing pedophiles in Boston, she must also delve into the murders of Charlie's friends, racing to find answers before the next gruesome January 21 anniversary. Is Charlie truly in danger, or is she hiding a terrifying secret that may turn out to be the biggest threat of all?

This is my first Lisa Garnder. I thought I’d read one before, but I couldn’t find it in my records so I don’t think I have. While I did like the story and the characters, I don’t think I’ll be picking up any more in the series. Maybe some older ones if I see them somewhere, but now I know D.D. ends up eschewing her life to take up the oh so tired and traditional role of wife and mommy, it’s kind of a waste of time. I’m sure the author, her editor and her publisher think that adding these predictable storylines for their tough female cop will make her more identifiable to the masses, but for me it’s a miss. Every time D.D. went home to coo and gurgle and lactate I went into skim mode. Just not my cuppa.

The crimes, though, were fascinating as was Charlie, aka Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant. Luckily we get a lot of time with her and a lot of the story is told from her perspective. She’s tough, haunted and incredibly damaged, but wants to fight and bring justice to the person who killed her friends and wants her next. The parts about Tulip, the dog that wasn’t her dog, shone some light into what kind of a person Charlie could become if her demons could rest. While the story unfolded many suspects came under suspicion in my head. Her mother, her sister or even Charlie herself could have two personalities in there, one of them being the killer. At first the pedophile killer even seemed plausible, but then things started to unravel a bit. There were a lot of strange things happening and a lot of cops involved. Oh and the whole other storyline with Jesse and his vulnerability to possible predators on his online game. It got a bit tight in there.

Just before the killer is revealed in all identities, I figured it had to be that person in the sense of that person’s relationship to Charlie, but not in that person’s other identity. It was a neat trick and I’m a bit ashamed of myself for not being more suspicious and open to all the possibilities.

Worst Reads 2011

2011-12-29T15:04:00.000-05:00

If there’s a best there’s got to be a worst, right? Well here they are in all their warty glory. Links lead to my full reviews if you really want the gory details.

1. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (1997)
Surreal fantasy choked with the most annoying characters ever, written by an author stuck in adolescence and still fascinated by wet dreams. The completely nonsensical plot is supposed to be all allegorical, but it tries to jam so many literary themes into the pot that it comes off as pathetic and lacking in vision. Like the writer had a million ideas and no patience so he threw them all in at once. Also it was really forced in terms of trying to shock the reader and after a while that fell totally flat. Sorry Mr. Murakami, you fooled me once, never again.

2. Gideon’s Sword by Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston (2011)
Disappointing isn’t strong enough a word, but it will do. Character development is non-existent. Instead they drop Gideon into the story fully-formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. I didn’t buy it. There was too much telling and too little showing. Everything seemed to happen without effort and without me believing this guy could come even close to pulling off the stuff he does. Ugh. I really hope the suckfest doesn’t drift over into the Pendergast books.

3. Defensive Wounds by Lisa Black (2011)
I like my thrillers more thrilling than this one was. Testosterone-driven plots are at least exciting even if they might not be too plausible. This one was estrogen-soaked and the main character had a poor-poor-pitiful thing going all the time. That and her mother-hen fixation made me roll my eyes enough to ache. Then there was a cast of characters, some family, that just didn’t gel into a team whatsoever. Boring, boring, boring.

4. In the Shadow of Gotham by Stefanie Pintoff (2009)
Put a basically dull and unlikely cop into a derivative novel with pretty stupid ‘smart’ men and what do you have? A snore-fest that lacks heart and with a plot the reader can easily figure out before the supposed geniuses in the novel do. If you liked The Alienist and think this is going to be just as good because it’s constantly compared to it; don’t bother. Re-read Carr’s masterpiece instead.

5. Star Island by Carl Hiaasen (2011)
Even Skink couldn’t save this mess of an uninspired book. It had potential, but I think Hiaasen is bored by his own outlandish shenanigans. Compared to Stormy Weather and Tourist Season, this is a yawn fesitval of overblown characters, weak plot and little humor. And Chemo...did we really need him back?

Best Reads 2011

2011-12-22T09:55:00.001-05:00

Ah, it's that time of year again. Even though I read a number of non-fiction books this year, the top five are all fiction. So as to recognize the good non-fiction I read, I’ll list the best one all on its own. Also I’m going to add the best new-to-me author who might not have made the top five, but whose books I’ll be purchasing in future. And like I’ve done in the past I won’t be including re-reads in the top five. Those get their own award because sometimes they hold up and sometimes they don’t and I think a re-read that does ought to get some props for that. Most books are not as good the second time around. So without further ado -

1. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1844)
If you followed my Monte Cristo journal you won’t be surprised I’ve chosen this as the best book I’ve read all year. It epitomizes and in many was is the progenitor for a lot of other novels yet was never boring or wholly predictable despite that. I’m sad that it took me so long to read it. Don't make the same mistake! (5 stars)

2. Dr. Haggard’s Disease by Patrick McGrath (1994)
I’ve been a McGrath fan since around 1990 and am embarrassed it took me so long to get around to what I think is his best book. The pacing, the word choices, the relationships between the protagonist and his circumstances and environment - all of it embodies the best of what gothic literature can be. The narrator may be unreliable, but McGrath delivers book after great book. (5 stars)

3. The Scapegoat by Daphne DuMaurier (1957)
If all you’ve read is Rebecca you're missing out. Yes the premise is a stretch, but it’s only the vehicle for an insightful story that makes at least one of its characters unhappy with what he wished for. Multi-layered and subtle, it’s not for everyone, but if you like reading between the lines and aren’t afraid to wonder what happened at the end of a novel, go and scour the used bookstores for this one. (4 1/2 stars)

4. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (2009)
Memorable not only for its cast of distinctive and intriguing characters, but for the location itself which became a character in its own right. It’s only the second novel to make me cry, but it’s not sappy, not in the least. Some of the medical details will make you squirm, as will the political situation of Ethiopia at the time, but overall it’s an excellent book about survival and family. (4 stars)

5. Palace Council by Stephen L. Carter (2008)
Carter goes from strength to strength with his loosely connected series of novels involving the darker nation as he puts it. This time we’re caught up in trying to get at the heart of a decades-old conspiracy involving the highest levels of government. Also this time, the way the story is told meshes perfectly with the character doing the telling and the story itself. Perfect pitch, no gimmicks. (4 stars)

Best new-to-me author is Amanda Kyle Williams and her book The Stranger You Seek. Despite a character who is (yawn) a recovering alcoholic and ex-cop with a really annoying name, I liked Keye Street. I liked how she treads the world. I also liked that Williams understands her audience and doesn’t drown us in details we already know from reading countless thrillers and watching zillions of episodes of NCIS. I’ll BOLO for her next installment for sure.

Best non-fiction is Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (1997). Why I waited so long to read this probably has to do with its hype. I remember an old boss using quotes from it in his presentations. That alone put me off. And I’d already tried to read another Diamond book and couldn’t because the writing was so awful. This one though is better and very, very thought provoking. It didn’t make my overall five because it was too repetitive in the end and I felt it could have gone down other avenues instead of just pounding the same old things over and over. Still very much worth reading.

Best re-read is The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre (1963). It had been so long since I last read this that it was almost fresh and the novel held up very well. There's nothing extraneous in this story; no inner monologues, no sub-plots, no flashbacks. Everything we're shown, told and everyone we meet is important. And there's something rhythmic about Le Carre's writing that struck me this time around that I missed the first time. Great stuff.

Well, that's it; the best stuff I read this year. And have no fear, a Worst Of will be coming up shortly. Muhahahahahaha!

11/22/63 by Stephen King, 2011

2011-11-25T17:13:00.001-05:00

Read in 2011

Synopsis: On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas,
President Kennedy died, and the world changed.

If you had the chance to change history, would you?
Would the consequences be worth it?

Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.

Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

Overall I liked this a lot. It has an interesting premise despite being one that gets used a lot; time travel and alternate history. For me the Kennedy assassination is a historical detail of importance, like Pearl Harbor, but it is not personal. I wasn’t born yet. So I think this book doesn’t touch me like it does people of my parents’ generation. You can tell it was written by someone that age, too, because while it does attempt to show the nasty bits of the late 1950s and early 1960s, mostly it’s a wistfully nostalgic look back at those times. Jake LOVES it there despite dying for his cell phone a couple of times. Clearly from this book and others (IT and The Body mostly) King does, too. The funny part is that he doesn’t take any responsibility for his generation also destroying the whole culture from that time. If it was so wonderful, why’d you wreck it boomers? For a generation so wrapped up in themselves it is the height of irony that they’d be so non-aware about this point. I find it funny anyway.

Mild spoilers -

As usual King doesn’t explain the phenomenon that drives the whole book. Michael Crichton he is not. The time tunnel just exists. It has certain “rules” as Al and Jake understand them. It does certain things. If you want more you’ll just have to make it up yourself. This is why when suddenly at the end he pulls rules out of a hat it upsets the whole tale rather than enhances it. We’ve been going about our mission, moving forward with an idealistic goal in mind and then out of nowhere *bang* there are repercussions. Consequences. Shit happens. And they happen almost precisely in the way they did in Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder. So much so that I laughed. And the Yellow Card Man - what was up with that? What inept “guardians”. If the fabric of time is so fragile and subject to fuckery, why give it such weak protection? It makes no sense. Also, if being such an ineffectual time tunnel keeper is soooo taxing, maybe someone should rotate them more often. Seriously; the inebriated bum act complete with nonsensical ramblings and lack of baths is pretty stupid if you’re trying to prevent someone from wrecking the known universe. Obviously there’s some governance at work here because we get a new Yellow Card Man and he’s got the gift of coherent speech and gives us the big reveal. Jake’s comings and goings and all the big changes have put actual reality in jeopardy. Then why the sweet fuck did you let it get that far? The mechanics are ludicrous. Seriously this needed a Science Fiction editor to help him frame the story.

And what a story it is. Jake is an excellent accidental hero. His passion for righting wrongs is palpable and his dedication is stunning. Besides his own independent fix (aside from the Kennedy thing which is the main event), he tries to right Al’s independent fix as well and keep the girl from the stray bullet which would land her in a wheelchair. Admirable. I like that he remained normal the whole time and didn’t suddenly turn into Jason Bourne. He made mistakes, miscalculations and outright stupid decisions, but that’s what we’d all do.

The time spent in Derry is comforting and fun to the King fan who read and loved IT. No, we don’t see everyone again, but we do come across Bev and Richie and there is still that awful vibe of wrongness about Derry. Later Jake draws parallels between Derry and Dallas and how they both have that same hostility and creeping cruelty in their citizens. It’s nice to be on the inside of things in this respect. We wonder what tortures Dallas as It tortures Derry.

An aspect I hadn’t expected was how human Oswald became in this story. For me, because of my remove from this event, he is nothing more than a cartoon villain...like Charlie Manson and Hitler. Yes, they all did reprehensible and world-altering things, but they’re so exaggerated by the popular media that all proportion is lost and so their humanity. King didn’t make Oswald likable exactly, but he made him human. The monstrous mother, the nasty apartments, the low-grade psychosis, the poor-me effect, the communism, the disillusion and low wage jobs; all of it made him more rounded in character and less of a cardboard cutout. Parts of his life were even portrayed as tender and caring.

But the real sweetness at the bottom of it all is Jake’s time with Sadie. It starts out with a spark that ignites a conflagration and we hope against hope that it will last. I don’t know what it is about the way King describes romance or romantic relationships, but it always rings with the most enviable honesty. No one is perfect, yet the love is intense and the connection very strong. There is a lot of sex, but no smut; he never goes all the way into the bedroom with them and I think that’s a big part of it. The pair is secretive at first, but eventually everyone knows and mostly everyone approves. I LOVED the way Jake put that busy-body woman in her place after Sadie’s attack and injury. Despite knowing that something must happen because of all the foreshadowing about Clayton, I hoped she’d escape. Jake’s beating and subsequent nursing were easier to take somehow and the two incidents balanced each other and made the relationship more about equals supporting and healing each other rather than one being grateful and somehow beholden to the other. I also liked Jake’s innocent slip-ups. Stuff I’d fall into as well; using 2011 slang, making references to things that hadn’t occurred yet, singing as yet unwritten songs. It made the situation much more believable.

The ending is sad, but understandable. Living in what the world has become would be too much agony for anyone who’d lived in this one. As bad as it seems sometimes, it could get a LOT worse and I think just the little bit King described was enough to make me wish Jake would go back for his “reset”. He did, but not without more heartbreak and anguish. The dance with an elderly Sadie afterwards was a nice touch. Funny how she thinks she knew him from somewhere. Must be those darn harmonics again.

The Most Dangerous Thing by Laura Lippman, 2011

2011-11-09T08:34:00.000-05:00

Read in 2011

Synopsis: Years ago, they were all the best of friends. But as time passed and circumstances changed, they grew apart, became adults with families of their own, and began to forget about the past - and the terrible lie they all shared.

But now Gordon, the youngest and wildest of the five, has died and the others are thrown together for the first time in years.

And then the revelations start.

Could their long-ago lie be the reason for their troubles today? Is it more dangerous to admit to what they've done or is it the strain of keeping the secret that is beginning to wear on them and everyone close to them?

Each one of these old friends has to wonder if their secret has been discovered - and if someone within the circle is out to destroy them.

At the end Lippman admits this to be her most autobiographical novel in the sense that she set it in her childhood neighborhoods. Clearly she got lost in the nostalgia of her memories because she didn’t write a thriller or anything even close to it. Long, meandering and mostly pointless she delves into the lives of her characters in both the past and the present. The unknown, dark and ostensibly dangerous secret is none of those things. The unseen and malign presence that is supposed to be threatening the long disbanded group of friends is non-existent. There is no dread, no fear, no cringing doubt. It’s a flat story about an unattractive bunch of kids who (surprise) grow up to be an unattractive bunch of adults. I won’t say it was unreadable, because I was drawn into the story, but in the way that appeals to my inner voyeur, not because there was any kind of mystery or big revelation waiting for discovery. That aspect was a yawn-fest, but the differing points of view were pretty interesting and the writing was strong as usual. I just wish Lippman hadn’t gotten all misty-eyed on us and had given us a story with meat on its bones.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre, 1963

2011-11-05T16:55:00.000-05:00

Read again in 2011

Synopsis: The story's central figure, Leamas, whose mission is to trap the top spy of East Berlin, is a creation of astonishing reality and authenticity. The plot he sets in motion, and later becomes the principle victim of, is a thing of magnificent complexity. Also of far-reaching implications. For the tension within Leamas is strikingly contemporary. It is the tension of a committed man unable to come to terms with the utterly ruthless machine he serves.

Because it’s been so long since I first read this, my re-reading was blank enough to be essentially a fresh one. One thing that struck me this time was the terrific rhythm Le Carre’s prose has. I even read some of it aloud to better appreciate it.

Leamas is a tough person to root for because he doesn’t really seem to root for himself. He does his masters’ bidding without question and sometimes even enthusiastically. I disagree with whoever wrote that old synopsis up there that Leamas is trying to come to terms with his Service. To me he seems all too aware of what they'll do and how little he means to them in the grand scheme of things. Only when it comes to Liz does he muster any outrage or rebellion. The overall tone of the novel isn’t uplifting and so while the very end does give us glimmers of hope in our sentimental selves, our rational selves know there is no hope. The audacity and casual cruelty is the real cold in the title, I think. It is pretty galling how seemingly without compunction the Circus can set up and do away with one of their star performers. Considering what happened to Karl though, it isn’t surprising at all.

Another thing I really appreciated is how focused the story is. Unlike a lot of writers today (and even of yesterday, I’m thinking of Eric Ambler here) Le Carre doesn’t fill out his story with a lot of inner monologue, back-story or sub-plots. All the action has purpose and moves the story along at a relentless pace. All the people, their actions and their interactions have meaning and are important to the story. Remove any one of them and the whole operation comes apart. I wish more writers told their stories this way.

Defensive Wounds by Lisa Black, 2011

2011-10-18T10:58:00.000-05:00

Read as an ARC in 2011

Synopsis: In this fourth novel in Lisa Black’s captivating suspense series, forensic investigator Theresa MacLean finds herself embroiled in a case in which everyone has a motive and everyone is a suspect—especially when high-powered defense attorneys start turning up dead.

When Marie Corrigan, a Cleveland defense attorney with a history of falsifying evidence and no shortage of enemies, is found dead in the presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton, most people would agree that she had it coming. Forensic investigator Theresa MacLean is summoned to the crime scene by her daughter, Rachel, who is working the front desk. But even before Theresa enters the room, she knows that she’s walking into a forensic nightmare—for crime scenes at hotels, even the most luxurious, are teeming with trace evidence that has been left behind by innumerable guests and may or may not be related to the murder. But what Theresa finds is even worse than she imagined.

Given the positioning of Marie’s body, everyone assumes the same thing—that it’s a lovers’ tryst turned lethal. But large questions remain: How did the killer gain access to the room without anyone’s knowledge? And has the scene been staged for their benefit? The little evidence Theresa has is conflicting at best. What’s more, a legal convention at the hotel provides an endless list of suspects—and potential victims.

When two more bodies show up in quick succession, each in a similar state, Theresa’s investigation takes on a whole new urgency as she fears they may have a serial killer on their hands—a serial killer with a vendetta. But as she searches for the threads that tie the cases together, Theresa begins to suspect that she and her daughter are closer to danger than they realize. And a mother will stop at nothing to protect the life of her child.

Although she’d come to my attention before, this was my first Lisa Black and unfortunately I won’t be coming back for more. It wasn’t an awful book, I’m sure she has her fans, it’s just it wasn’t quite what I look for in a thriller of this type. First of all it didn’t really thrill. Theresa is whiny and overprotective all the time; the poor me schtick got old fast. As did the mommy thing. Rachael is 18 years old and is constantly referred to as a child. I got an eye ache from all the rolling I did. By the time she was in real danger it didn’t matter anymore; Black had already wrung as much emotion from that rag as she could. All Theresa’s worrying and maneuvering blunted it prematurely.

Then there were the red herring suspects and surprises, neither of which were effective, at least not for this veteran thriller reader. I did like the deduction used for each, minimal though it was. The teamwork was also minimal though and none of the characters seemed to have any ease with each other. The family and cousin thing was beaten to death, but not effective in creating a fluid working unit of the members. Weird.

Last was the awkward language that kept leaping out at me and jerking me out of the story. Starting on page 31 with someone’s (Neil’s?) muscles glimmering under his skin. Really? Glimmering? What was he, transparent? Then this whole paragraph on page 73; I still don’t know what the hell she’s trying to convey and why it’s important -

“Between the rows of overhead lights and the tiled walls and floors, washed down at the end of every day, the autopsy room was the brightest, cleanest room in the building. (ok, that sentence isn’t so bad) And, as the dieners could go home when the day’s cutting had been completed, whether that was sooner or later, the most efficient. (Huh? ugh..just ugh) The assistants had no reason to lollygag and every reason not to. (is there an echo in here?) Plastic jars were labeled, flesh cut open, tables hosed down with the highest possible proficiency.” (why do we need to know that? Oh where was the editor?)

OMG what a mess. Then there’s the one on page 290 that talks about the inside of lungs and inhaling black powder. Like we’d think it would somehow end up on the outside of the lungs. The last one I took note of was on page 329 where Theresa muses that she “didn’t know him that well and had never been able to read people like a book”. Ig.

Sorry Ms. Black, although most of your ballistic, ordinance and forensic details rang true, I just couldn’t get past these clunkers and Theresa’s worried mommy fetish.

The Count of Monte Cristo - Part 5 - The End

2011-09-19T13:15:00.000-05:00

Finished. Blown away. Both by the expected and the unexpected. de Villefort had the sharp end all right and in a way I’m not surprised it affected Dantes so sharply. I didn’t have much sympathy for the missus or the kid though; he seemed like a right brat heading for basically the same life as his half-brother. Sociopathy must run in the family - I did make the connection and saw Benedetto’s real identity right after I met him and understood the set up. But still, Madame and de Villefort junior’s deaths and especially the manner of them gave Dantes pause, so by the time we get to Danglars, he has lost his will a bit. Funny that he always hung his hat on god approving of his actions when clearly the bible teaches otherwise. But religious people will always find an excuse. Still it was fun to see Danglars squirm on the hook. And that letter he wrote to his wife! OMG. That was the highest form of insult and contempt I’ve ever seen - so evil and dripping with hatred. To be on the receiving end of that. Ig.

For everyone else though, we get a happily ever after deal. At least it’s what we suppose when Dantes and Haydee sail off into the sunset leaving Valentine and Morell behind with their millions. I’m glad that Dumas didn’t turn this into a moral tale against revenge in the end; yes, Dantes had his moment of pause, and I think that some of the people who were harmed weren’t deserving, but to have him completely crumble and repent his actions would have really taken the enjoyment out of this book. I mean, who doesn’t love to see a seriously evil jackass get his comeuppance? I think the pull back on the reins was just enough to convey that revenge is tough on the soul without condemning the audience who is enjoying the tale.

Overall it was a satisfying conclusion although the absence of the book and being in that world is something palpable for me. After so long hearing about the situation and everyone’s exploits, it’s weird for it to be done. Even though it is so entirely devoid of reality, I love this book and it is exemplary of what fiction is supposed to do. Definitely an “island book” and though I read it as a most excellent audio book, impressively narrated by John Lee, I will probably eventually buy a nice text edition as well. I can see myself dipping into it for specific scenes - the theater scene where the Count and Albert decide to duel, the poison discussion between the Count and Madame de Villefort, the fights between the Danglars’s - all wonderful and remarkable for their ability to still work and be so effective all these years later. Truly the mark of greatness.

So, if you haven’t read it and you’re still not sold I don’t know what else to tell you except that you might be thick or so incurious as to not have a pulse. If you are sold, go get a copy. I highly recommend the recording with John Lee if you’re into audio, but as far as other editions go, I think most of them use one specific translation by Lorenzo Carcaterra and so will only vary in terms of physicality. Thanks for reading along, I’ll be back to On the Origin of Species, soon as well as my more usual type of reviewing.

The Count of Monte Cristo - Part 4

2011-09-15T10:55:00.000-05:00

So things have picked up a head of steam lately. The web is tightening and threads are becoming more and more visible. Caderousse has been dealt with in a pleasing sort of way. What a wretch he became. Only in fiction could a person have such reach and foresight as The count has. To use his English gentleman persona to help the two escape only to set them up and at odds with each other so many years later is such a stretch that I’m almost tossed overboard. Almost. Only the story as a whole keeps me on board with what has to happen in order for the fiction to be successful. The Cavalcanti angle is a strange one though and I wonder when he’ll play the card Caderousse helped him win. Seems a sad thing to do to Eugenie though.

The scene in the opera box was such a product of its time. Honor is an unknown quantity at this time of humanity and also this kind of ritualistic dance in dealing with it. The whole glove thing is something I understand, but cannot empathize with. I admit I have some sympathy for the younger Morcerf; the sins of the father being visited upon the son and all that, but I am sorry to see what Mercedes has done to Dantes and that he’s taken her up on it. Having seen her reactions to his presence, it came as no surprise that she’d recognized him. I’d have thought her a dense woman if she hadn’t and was especially pleased that she’s recognized his voice first. That’s always the last thing to change and the hardest to disguise so it made sense. Seems Dumas had an idea of what women notice. And it seems he also likes to reinforce feminine stereotypes as well; woman as poisoner being one that sticks out.

Disorder and disillusion in the Danglars household has reached a crescendo and the argument between father and daughter is scary and wonderful to read. Both are so articulate and so bare in their contempt for one another. Ah family.

Anyway, I also know the final resolution of the duel and like the way that Dumas handled that and the bit of suspense it provided while I didn’t know. And with the ignominious suicide of the elder Morcerf, we only have two arch enemies left. Neither has a prayer.

The Count of Monte Cristo - Part 3

2011-09-09T13:45:00.001-05:00

Jeez. What an over long and round-about way we have come to inserting Dantes into Parisian society. OMG I was beginning to lose patience over all the stories about the bandits, women snatching and rape. Then ransoming of men. Notice they did not rape them. The Italian accent the narrator put on for these parts was extremely irritating. And then the whole Albert and Franz deal in Rome and the Coliseum and the parties and operas and executions. By now Dantes has styled himself the Count of Monte Cristo and has evidently purchased the miserable rock. He’s all mysterious and is seen with equally mysterious women. He has ties with bandits and has secret assignations within ancient ruins. He’s ghostly pale and excitable females think he’s a vampire a la Count Ruthven. His newly constructed character serves him well and Albert is nearly in thrall to him while Franz is more cautious having met him in the secret cave at Monte Cristo and overheard his equally secret meeting with the bandit Luigi Vampa. It seems like an awful lot of maneuvering, but that’s just me. Right now I’m getting an in-depth description of Albert’s house and furnishings. I admit it is a bit trying. Ah, Madame Danglars has sent a note to Albert and he’s just showered her with gifts for inviting him to her theater box.

So now Dantes is well and good inserted into society and is a mystery all want to solve. I think this book must be one of the progenitors of the all encompassing, interconnected-to-the-point-of-absurdity novels. Not only are his main acquaintances part of his past sorrows, but even his servants are part of this huge web - delicious to be sure. All to be manipulated exactly as he wants. Only in fiction could it be so and it is part of what makes fiction magical; that all things are possible. Now when there is a tangent, I pay close attention knowing it will be important somehow in the grand scheme of things. In a way I’m glad it’s going to take so long to get everyone paid back; the dance is wonderful.

Oh and I have to say that the dialogue between The Count and his enemies is so amazing I can hardly stand it. The veiled insults that are sometimes so obscured that you have to LOOK for the insult and then parse its meaning. I sometimes wish we still could skewer each other so delicately.

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, 1859 - Part 1

2011-09-08T09:32:00.000-05:00

For me, the ideas contained within the Origin of Species are so ingrained and logical that it’s not surprising the hardest thing about finally reading this book is to grasp and put into context the tenets that Darwin challenged. The first one that whalloped me is that at the time of its writing people believed that every species bred true. And that for every domestic species there was a correlating wild one.

What?

Think about that for a second. Every domestic species had a wild counterpart that also bred true. I think this bears repeating.

What?

So that meant there were wild poodles, right? OMG. It’s hard to fathom anyone laboring under this idea. First of all...where were they then, the wild poodles? And couldn’t anyone see what they were doing to domestic species? I mean really, were they blind? Darwin used an example of a King Charles Terrier (I think or some similar breed) that was painted with its owner in the 1600s. Another painting done in the 1800s features the same dog, but you’d be hard pressed to guess that without knowing. Couldn’t they see that even when we tried to breed them true, animals changed?

Here’s another example; there is no wild corn.

Nope. None. It’s entirely a man-made plant. And an American-man-made plant at that.

Using pigeons as examples, Darwin set out to experiment with the birds to understand the dynamics of heredity, variation and mutation. Amidst protests he declared there was but one wild pigeon - the Rock Pigeon - and then proved it by a series of experiments and observation. Now through genetic profiling we know that all pigeon breeds descended from this species, but back then it was tougher. One of the major proofs is that if you let any domesticated species go feral, they will lose the special features cultivated by man and revert to a much wilder form. Markings and proportions of the Rock Pigeon came out after only a few generations of cross breeding in Darwin’s aviary. You can see the same thing happen with feral populations all around the world; pigs, dogs most especially.

Up to this point I understood things well and reading wasn’t too difficult. Then in Chapter 4 I started having to read things over and over to grasp them. I even read passages out loud several times. Sometimes the word usage has changed enough over the last 150 years to obscure things and makes some sentences hard to figure out. With larger context I was able to get to the bottom of things, but it wasn’t easy sometimes.

There are some funny asides Darwin puts into the book that are either norms for the day or his particular personality quirks. He insisted that this book was a mere abstract of a much larger work he intended to publish one day and so many times he says that while he could go into a lot more detail, he wouldn’t because he hadn’t the time or space. Funny. He also calls out other scientists, naturalists and authors, sometimes to good, sometimes to ill. The main force of these asides is to illustrate how serious he took the work and how rigorous his approach as compared to some others. Even though he intended this book to be read by a general audience, he was propping up his findings with good scientific practices and documenting that they indeed took place.

I’ve learned not to read the accompanying side-bars along with the main text right when they appear. They’re usually excerpts from the Voyage of the Beagle and are interesting in their own right, but disrupt the scientific flow of ideas. Now I save them to a logical break point. I believe they are placed in a chronological way that has some tie to the main narrative; that certain ideas or points of clarity had their origins at that place or time. I think most or all of that book is included with this one and the illustrations as well. It really makes this edition very special.

As I go, I’m also taking notes to summarize his ideas and declarations so that I have them fully understood. Reminds me of being in school again, only this time I understand note-taking better and can do a more effective job. So far this has been a rewarding experience. Not without effort though, that’s for sure. This is not an effortless read, but an effortful one. I don’t know how many other people like this approach to a book. I so often hear that people just want an easy escape from reality, but I am happy that I’m working on something like this. That it does make me discipline my reading and understanding.

Anyway, that’s it for now. If you want me to put the notes I was talking about here, let me know.

The Count of Monte Cristo - Part 2

2011-09-03T14:21:00.000-05:00

Well, I was right. Dantes escaped fairly quickly and wound up spending some time aboard a ship getting reacquainted with the world and forming his plans to get to Monte Cristo. Eventually he did and I really liked the ruse he used to get his shipmates off the island so he could search for Faria’s treasure. Now he’s been spending his money, time and talents in rewarding old and new friends alike. I had to go and verify some passages in the PDF I have of the book because they were glossed over so quickly and were such big things that I couldn’t really believe what I’d heard. Yeah, he bought Jacopo his own boat. And then had one built for himself. So great.

I loved the visit he paid to Caderousse, dangling all that wealth in his face and tempting him to basically tell the truth, but ensuring as much treachery as Caderousse dared to bring against Fernand and Danglars. People only see what they expect to see half the time so if Dantes hadn’t worn a disguise and had looked like his old self, I don’t think the jerk would have recognized him anyway. Still it was pretty moving to see all of Faria’s deductions borne out by Caderousse.

Only Morrell is worthy of saving and it was wonderful to see Dantes go about it. Especially the part with the reappearing purse. And the restored Pharaon, complete with cargo - wow, now that’s a gesture! Makes you almost believe in the goodness of humans again. Almost. Now I’m at the part where the specter of revenge starts to haunt Dantes and his good deeds now done he can turn his mind to planning the downfall of the men who set him up. I have a feeling all that tutoring Faria put him through will come in handy. So far he’s shown that he can fake accents and appear as if he is a gentleman from alternately Spain, England and Italy. Not bad for a sailor boy. I wish that his training had more detail though; now it seems sort of miraculous that he can pull this off, but I guess it’s part of that whole suspension of disbelief thing.

I’m surprised he doesn’t have a co-conspirator or confidant to help him with his plans. He seems willing enough to trust people, up to a point, so maybe he’ll get one in the future. Anything elaborate or involved is going to require help. At this point I can’t see where it will come from though. More of what gives this book suspense and tension. All the imaginings of what he’ll do and what forms his vengeance will take. Like, will it be directed at Mercedes? I like it and so far am anxious to read more. I know from a few folks that it does slow down, but I haven’t gotten to that part yet and hope that it will still be at least interesting even if it isn’t tense.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, 1846 - Part 1

2011-09-01T13:41:00.001-05:00

I was inspired to read this book by reading A Prisoner of Birth by Jeffery Archer which is an homage to it. I think I’ve seen a movie or two based on it as well, so I know the basic outlines of the plot. It’s the particulars and the language that keeps me interested. So far I find it well-paced and full of atmospheric detail. My research turned up the fact that this was published as a serial and it certainly reads like one, with a rolling course of tension and neat vignettes that all relate to each other and provide closure to each chapter or set of chapters. The construction compels the reader to wait anxiously for the next installment and I can imagine that they did. Every time I read a book from the 18th or 19th century it takes me a bit to get used to the language. Some call it flowery or overly descriptive, but I rather like it, keeping in mind that the people of the day who read this loved the detail the got. How else would they know what other people ate and wore? Where they lived and how they earned their money? What political opinions were fashionable and which to be ignored? Plus there’s the intrigue and dastardly deeds.

I can hardly call them anything else; dastardly for sure. From reading A Prisoner of Birth I thought that I’d get a long, drawn-out trial to read through. It was the most tedious part of that book so I wasn’t looking forward to it in this one, but surprise me all to hell when Dantes was thrown in prison without a trial. It really shocked me and made the injustice all the more vile. On his first occasion to talk to anyone other than the jailer, Dantes asks to be tried for his crime and the fact that he wasn’t doesn’t seem to bother anyone, even the people who didn’t put him there. To a 21st century American, raised on TV cop dramas like Hill Street Blues and Law and Order this kind of thing is almost inconceivable. It’s fantastic to imagine this happening and it gets to the heart of what scares me the most; the disillusion of modern justice and the way we think of ourselves as citizens and not subjects. But in this period of France’s history, the people were just starting to make that distinction. Upheaval followed upheaval and government and all of society were in an almost constant state of flux. Most people seemed to want to keep their heads down and get through it, but our villains don’t mind sticking their necks out for advancement, position and greed.

So far the villains are mere sketches and I assume their evil will be shown in full flower once Dantes escapes. I’m up to the part where Abbe Faria has had his fit and has told Dantes about the treasure. Like everyone else, he thinks his friend is mad and just humors him. The prison conditions are described enough to make us feel the sheer grossness and deprivation, but not as in as much detail as I’d thought. It seems like Dantes is going to escape imminently which is also surprising; I thought we’d spend a lot more time in there, but my supposition could be wrong. There is a lot more book left so I imagine we’ll get a lot of payback time. Of course, that’s the best part.

Some reviews say this book is slow moving. In comparison to what, a comet? I like the pacing so far and the time we’ve spent getting to know Dantes, Abbe Faria, de Villefort and King Louis XVIII. The style is terrific and I don’t mind how I’m receiving information on prisons, Bonapartism, marriage customs etc. No big info dumps or As You Know Bobs. I have a feeling this is going to be fun ride.

To keep track of the entries about The Count, check out the label Monte Cristo Journal

Two Heavy-Hitters and a change of pace

2011-08-31T08:41:00.003-05:00

Recently I have begun reading two different, but similarly famous and important works. One of non-fiction, a scientific book of ground-breaking discovery still hotly debated today. The second is fiction, but of such vast scope in terms of theme and plot that it has spawned many tropes used successfully by other authors for over a century. They are namely –

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
And
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (pere)

Oh how to “review” either book when I’m finished? Oh how to parse meaning from individual passages and chapters? Oh how to summarize and condense such mammoth and important works? I can’t even try it. It would be insulting to both. So I’m taking a different tack. I’m going to break down my reading into multiple entries in more of a diary or journal style. Usually when I’m reading I take notes as I go along and later use them for reviews. This time I’m going to use those notes for this ongoing reporting type approach. I’ll keep one entry to one book and probably alternate as I go along.

As a preface, I’ll describe the editions I’m reading since both books have many and the variations can be important. The Darwin book is a sumptuously illustrated and annotated version from Sterling Publishing, edited by David Quammen. Published to coincide with the 150 year anniversary of the original publication of the book, this one is extraordinary in the fact that it’s illustrated. Rich with drawings, paintings, diagrams and excerpts from Darwin’s earlier book, The Voyage of the Beagle, it is a treat to read. And read you must. With close scrutiny that often has me reading aloud just so I can understand what Darwin meant. Not that the language so far is difficult or imprecise, but it is 19th century English so takes a 21st century brain a bit of getting used to. The text is from the 1st edition and is unabridged and complete. I’ve wanted both to read this book and this edition for a long time and so it’s really a joy to finally be able to. If you want to see more about this book, hit the Amazon website. It’s the only one I found so far that has pages scanned in so you can see what makes it special. LINK HERE

The Dumas book is an audio. Yes, I admit it, I was daunted both by its sheer length and French origin. The narrator is John Lee and he’s doing a very good job so far. His normal speaking voice is English accented, but his pronunciation of French terms and place-names is French. He has a subtle range of voices he uses for the characters that have appeared so far and I can tell who is speaking just by the sound. I expect that if there is a long time between the appearances of a character, I might have to rely on Dumas’s text to fill me in, but that’s OK. I’ve read from a source on audible.com that this is the Lorenzo Carcaterra translation if that means anything to anyone. It doesn’t to me since I’m unfamiliar with either his or others work in general terms or specific to The Count of Monte Cristo. I also have a Project Gutenberg PDF version, but it does not list a translator.

One thing I appreciate about reading these books in the internet age is that I can search for and find information that will help me understand the world as it was when these men wrote their books. Why Bonapartism was important and how it affects the plot of Monte Cristo. Also a handy list of characters and their relationships which I’m sure will confuse me in the dozens of chapters to come. What the commonly held beliefs and norms were that Darwin was challenging and why his ideas were so revolutionary. Ah the information age.

So anyway, expect to see multiple entries for both books in the upcoming weeks (months?) and feel free to chime in and start conversations about both as I go along. Half of what’s great about these books is the dawning awareness and understanding that bubbles in my brain as I read them and I’m happy to be able to share it with so many.

The Man in the Rockefeller Suit by Mark Seal, 2011

2011-08-27T14:14:00.002-05:00

Read in 2011

Synopsis: A real-life Talented Mr. Ripley, the unbelievable 30-year run of a shape-shifting con man. The story of Clark Rockefeller is a stranger-than-fiction twist on the classic American success story of the self-made man - because Clark Rockefeller was totally made up. The career con man who convincingly passed himself off as Rockefeller was born in a small village in Germany.

At 17, obsessed with getting to America, he flew into the country on dubious student visa documents and his journey of deception began. Over the next 30 years, boldly assuming a series of false identities, he moved up the social ladder through exclusive enclaves on both coasts-culminating in a stunning 12-year marriage to a rising star businesswoman with a Harvard MBA who believed she'd wed a Rockefeller. The imposter charmed his way into exclusive clubs and financial institutions-working on Wall Street, showing off an extraordinary art collection - until his marriage ended and he was arrested for kidnapping his daughter, which exposed his past of astounding deceptions as well as a connection to the bizarre disappearance of a California couple in the mid-1980s.

I admit it. I’m fascinated by con-men. On one hand I admire what they’re able to do and the mind behind the elaborate lies, false identities and schemes. On the other hand I am appalled by what they get away with and how easily normal people are taken in. Sometimes it’s easy to dismiss their crimes by putting the blame onto their victims; making them into stupid people who somehow deserved to be duped. Sometimes you root for the con-artists and want them to get away clean. This is one of those cases to a certain extent, but some of his victims deserve real sympathy. I can’t say that I’ve have spotted him as phony, but I can say that I would have hated his pretentious ass. Anyone who has to go around talking about himself and how great he is all the time certainly has a weak ego that must need constant shoring up. I’ve known a few people like that; not con-men, but low-self-esteem victims who can’t shut up. That seems to be “Clark Rockefeller’s” M.O. Even now he doesn’t admit defeat; maintaining that he IS a Rockefeller in the face of the family’s vehement denials. Fascinating. Is he mentally ill in the sense that he believes his own lies, or is he just keeping up appearances so that he can morph into someone else when this all goes away? Something he seems to devoutly believe will happen.

The sheer intelligence, memory and will is incredible to me. I can barely keep facts straight never mind countless lies upon lies. And the cunning! To be planning and conniving so many steps in advance; it’s mind-boggling. I’d love to know more about exactly when he started planning this, when he started looking for his perfect American dupe. He must have pulled this kind of thing when he was a kid, albeit in a much smaller way. I guess we’ll never know unless he decides to admit what he’s done and write a swaggering tell-all or Impersonating Fake People for Dummies handbook. When that kind of mind plus a total lack of conscience come together, all bets are off and it’s just a matter of whether the person has the guts to really aim high and whether he gets caught. I wonder how many don’t. To us regular people, the sheer guts it takes to pull this off is unreal. Whenever I read about a real-life con-man I’m amazed by what they get away with and how frigging fearless they are. I’d never be able to lie so well and to so many people even if I had the inclination to do so. That’s why so many fall victim; we can’t imagine doing it ourselves so we never think that anyone else can, much less to us. And the bigger the lie, the more we believe it just because we can’t believe anyone would be so fearless and so convincing. Who would go around saying they were a Rockefeller if they weren’t? Not me. I’d get caught. I’m sure I’d get caught, so I never think that anyone else would dare. Flabbergasting.

Overall the story is told well, from an investigative reporter point of view. The author talks to as many people as he can and follows the trail chronologically starting with Gerhartsreiter’s entrance into the US and ending with his conviction of kidnapping in a Massachusetts court. Many people won’t talk to him, probably out of humiliation over having been fooled, but enough people do talk to sketch Gerhartsreiter’s life pretty well. Although this is an interesting and compelling book, I wish the author would have gone into more detail about exactly how he was able to manage one façade after another. With very little effort he appears to go from his real persona, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, to Christopher Chichester, to Christopher Crow to Clark Rockefeller. In reality he must have done an immense amount of reading, memorizing, planning and practicing. How did he find the time? How did he find the money? Always with the new clothes and accessories, but never a visible means of support. What other schemes had he going that brought him money? I’d have loved more insight into that. Maybe that’s for the sequel.

A Shroud for a Nightingale by P.D. James, 1971

2011-07-22T10:00:00.002-05:00

Read again in 2011

Synopsis: The young women of Nightingale House are there to learn to nurse and comfort the suffering. But when one of the students plays patient in a demonstration of nursing skills, she is horribly, brutally killed. Another student dies equally mysteriously, and it is up to Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard to unmask a killer who has decided to prescribe murder as the cure for all ills.

Spoilers in penultimate paragraph.

In preparation for writing this review, I skimmed some of my previous reviews and 1-5 star ratings of the other P.D. James books I’ve read. To my surprise, I’ve rated most of them as 3-stars; a little above average. Some I didn’t rate, however, judging by the reviews I think they rate higher than that, but still no 5-stars. So why do I keep coming back to Dame James?

I think it’s the mix of usual and unusual that does it. She has a very distinct formula to weaving her tales and that starts with the people involved with the crime. Usually she starts out with some environmental back story that features the victims (there is usually more than one) and the suspects. Much like a Christie mystery, we’re left to judge these people for ourselves. And boy, is there a lot to judge. Usually there are a bunch of jerks and a few bright spots of sanity. What an eye for the repugnant personality trait James has. Some of her characters have so many of them it’s a wonder they weren’t murdered themselves long ago. The nurses, instructors and other staff members in this book have no compunction about showing their nasty sides. No pulling punches, no being conciliatory to preserve peace, no concessions or allowances; just all vitriol all the time.

And I have to include Dalgliesh as one of the jerks. He seriously is. He instantly dislikes most of the people he comes into contact with, writing scurrilous monologues about them in his head. Then he will reach the point where he can’t hold it in any longer and will deliberately lash out at someone in a subtly cruel or manipulative way. Oh with what glee does he push people’s buttons. Sometimes we’re glad to see him get away with it, but sometimes it’s just antagonistic and mean. If this is not enough to underscore his innate anti-social personality, we also have to have snotty little asides about other people’s tastes and how superior his is to theirs. I do like that she often gives us views of Dalgliesh through the eyes of others. His underlings are particularly good at skewering him in their private thoughts. No one dares to do it to his face though.

In some ways he’s insufferable, but that’s only based on early books. In later ones she softens him by describing his inner struggles with poetry, with ethics and with the deaths of his wife and son. He also struggles with duty and how far he has to go in the name of it. It’s an old-fashioned idea and one that underscores the rigid bonds of his personality. Underneath it though, he’s thoughtful and not without mercy. Those come later though, and a reader starting at the beginning of the series will have to look past his abrasive persona to the good points of him and the way she crafts her novels.

Mostly that hinges on the plots. The crimes are usually pretty personally motivated, meaning there is some really neurotic reason for the killing. James’s novels aren’t peppered by psychopaths randomly killing based on some delusion, and that makes them all the more devious. This book is a great example because everyone in it is supposed to be a caring and gentle healthcare provider. They live in a claustrophobia inducing world that would make most of us really squirm; the lack of privacy and autonomy, the constant being at the beck-and-call of everyone else, the confinement and routine; all designed to have us sympathize, and we do. When eventually the killer is revealed (which I almost never get right and is only done after Dalgliesh does a lot of interviews and inner sleuthing) we feel sorry for her, just a little.

In this one, I had some swirling thoughts about Matron and her cool, detached sensibility and so I wasn’t surprised that she was guilty of something. Just not of everything. Her lap-dog relationship with Brumfett was just weird. They seemed so opposite that it had to be some form of obligation that bound them. That was the hinge. A lot of other suspects to consider. I couldn’t decide which of the sisters though, they were all pretty much equally repugnant, especially Rolfe and Brumfett. Witches the pair of them. And that surgeon, Courtney-Briggs. Ugh. He was pretty repellent. Oh and what’s with everyone having snotty and disparaging things to say about the police? Can’t anyone be helpful and understand how important the job is to the whole justice system? Can’t anyone be reasonable? And if you can’t how about keeping to yourself, huh? What a bunch of assholes, really.

James’s writing is sort of old-fashioned, but it’s pretty soothing overall. She uses description sparingly when it comes to locale, but is so specific with her characterizations that nothing is left to your imagination. I think she wants you to be working on filling in the blanks of the mystery, not the suspects. Another thing I like about James’s writing is that she makes me use my dictionary. Not many writers do and I like it. Little-known gems like pavane (n. a stately dance done in elegant clothing) and antiphonal (adj. sung or recited alternately by two groups). MS Word sees pavane as misspelling of pagan or paving. Anyone who can do that is worth reading.

The Stranger You Seek by Amanda Kyle Williams, 2011

2011-07-20T10:54:00.007-05:00

Read as an ARC in 2011

Synopsis: A serial killer is tormenting Atlanta, writing letters to the media, promising to slay again. Under pressure before another victim dies, the Atlanta Police Department turns to Keye Street, a disgraced FBI profiler who is now chasing down bail jumpers, doing some (very) odd detective work, and trying to stay off the bottle. While Keye tries to make the elusive connection between the victims and one of the south's grisliest, most skillful serial killers, the stranger she seeks may be far closer than she realizes.

This part of the review is spoiler-free…I’ll warn you when it’s no longer safe.

At first, when I read the prologue, which is from the killer’s POV, I thought that I had another cookie-cutter type thriller on my hands. I mean, haven’t we had this enough? Then chapter one gives us a literal introduction by Keye of herself…she comes right out and says my name is Keye Street (which is an annoying name, really) and I can’t recall coming across this technique before and I liked it. Then in the next two pages Williams made me like Keye. Really, in 3 pages I liked her. Yeah the alcoholic thing is played, but despite that there is some originality in the character and it worked. I also liked how she kept some things dark about Keye, like her marriage to Dan; we have the broad strokes, but she’s saving the details for later. Good. I hate it when an author tries to give us every last particular of a person right off the bat (for a good example read – and borrow it for goodness sake – Gideon’s Sword by Preston & Child. Absolutely nothing left to savor over that guy; no mystery). Bor-ring.

In terms of how the story played out, I wished that we didn’t have the killer’s blog entries when we had them, since the investigatory team didn’t have them at the same time we did. It seemed out-of-sync with the real-time nature of the investigation since it was told in the first-person narrative. I think this type of device works better when included in a third-person narrative, like Sandford does with Davenport. Writing-wise the story is very fluid and natural; I caught a few clinker sentences that could have been done better, but not many.

I also appreciate that Williams seems to know her audience and I can’t tell you how much that makes a difference. No long-winded info-dumps about forensic protocols and evidence-gathering techniques. No step-by-step explanations about police procedure. No big back story about how different it is being private rather than a public detective. She knows we already read Sandford, Deaver, Reichs and Crais. She knows we watch Criminal Minds, Dexter and Law and Order. And you know what? I think she does, too. Nice.

Although the sub-surface romance was obvious, it was done with humor and a light touch, something I also appreciate. Overall the humor was black and often un-PC which I think is pretty brave these days and made the book more realistic and appealing to me. Also brave is to make a person so scornful of religion, in fact, Keye might be an atheist (gasp!). The supporting characters are a bit color-by-numbers, but hopefully Williams gives them more individuality as time goes on. I’m definitely going to seek out the next novel in the series even though it bugs me that every frigging author on earth has to be a series author.

Spoiler alert!

Williams did latch onto some standard memes of the genre though; red herring suspect being the first. I just knew Charlie couldn’t be the real killer. When things started coming to light about him I agreed that he did have something violent and probably criminal about him, but I also knew he was being set up. She made up for that by killing LaBrecque and leaving him for Keye to find. I didn’t expect that considering the other vignettes of her unconnected PI work and it did shock me. Hard to do to me and nice to be on the receiving end of. However, during the whole Brooks scenario, I smelled perfume in the air; I had a gut feeling it was a woman doing the killing. When Dobbs, the serial philanderer, went down I felt it even more. So when Keye and Williams started talking about her suspect without using personal pronouns, I knew it and Margaret was the only woman powerful enough in the story to be the killer. Eh, it wasn’t surprising and I wish she’d done more connecting the dots with Margaret; the pulling her out of a hat was a bit of a let-down considering the high-caliber novel she had going. Williams did blind-side me with Diane though and that was sad; she was just the office manager Keye needed.

I must admit to being relieved that Rauser woke up in the end. It was corny and I would have been ok with it being left up in the air until the next book, but it was a nice ending that left me feeling positive, which is not a bad thing. I am a bit bugged that Margaret gets away though; shades of Hannibal Lecter and Gretchen Lowell. Depending on how its handled in future, it could be a big PITA for a reader. I don't mind long story-arcs and plot points that don't wrap up in one book, but I don't like gimmicky stuff and it could go that way. Tension-creating fake-outs don't make me buy novels no matter how good the rest of it is. Oh and please don't make Keye a marriage-and-a-baby-woman. Please.

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, 1997 (US)

2011-07-14T07:55:00.003-05:00

Read in 2011

Synopsis: Toru Okada's cat has disappeared and this has unsettled his wife, who is herself growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has started receiving. As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.

Sometimes I take a gamble with my reading and go off the reservation. Sometimes it’s great (The Human Stain) sometimes it’s not and this is a NOT. The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is the worst book I’ve read all year. Let this be a lesson to me; I am literal and DO NOT appreciate fantastical stories so separated from reality. Next time I try out something so far off my mark I will remember the torture of this stupid book. No, I am not unimaginative, but neither do I live in a fantasy world which clearly, you need to have some familiarity with before you can enjoy this as an adult. I am ashamed to have fallen for it. Pretentious is too kind a word.

Such a nonsensical and non-cohesive plot; as if the author had a bunch of ideas and no clue how to put them together. Oh wait, I’ll try forced allegory and wrangle every last literary theme on earth into one book. Yeah. That’ll work. I’m a Certified Genius. Ugh. At least he realized that the violent and degrading war story couldn't be presented as a whole without making the reader suicidal. Still, the rest of the story is inane.

Here are my notes as I dragged myself through this story. Yes, I had a martyr complex and actually got through the whole unbelievably idiotic thing.

Why refer to the cat as IT all the time...clearly it's a male. Weird.

The radio or boombox type thing the girl has, translated as a music machine. Later she has a radio. Odd.

Why are all the female characters intensely annoying?

All these visceral gyrations from Creta are unbearably awful. Who writes this crap? It's supposed to be shocking, exposing and hedonistic, but it's just stupid. I skipped over most of it.

The Japanese habit of calling people by first and last names is at first charming, then, after a while, grates on my nerves something awful.

I know it's supposed to be all mystical and allegorical, but it just smacks of adolescent obsessions over wet dreams.

Mai writes a letter to T complaining that no one likes her and is mystified as to why. Because you're annoying, that's why.

The narrator does some distinctive voices for this, but the one for the brother in-law's minion is the love child of Gilbert Godfrey and Peter Lorre. Ugh.

I’d have given it ½ a star, but it wasn’t badly written, just a horribly juvenile and incoherent story strung together to be as “shocking” as possible. Like a little boy scribbling swear words on the living room wall so as to get his parents to pay attention to him. Pathetic.

A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler, 1939

2011-07-12T07:12:00.001-05:00

Read in 2011

Synopsis: A chance encounter with a Turkish colonel with a penchant for British crime novels leads mystery writer Charles Latimer into a world of sinister political and criminal maneuvers throughout the Balkans in the years between the world wars. Hoping that the career of the notorious Dimitrios, whose body has been identified in an Istanbul morgue, will inspire a plot for his next novel, Latimer soon finds himself caught up in a shadowy web of assassination, espionage, drugs, and treachery.

Despite my going through an intense espionage thriller phase many years ago, I never even heard of Eric Ambler until the last few years. His books are often held up as some of the founding works of the genre. Before LeCarre, Fleming and Follett there was Ambler cooking up the memes that would become so familiar. So I finally read one and it was good. Not entirely surprising since I’ve read a lot of what came after, but it held my attention quite well.

One thing that stood out was the novel’s construction. We do not follow a spy directly, nor do we interact with his handlers or agency. The man in question isn’t really a spy at all, but more of a mercenary for hire who isn’t too picky about the job. Need an assassin? Call Dimitrios. Smuggler? Ah, Dimitrios is your man. A spy? No problem, Dimitrios can get it done. It is the ever-changing nature of his activities that have kept him out of harm’s way for so long and part of the reason our protagonist, Charles Latimer, is fascinated by him. Often he says to himself that he really should give up the chase and go back to his detective stories, but he can't; he's obsessed.

Latimer isn’t a cop or a spy-chaser, he’s a novelist. At first I thought he was being deliberately hooked into Dimitrios’s story in order to ferret him out, but that wasn’t the case. He was just interested and wanted to see how much he could really do as opposed to just writing about detectives and how they get their men. From each bit of information, he discovers more and meets people connected with Dimitrios. He’s a bit bumbling and innocent, but he has flashes of cunning and capitalizes on lucky breaks very well.

Mixed in with the intrigue is a lot of interesting history that gets overshadowed by the two world wars on either side of the decade. The villainous politicians and the violence they wrought added a lot of flavor to the story and firmly cemented its time and place.

As I said, Ambler has created memes of the genre that are no longer surprising, so I wasn’t as shocked by the actions and outcomes as a reader in the 1930s would have been. Despite that, I liked Latimer and his obsession and stuck with him until the end.

Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King, 1993

2011-07-07T07:22:00.002-05:00

Read again in 2011

Synopsis: By her own account she’s an old Yankee bitch, Dolores Claiborne; foul temper, foul mouth, foul life. Folks on Little Tall Island have been waiting thirty years to find out just what happened on the eerie dark day her husband, Joe, died – the day of the total eclipse. The police want to know what happened yesterday, when rich, bedridden Vera Donovan, the island’s grande dame sans merci and Dolores’s longtime employer, died suddenly in her care.

With no choice but to talk, Dolores Claiborne talks up a storm. “Everything I did, I did for love,” she says, and this spellbinding novel is at once her confession and her defense. Given a voice as compelling as any in contemporary fiction, her story centers on a disintegrating marriage’s molten core, where the mind’s unblinking eye becomes huge with hate and a woman’s heart turns murderous. It unfolds the strange intimacy between Dolores and Vera, and the link that binds them. It shows, finally, how fierce love can be, and how dreadful its consequences. And how the soul, harrowed by the hardest life, an achieve a kind of grace.

I hadn’t read DC since 1993 when it was first published and luckily I didn’t remember much about it. Luckily because I think my age made it a better and more memorable novel than the first time around. Mainly it’s the years that have gone by and how they make the characters easier to relate to. Seriously, how much perspective can a 20-something have about life? Some, but not enough. Not that I compare my relatively easy life with Dolores’s or Vera’s, but it hasn’t been all smooth and so I can empathize more than I must have been able to in 1993.

Some will say this is out of the ordinary for King, but it really isn’t at heart. So many of his books are about strong women and this is about one of the strongest. Every time I read a review saying King can’t write women (or can’t write at all) or that he doesn’t like women I have to laugh. If you read enough of his work you see he more than likes women; he reveres them. Starting with his mother, Ruth and moving on to his wife, Tabitha, you can see by his writing he fits women into his consciousness as whole and evolved people, not just objects or roles. Don’t take my word for it though, check this out –

Carrie – teenage girl finally snaps and kicks ass
The Shining – Wendy doesn’t give up, ends up ok
The Stand – Frances, Naomi, Mother Abigail are all stand-up girls
Firestarter – a little girl who can control the world if she wants
Cujo – woman v. rabid dog, not everything turns out well, but she doesn’t crumple like a flower
Christine – ok, this one is a stretch, but the car was female…yah yah, forget it
IT – not too long on girls, but Bev finally gets some of her own back
Misery – again, a stretch, but a psycho woman was still kind of a novelty to write back then
Tommyknockers – I always admired how Bobbie lived life on her own terms despite what she did to Peter
Gerald’s Game – at first you’re not sure what to make of Jessie, then she puts the hammer down
DC – of all the put upon women of the world, DC is right up there
Needful Things – has a good mix of female characters, strong, weak and shades in between
Rose Madder – abused wife gets out from under
Lisey’s Story – wife in the shadows gets her shit together
Full Dark, No Stars – rape victim does not lie there and take it, like I Spit on Your Grave in words

If I’ve left any out it’s because I can’t remember enough of them. Ditto with the stories, but you get the idea. King admires women as people, not as women overcoming their gender.

After a while Dolores’s abrasiveness wore away and I began to sympathize with her. She never had much of a chance, but she did the best she could with the cards she was dealt. Even Vera lost some of her ‘high riding bitch’ veneer and got some sympathy from me and I could see why D stayed with her so long. Neither of them had anyone else and they didn’t know how to be different with each other. There’s comfort to be had in long habit. Also I think enduring becomes a habit as well.

Some will say that Joe’s death was Dolores’s revenge, but it wasn’t. It was protection. There wasn’t anything else she could do to protect her kids in the present (surely he would slip and ‘get at’ Serena again) and in the future (the dwindling college money). I liked the planning D put into it though; first with the diversion of the eclipse itself then with what to lure Joe into chasing her to the well. Perfect. She paid a price though; a steep one. I think that plus D’s circumstances showcase how well women are built for suffering.

Writing and style are strong in this one although I don’t know if a New Englander would say warsh; isn’t that more of a mid-west thing? Still, the writing in dialect didn’t bother me in this book like it has in others. King really showcases his talent as a character writer by sticking to Dolores and all that makes her tick. An amazing feat. I didn't catch one false note during the whole thing. And the fact that there are no chapters or breaks of any kind emphasizes that D narrated this whole story in one go; with the cops and Nancy the stenographer from Kennebunk. That they let her off for Joe’s murder is a bit of a stretch, but forensically the case against her for Vera wouldn’t have held up so that one is more understandable. Still the ending is a bit, oh, I don’t know, unreal. After what had gone before being intensely real, it was a bit jarring.

Star Island by Carl Hiaasen, 2010

2011-07-06T15:56:00.003-05:00

Read in 2011

Synopsis: Meet twenty-two-year-old Cherry Pye (née Cheryl Bunterman), a pop star since she was fourteen—and about to attempt a comeback from her latest drug-and-alcohol disaster.

Now meet Cherry again: in the person of her “undercover stunt double,” Ann DeLusia. Ann portrays Cherry whenever the singer is too “indisposed”—meaning wasted—to go out in public. And it is Ann-mistaken-for-Cherry who is kidnapped from a South Beach hotel by obsessed paparazzo Bang Abbott.

Now the challenge for Cherry’s handlers (über–stage mother; horndog record producer; nipped, tucked, and Botoxed twin publicists; weed whacker–wielding bodyguard) is to rescue Ann while keeping her existence a secret from Cherry’s public—and from Cherry herself.

The situation is more complicated than they know. Ann has had a bewitching encounter with Skink—the unhinged former governor of Florida living wild in a mangrove swamp—and now he’s heading for Miami to find her . . .

Will Bang Abbott achieve his fantasy of a lucrative private photo session with Cherry Pye? Will Cherry sober up in time to lip-synch her way through her concert tour? Will Skink track down Ann DeLusia before Cherry’s motley posse does?

All will be revealed in this hilarious spin on life in the celebrity fast lane.

Any book with Skink in it wins me over. This one was no exception, from changing his human fake eye for one from a stuffed hunting trophy to picking his teeth with a dessicated starling beak, he's a hoot to follow because you never know what he'll do next. Newcomers might think the environmental bit was tacked on, but that's Skink's metier - kicking unscrupulous butt in the name of ecology. And I caught a lovely Zevonism in there about someone leaving the 'detox mansion' - sweet.

That being said, this book felt more forced than usual for Mr. H. The idiotic escapades of a brainless pop-star just got to be over the top even for him. If you're new to Hiaasen's work, I wouldn't start here. I wished I saw more of what made Ann so attractive to Skink to make him seek her out for rescue and less of Cherry, her parents or her handlers. Bang was pretty entertaining in his conscience-free, hapless way, but unlikeable. Maybe making Chemo a tad more sympathetic would have done the trick. The similarities to Frankenstein's monster weren't lost on me, but the sympathy was. Oh and I hate you, Carl baby, for putting that rancid Warrant song in my head for days. Thanks, bud.

All in all not bad if you're a fan and like the lengths Hiaasen goes to, but if you can't put your tongue firmly in your cheek, don't bother.

Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd (2009)

2011-06-17T09:34:00.003-05:00

Read in 2011

Synopsis: One May evening in London, Adam Kindred, a young climatologist in town for a job interview, is feeling good about the future as he sits down for a meal at a little Italian bistro. He strikes up a conversation with a solitary diner at the next table, who leaves soon afterward. With horrifying speed, this chance encounter leads to a series of malign accidents, through which Adam loses everything—home, family, friends, job, reputation, passport, credit cards, cell phone—never to get them back.

The police are searching for him. There is a reward for his capture. A hired killer is stalking him. He is alone and anonymous in a huge, pitiless modern city. Adam has nowhere to go but down—underground. He decides to join that vast army of the disappeared and the missing who throng London’s lowest levels as he tries to figure out what to do with his life and struggles to understand the forces that have made it unravel so spectacularly. Adam’s quest will take him all along the river Thames, from affluent Chelsea to the gritty East End, and on the way he will encounter all manner of London’s denizens—aristocrats, prostitutes, evangelists, and policewomen—and version after new version of himself.

I decided to make this my second Boyd novel partly because I really enjoyed the first (Restless) and partly because this one seems to polarize people into two camps; liked it and hated it. I didn’t see many reviews claiming to love it though, so maybe I was better forewarned than I thought. Although I did find it interesting and finished it without too much effort, it lacks focus and has a lot of people doing stupid things. Maybe it’s in the water, but no one seemed to act rationally. Maybe that’s the experimental piece of what Boyd seemed to be doing with this book; to write a thriller full of people doing the unexpected. Sort of an anti-thriller; the thriller that didn’t thrill.

Not only does Adam do dumb stuff, but so does the supporting cast; Rita, Ingram and Jonjo. Each in their own ways of course, but their actions don’t follow what we’ve come to think of as normal for this type of book. Does it succeed? I don’t know. As a meandering story of what if, yes it does. What if a guy stumbled into a murder and became the chief suspect, would he run far away or hide in a vacant piece of land a few miles from the kill site and become a bum? Would a by-the-book cop jump into a relationship with a man far below her social station who appears to have been dropped into his current life straight from the moon? Would a killer-for-hire hold such a grudge against a person who doesn’t matter anymore? Would a powerful corporate executive spend so much time deciding what to drink, whether or not to wear underwear and with hookers instead of controlling his company, employees and board members? It’s as if Boyd made a bet with someone that he couldn’t sell a book with people making such weird decisions. I guess the joke’s on us.

That said, I didn’t hate it. I actually enjoyed Adam’s moral flaying. I enjoyed seeing how low he could go, from taking advantage of a relatively stupid single mother, adopting another person’s newly acquired persona, to stealing a blind man’s cane and pretending to be blind, to murdering his blackmailer. Maybe those last two should be in reverse order. Even as Adam acknowledges the slimy, lowness of his deeds he goes through with each of them without a qualm. Like the sexual encounter that ended his marriage, he seems to do these things accidentally on-purpose and it spoke to my inner voyeur.

The tracks involving the other characters were less interesting. Rita being the least among them. I never really ‘got’ her. She seemed like a bimbo add on, but those aren’t popular so was changed into a career girl and a cop. Ah that will make the PC Police back down. Eh. Then Jonjo (what a name, btw…Jonjo…really? I’m supposed to be scared of him?) just seemed cobbled together out of what a professional thug is supposed to be. The dog was an interesting touch, but seemed quirky for quirkiness’s sake. Ingram was the biggest oddity of them all; a CEO with no balls, power, drive or ego. He wasn’t a type A at all and to be the head of a biggish company like he was, you have to have those. I did like Mhouse though in a strange way, and was sad at her ending. The way Boyd moved them all around each other was good; I liked the serendipity of a lot of it. But as characters they left me sort of disconnected. I will read others from Boyd though.

In the Shadow of Gotham by Stefanie Pintoff, 2009

2011-06-12T16:19:00.003-05:00

Read in 2011

Synopsis: The historical tale of Detective Simon Ziele, a man who lost his fiancée in the 1904 General Slocum ferry disaster and thereafter flees New York City for Dobson, New York, to escape the memories of her death. But months into his tenure, he catches the worst homicide of his career: a young woman brutally murdered in her own bedroom in the middle of the afternoon. His investigation quickly takes him to Columbia University criminologist Alistair Sinclair and one of his patients. But what could lead this Michael Fromley, with his history of violent behavior, to target such a proper young lady? Is Michael really behind the murder or is someone mimicking him? Ziele must discover the truth in this story of a haunted man on the trail of a killer while on the run from his own demons.

Spoilers set to kill.

Because everyone compares this with Caleb Carr’s masterful novels, and I couldn’t help thinking of them too when I read the synopsis, I’ll continue with the comparison even though it doesn’t go Pintoff’s way. Even without Carr’s books to refer to as a model of sorts, this novel wouldn’t be a stand-out. Not for me. Maybe it’s because I read a lot of detective fiction, but I fingered the guilty party way ahead of Alistair and Simon. For two guys who are supposed to be really clever and ahead of the curve, they were incapable of looking within their inner circle and they blew it. The signs were very clear in both situation and in behavior. And maybe it’s because my husband’s former boss, also named Horace, eventually was indicted and is now serving a long sentence for embezzlement that I first suspected him. When Fred showed up in the end, seemingly by coincidence, I knew he had to be in on it, too. I wasn’t shocked when he pulled a gun. Creep.

Anyway, as far as the characters go I found Simon to be stilted, insecure and a weird candidate for a cop. He spoke strangely and the way the book was narrated just came across as maladroit and stiff. This is supposed to be a street detective fresh from the cesspit that is New York in 1900? No way. He’s way too awkward and unsure of himself. I didn’t buy it. The pining for the dead fiancée was sort of nice at first, hey we’ve got a sensitive guy on our hands, but after a while it just seemed part of the whole wrongness about Simon as a cop. He has no vice, no hang-up, no outlet for his grief over his loss. Made him less human despite the angst.

And Alistair is a frigging bore. Always lecturing, always grandstanding. Ugh. Unattractive. At least he wasn’t trying to out-Kriezler Kriezler. He wasn’t weird and inscrutable. He wasn’t eccentric and brilliant. He wasn’t mercurial and Holmesian. Thankfully. He was fording his way into a new field and it rang mostly true; his need to convince person after person that the work was worthwhile, his need to explain theories and techniques, his need to attach himself to a university etc. The foundation though I found to be a bit of a stretch…and the self-funding and all that. Seemed a bit too much too soon if you know what I mean.

The bits about contemporary police procedures were interesting, as were the bits about women’s Suffragism and their struggle to win the vote. Those elements were nice and not overly done. But, something was missing. None of it was personal in the way that Carr made it personal. And the emotional pitch wasn’t as acute either; I didn’t really feel tense during my whole reading. No one was desperate. No one was at their wits end, no matter how much Simon opined that he was and I’ll probably give the next installment a miss.

Water Music by T.C. Boyle, 1981

2011-06-08T16:04:00.004-05:00

Read in 2011

Synopsis: Set in the late eighteenth century, Water Music follows the wild adventures of Ned Rise, thief and whoremaster, and Mungo Park, a Scottish explorer, through London’s seamy gutters and Scotland’s scenic highlands—to their grand meeting in the heart of darkest Africa. There they join forces and wend their hilarious way to the source of the Niger.

Water Music is another book I’m having trouble with review-wise. Maybe I’m not the intended audience for it. Come to think of it, I don’t know who is. A blurb on the back styles it as “The funniest, bawdiest, most adventure-filled novel to come along since Tom Jones”. Having never read Tom Jones I can’t say if this is accurate or not, but I did read Moll Flanders and if you liked that, you’ll probably like this, too.

Take the not-quite-likable cast of characters with Mungo Park taking the lead. Now, as protagonists go he’s pretty good. He gets a lot of screen time and during much of it he’s doing something pretty interesting. Not enviable, mind you, but at least interesting. The thing is, I didn’t really care all that much about him. During his most harrowing moments with Dassoud or in the grip of some awful disease or other (which I swear half of the book is devoted to describing. In great detail.) I didn’t really root for him. Somehow Boyle missed the mark in making me care. I think it was because Mungo himself didn’t really seem to care about anything except making a name for himself as an explorer. He isn’t much of one really. One of the Three Stooges might have made a better one. Probably Larry. When he’s not making a bad decision he’s doing something stupid, when he’s not doing something stupid he’s sick as a dog, when he’s not sick as a dog he’s being attacked or held prisoner and when he’s not doing any of those things he’s home with his family pining to go back and do it some more.

Interspersed with Mungo’s narrative is that of Ned Rise. A more wretched character I have yet to meet. Dickens didn’t go as far as Boyle did with Ned. Think of Fagin, Oliver or any of the other sorrier-than-sorry urchins-turned-criminal and then kick it up a few notches. Or down depending on how your mind works. But despite his callow sliminess and self-serving blindness, I liked Ned better than Mungo and so the ending suited me and probably suited Mungo, too.

The vignettes featuring Ailie and all she endures were nice breaks to the unrelenting action of the explorer bits. Just when things got too squalid, visceral and just plain gross we’re reprieved and sent back to Scotland to see what’s been left behind.

Not much as it turns out. Ailie is spends a lot of her time without Mungo pining for him and alternately being pissed that he left. When he is around she spends most of her time being pregnant. Such is life I guess.

None of that helped me figure out the intended audience for Water Music. Tropical disease specialists? Reincarnated 18th century explorers dying to reminisce? Jilted wives and lovers trying to understand their wayward men? Angry native guides looking to see how brainless the white man is? I don’t know, but I’ve never read anything quite like it and probably never will again.

A Trio of Non-Fiction Winners

2011-05-06T07:29:00.005-05:00

I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction lately. This is kind of a new habit with me and one I really enjoy. The thing is though; I find it much more difficult to write a review when it’s a non-fiction book than a novel. So I’ll do my best here with three that I read recently. I’m not a scholar, nor do I play one on TV, so these are the impressions of a reasonably intelligent, reasonably insightful layperson, not an expert.

First, and most recent, is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.

Very memorable because it brings into focus the morass of ethics surrounding human tissue culture and research. In short Henrietta Lacks was a black woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951. Unbeknownst to her, the doctor treating her took samples of her tumor as part of an ongoing effort to culture human tissue for research purposes. At the time (and even now) doctors have a right to do this without expressly telling the patient what they plan to do. Luckily for us Henrietta’s cancer took to culturing like no other human cells ever had and we have all benefited immensely. The biggest “product” of research involving the HeLa cell line created from Henrietta’s cancer is the Polio vaccine. There are probably hundreds of other treatments, protocols, drugs and vaccines that came as a result as well (like chemo therapy) and so the overall good of human society is greatly increased. At what cost though? Was removing part of Henrietta’s tumor ethical? Is she or anyone else automatically entitled to money because of it? Did the creators of the cell line violate her privacy? Would we feel differently if Henrietta was a rich white lady of vast fortune? Would we feel differently if her cells came to nothing and were not much good to medical research at all? All of this and more will make you think about the past and present state of human biological research, ethics and practices. It isn’t all science all the time though, a large part of the book is spent with Henrietta’s surviving family and their struggle to make sense of what happened and its effect on their lives.

Second is Guns, Germs and Steel; The Fates of Human Society by Jared Diamond.

Most people have at least heard of this book and I remember a CEO of a former employer quoting it in meetings. Basically this book tries to find a non-biologically based reason for why the divide between the haves and the have-nots exists in human society. Even more basically, why Europeans conquered the rest of the world and not the other way around. The question has occurred to me more than once in my reading. If the Inca and Aztec civilizations were so sophisticated (and even advanced beyond then-contemporary Europe), why didn’t they sail across the Atlantic and invade, conquer, exterminate and enslave Spain?

Complex? You bet, but Jared simplifies things so that at least the underlying reasons for his conclusions are apparent. In a nutshell it comes down to (in his estimation) geography. Eurasia is a continent blessed with factors that led to success for humans in some key areas; its orientation is largely east/west and so moving along great distances does not change the climate, hours of daylight or growing season very much, the continent contained animals and plants highly suitable for domestication, its rivers are large and navigable. So early humans had the materials at hand to become herders and farmers. Increased availability of food meant larger populations. Larger populations meant more stability and might in the face of smaller populations. Stable populations meant people could explore other skills and not be directly involved in food production. Specialization in other skills meant invention could develop and eventually flourish. Things invented included metallurgy, weaving, pottery, writing, medicine and tool and weapon manufacture. The people still involved in animal husbandry became exposed to the diseases their animals carried and through hundreds of generations improved the people’s ability to fight them off.

Only in Eurasia was this possible. The geographies of the Americas and Africa are north south oriented and also feature many barriers to human movement like deserts, jungles and high mountains. The large animals needed for muscle power and food were unavailable (no horses, cows, goats, sheep, camels or pigs in those areas). Also missing were the types of crops that could be planted easily and would yield highly nutritious food (no wheat crops grew in America or Africa in the wild). So as a result the people who lived there did not develop robust farming or herding. Their early populations weren’t as large or homogeneous and couldn’t reap the benefits of a large homogeneous group. They didn’t have writing to spread the word of their culture or inventions. They didn’t develop immunity to animal-borne diseases. They didn’t have horses to ride into battle. In short, they just didn’t have the technology or the social mechanisms to deal with Europeans when they arrived. An absolutely fascinating idea and plausible.

Lastly, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.

Sadly, the people who need to read this book most won’t. Ostensibly this tries to explain why humanity clings to superstition and why it has evolved to be so prevalent; what evolutionary advantage does it have. Unfortunately it doesn’t do that very well and is largely a giant rant against the religiously minded. Granted, I think they’re delusional as heck, but I also don’t think my brain can encompass every nuance of the universe. Dawkins does. But I knew that going in and basically read this to satisfy some need to hear someone else bemoan the destructive power of religion. Nothing else on earth has caused more pain and suffering than religion. Of all types, but mostly of the Abrahamic stripe; Islam, Judaism and Christianity. If you are a weak agnostic or an atheist, this book will appeal to you. If you’re a religious person struggling with your “faith” this will help you. If you’re already inoculated in religion by your parents and scorn the unbelievers and heathens, this book will make you really angry. Mostly because it challenges stuff you can’t really defend or explain rationally and boy does that tick religious people off. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

So that’s it. Three worthy non-fiction books to keep your brain from atrophying.

An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears, 1998

2011-04-08T08:21:00.004-05:00

Read (finally) in 2011

Synopsis: We are in England in the 1660s. Charles II has been restored to the throne following years of civil war and Oliver Cromwell's short-lived republic. Oxford is the intellectual seat of the country, a place of great scientific, religious, and political ferment. A fellow of New College is found dead in suspicious circumstances. A young woman is accused of his murder. We hear the story of the death from four witnesses; an Italian physician intent on claiming credit for the invention of blood transfusion; the son of an alleged Royalist traitor; a master cryptographer who has worked for both Cromwell and the king; and a renowned Oxford antiquarian. Each tells his own version of what happened. Only one reveals the extraordinary truth.

This book took me 13 years to finish.

Well, sort of. Back in 1998 when I bought it, I got about 2/3 of the way through before giving up. I don’t remember what the reason was exactly. It might have been my expectations – I framed this story as a mystery in my head (I think this is how it was marketed) and wasn’t prepared for the amount of atmospheric (non-mystery-solving) detail it has. Yes the reason that each person writes his part of the narrative is because someone is killed, but none of them is directly involved in trying to find out who and why. That’s probably what did it. That and the amount of political intrigue concerning the toppling of Cromwell’s Republic and the Restoration of the Monarchy. I didn’t know much about that and so trying to piece it all together was too much and a lot of the implications whizzed right by me.

This time around I had access to a robust internet and so could do some reading beforehand. It certainly helped. Also I readjusted my expectations of this book and read it more as a historical fiction piece rather than as a mystery. Having the murder take a back seat to each narrator’s own doings certainly made things easier. Now I’ve read it I’m glad I hung onto it even though I couldn’t get through it the first time. I do that with books that seem to have potential.

I certainly can see why I stopped where I did; Wallis is a repugnant person with a vicious little mind and a judgmental attitude. Bigoted Asshole about sums him up. I don’t know if that’s what he was actually like, but he made my flesh crawl and I had to force myself read his piece of the story. There is so much interconnected detail that I didn’t allow myself to skim for fear of missing something important and becoming lost later on. Of all four narrators, Wallis is the least sympathetic with Prescott coming in a close second. Cola was smarmy and always seemed to be trying to ingratiate himself into something and wasn’t so attractive either, but neither was he repulsive. Through the accounts from the others we learn that he is not what he seems, nor is he exactly what others think either. I love that kind of thing. Unreliable narrators don’t scare me off; I rather enjoy their twisted views. Our final narrator was a bit deluded, but likeable enough. Wood had to balance a precarious social position with his conscience and in any age, that’s difficult to do.

Mild spoilers -

No, none of the narrators had much sympathy from me. All of that was reserved for Sarah Blundy. Every time I read a novel set in a time where individuals could be trampled on, violated and taken advantage of with impunity I am even more thankful I’m a child of the later 20th century. In the end, I didn’t like what she became though; I could have done without the Christ-figure, thanks. Wasn’t her fate awful enough without that? But I guess once Pears got going with the religious aspect of the story he couldn’t resist going a few steps beyond. Maybe it’s the atheist in me, but I found the whole thing ridiculous. As Wood got through his tale and it started meshing with Prescott and Wallis’s I knew the ultimate solution would be something religious. It didn’t matter much to me though. I can’t work up a froth about the distinctions that made everyone so rabid back then. Catholic, Protestant, whatever, it’s all basically the same superstitious wankery to me and so even in the end, when intellectually I knew why everyone was freaking out, emotionally it had little effect. (And before anyone gets on me about it, yes I know the basic differences between C & P dogma – the Pope as God’s rep on earth, the transubstantiation etc, but I don’t care about them…they are stupid to me, but then again, all religion is). Ok, I’m letting it go.

As an inside look at the life and times though, I think it’s excellent. I loved how a man who insisted on quarterly baths is called fastidious. Descriptions of food, living conditions, clothing and most of all the “medical advances” of the day all made me cringe. Although in 400 years people of the future will probably cringe at our primitive surgical remedies and clumsy drug regimens that do not cure, but only mask symptoms. Still, to die like Anne Blundy did is intensely horrific. And I know that knowledge and enquiry had to start somewhere, but to not know what blood is and what it’s for is inconceivable. Ditto for needles, injections and transfusions. It’s hard to put oneself back into that darkly ignorant time. Same with political equality and jurisprudence. It all has to start somewhere, but it’s difficult to read about it with any serenity.

So approach this book as one about memory and the presentation of events; how they differ and how through omission and misdirection a narrator can manipulate the reader. Approach it with the understanding that there is no sleuth, no who-dunnit, no detection, but that the mystery will be revealed in pieces by each narrator and it will be up to you to frame the solution. Read it with curiosity about how English people struggled with being subjects and being citizens and the differences between the two. And of course, read it with the idea that religion ruled all and is the most powerful control mechanism ever devised.

What the title means - it comes from a work of philosophy by Francis Bacon published in 1620.

The whole quote goes like this - "Among Prerogative Instances I will put in the fourteenth place Instances of the Fingerpost, borrowing the term from the fingerposts which are set up where roads part, to indicate the several directions. These I also call Decisive and Judicial, and in some cases, Oracular and Commanding Instances. I explain them thus. When in the investigation of any nature the understanding is so balanced as to be uncertain to which of two or more natures the cause of the nature in question should be assigned on account of the frequent and ordinary concurrence of many natures, instances of the fingerpost show the union of one of the natures with the nature in question to be sure and indissoluble, of the other to be varied and separable; and thus the question is decided, and the former nature is admitted as the cause, while the latter is dismissed and rejected. Such instances afford very great light and are of high authority, the course of interpretation sometimes ending in them and being completed. Sometimes these instances of the fingerpost meet us accidentally among those already noticed, but for the most part they are new, and are expressly and designedly sought for and applied, and discovered only by earnest and active diligence."

In Latin a fingerpost is simply a cross, think roadsign. Basically when two sets of evidence or indications conflict, one will eventually become so prominent and undeniable that it will point to the truth directly and there is no more argument. Also that sometimes a fingerpost will be unnoticed among other things we think are more important, but when seen in a new light or under new circumstances, they stand out. It's that second part of Bacon's definition that really refers to the book and its structure.

Odyssey: The Story of Odysseus by Homer, 800-700 BCE

2011-04-02T07:31:00.006-05:00

Read in 2011 - W.H.D. Rouse translation c. 1937

Synopsis: The epic tale of Odysseus and his ten-year journey home after the Trojan War forms one of the earliest and greatest works of Western literature. Confronted by natural and supernatural threats - shipwrecks, battles, monsters and the implacable enmity of the sea-god Poseidon - Odysseus must test his bravery and native cunning to the full if he is to reach his homeland safely and overcome the obstacles that, even there, await him.

It is difficult to read and review a book like this. To read because I can’t help but view it with my 21st century sensibilities in place and to review because I’m sure that I missed elements of importance because I don’t have a classical background. But since a lot of people will approach this book in exactly this way, I’ll try to organize my thoughts.

Let me get this out of the way – yes I was trying to fit each episode into O Brother, Where Art Thou? the whole time. Most don’t fit. Like…who exactly were the Hogwallops? And the ladies in the stream…were they Sirens or the girls who helped Odysseus when he washed up in the river on Ithaca? And just what was Baby-face Nelson supposed to represent? Ha! So I guess the Coens took a few liberties with their bong hits.

Oh and another thing I’ll get out of the way – ancient Greek men are insufferable. I’m aghast at how little they thought of women. The table in my dining room has more say over its destiny than a woman did in ancient Greece. They treat their dogs better. Penelope’s fate was so maddening because she had no say in it. The assholes eating her out of house and home had a perfect right to do so apparently, and neither she nor Telemachus could do a thing about it. And here I thought ancient Roman women got the short end of the stick…at least they got to eat in the same room as the men. Bah! Weak-minded humanity. Renders ½ its population as inert property while it slaughters the other. Men are weird.

Ok. That’s over now. I’m still mad about it, but what can I do? So the story itself went in a way I didn’t expect. Telemachus gets going first and we see him granted warm welcomes in the houses of both Nestor and Menelaus. The thing that really struck me here was how naive the ancient Greeks seemed to be. They accept strangers on the face of things and don’t even ask their names before giving gifts, new clothes, baths, money and ships with men and provisions to further their journeys. Weird. No wonder they found Odysseus highly tricky for a simple ploy like the horse at Troy. These days subterfuge is just an accepted part of any conflict and just daily life half the time. Anyway, we get some of Odysseus’s story from Nestor and Menelaus and not directly from Odysseus as I thought we would.

And the parts of the story I thought would be big deals and go on forever were treated with just a few lines and then – zip – they were done. The Sirens are a perfect example. That episode gets a lot of press and artwork devoted to it and it hardly lasts a minute with nothing of import happening at all. Again, not what I expected. There is, however, a lot of repetition of baths and anointing with olive oil and the rosy-fingered presence of dawn. Boy Homer ground that metaphor to death. The broad back of the sea or the fish-giving sea was another. But I guess it became more of a refrain for the bards who told this story again and again.

The wind-up took forever with lots of extraneous detail and elaborate lies to cover up Odysseus’s true identity. The whole time Odysseus was disguised as a beggar I was grinding my teeth with wanting to get to the ass-kicking. I mean, I don’t care what made up crap you tell everyone, just get on with it. Eventually we get it, but like everything else he does, Odysseus takes his time. For a man who wanted to get home really fast, he spent a lot of time farting around…like spending all that time with Circe. Oh sure he really wanted to see Ithaca again. And it’s the same with the ass-kicking, he strings it out as long as possible. Finally everyone is dead and we think he and Penelope will just rush into each others' arms and fade to black. Not so. More lamentations, disbelief and foot-dragging.

Anyway, it’s an interesting story and an enlightening one. I learned a lot about how the Greeks viewed their world and how helpless they really felt. So much shit just rolled downhill. Injustice heaped on injustice with a full complement of excuses. Cranky, childish and mercurial gods at the top, women and slaves on the bottom.

And a word about the narration - Anthony Heald did an amazing job. He's got a very expressive voice, but he never goes over the top. I think this epic poem was written to be performed aloud and so the actor must get it right. Heald injected the right amount of drama for each scene; anger, loneliness, fear, tenderness; whatever was needed. I'm glad I 'read' it this way since it is the way it was intended to be received by an audience. Pronunciation was excellent and I commend him for getting around all those tongue-twisters with what seemed effortless ease.

One other thing, if you don't have a really deep grasp of Greek mythology or customs (like knowing what a tripod is in Greek culture) it might be a good idea to have a search session open so you can get info about the life and times. Names especially might be a problem, such as why Zeus is sometimes referred to as Chronion or Chronides and who luminaries like Agamemnon, Heracles and Theseus are (Odysseus meets them in Hades or at least mentions them occasionally). I used a few wikipedia articles and some maps to orient myself along the way. What did we do before the internet???

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, 2009

2011-03-16T07:39:00.002-05:00

Read in 2011

Synopsis: Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics–their passion for the same woman–that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him–nearly destroying him–Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.

Cutting for Stone will go down in my personal reading history as the second book to have brought tears to my eyes (Of Mice and Men being the first). The family and brotherly bonds that make up the core story are intense, yet not cheap or melodramatic. A lot goes on from beginning to end, but as tightly woven as the narrative gets, it moves ahead logically with good pacing and foreshadowing. I don’t read a lot of family saga type books, but this one just sounded so interesting that I gave it a try. At first I had a hard time getting into the story; it’s a bit vague and stretches the bounds of belief (an infant remembering its birth? Oh come on.). Also, it plunges you straight into the story with no explanation as to circumstances or people involved. After a while though, the story coalesces and begins to construct itself.

I’m not 100% convinced that first-person was the right perspective for some of the story, particularly events before Marion’s birth, but it did make for a very personal story, one a reader can easily be emotionally connected to. I’m very glad I read this with my ears; Sunil Malhotra did an amazing job, putting just enough characterization into specific voices for them to be recognizable, but not cartoonish. He became the voice of Marion Stone. His voice, intonation and cadence was a treat to hear.
Spoilers set to stun.

Out of all the characters I think I loved Ghosh the best. His long, slow courtship of Hema was so tender and dedicated; I laughed out loud when they finally got together to live their lives. His relationship with Marion and Shiva was fatherly and also somehow, professorial as well. He taught them how to be people first, but doctors too in a close second.

The complex relationship between Marion, Shiva and Genet is too much to go into here with any detail. Plus it would give away too much of the plot, but suffice to say it is an unusual relationship and one that both makes them as individuals, but also destroys. The tentative beginnings with games of blind man’s buff are pretty illustrative of where it will go. I also had to wonder about how casual Shiva’s later sexual involvement with Genet was given what he was a silent witness to years earlier.

The historical context Verghese brought to the story was excellent. In other novels I’ve seen this kind of thing throw off and distort a story, taking a reader down ratholes that don’t go anywhere, but in Cutting for Stone they enhanced the story and fleshed out its people. Ghosh’s imprisonment, the tenuous situation Missing Hospital found itself in as a result of the government, the coups and rebellions; all of it was central to the story, not extraneous. Even if Verghese had an axe to grind here, it didn’t come off accusatory to this white, western woman. It made me very curious about Ethiopia and its history.

I also loved how Missing Hospital became a character all by itself. Doctors, nurses and support staff who dedicate years of their lives to these hospitals are amazing people. Aside from that, Verghese made the community a wonderfully nurturing place for Marion and Shiva. It’s clear that Stone’s abandonment was really a good thing for them. Hema, Ghosh, Matron and the others were more parent than Stone could have ever been. Missing was the perfect training grounds for Marion in terms of developing his medical style and preparing him for a hospital like Our Lady of Perpetual Succor. The deprivations he found there were light compared to Missing.

One thing I would have changed, or possibly just reduced were the surgical descriptions. Visceral isn’t strong enough a word. I mean, while reading a vivid account of a vasectomy even I squirmed. While on one level they were interesting, I don’t think so much detail was needed to convey the intense passion for surgery that is part of Marion’s personality. Overall though the story is original, extremely character driven and one I know I will re-read again and again.

An Iliad by Alessandro Baricco, 2006

2011-03-07T12:54:00.004-05:00

Read in 2011

Synopsis: Alessandro Baricco re-creates the siege of Troy through the voices of twenty-one Homeric characters in the narrative idiom of our modern imagination. Sacrificing none of Homer’s panoramic scope, Baricco forgoes Homeric detachment and admits us to realms of subjective experience his predecessor never explored. From the return of Chryseis to the burial of Hector, we see through human eyes and feel with human hearts the unforgettable events first recounted almost three thousand years ago—events arranged not by the whims of the gods in this instance but by the dictates of human nature. With Andromache, Patroclus, Priam, and the rest, we are privy to the ghastly confusion of battle, the clamor of princely councils, the intimacies of the bedchamber—until finally only a blind poet is left to recount, secondhand, the awful fall of Ilium.

Imbuing the stuff of legend with a startling new relevancy and humanity, Baricco gives us The Iliad as we have never known it. His transformative achievement is certain to delight and fascinate all readers of Homer’s indispensable classic.

I must start this book review with a confession; I’ve never read any classical works. It’s shameful, I know. I’ve devoured plenty of historical fiction about ancient Greece and Rome and some biographies of famous men, but never read any writers from those times. Terrible. I admit it. There’s no excuse, but there are reasons. First; I hate poetry. Second; I’m suffering from a delusion that the ancients won’t be readable. Third; translations make me wary.

So, why did I start with a translation of a translation with writing 180 degrees from the original that also left out huge chunks of the story? Because it was there. I bought it in 2006 and had never read it. It’s been languishing on my shelf that long and now I’m glad I read it. It’s made me want to find a more closely translated version to read, too.

The thing that attracted me to An Iliad (an important distinction to The Iliad) was that it wasn’t in poetic verse. It’s in prose. Woo hoo! No rhyming. No awkward (to my ear) cadences that obscure meaning. Straightforward prose. Real sentences. No rhymes.

I didn’t know when I bought it that it left out the gods though and I’m not sure how I feel about that. My first reaction is that if Homer put them in there, who has the right to take them out. That’s certainly a much bigger liberty than changing from verse to prose or from omniscient 3rd person to first person (which was also done). Seemingly unforgivable, but my modern sensibility appreciates it. I’m an atheist and would no more worship Zeus than I would Allah and so the mythical nature of the gods’ intervention would only serve to distance me from the actual story. With the gods stripped out it seems much more a factual tale than myth. With recent archaeological discoveries it seems the war between the Trojans and Greeks was probably true anyway and putting gods in to make things happen would detract from that realism. Whenever humans take full responsibility for their actions and decisions it has more bite, more heft. It matters. Gods running around moving us like pieces on a chessboard just makes me roll my eyes.

What’s left is a story of man’s most base nature. And I do mean man literally. The men in this novel are appallingly self-centered, narcissistic and weak. The whole species of them. To despise and fear women so completely as to render them property reduced to sexual organs only shows me how weak in mind and character they were. Probably still are if they had their way. As a modern female I can help but see this as an overarching theme even if an unintended one. I can’t believe the whole of Western literature is founded on who gets to put his dick into whom. And even more importantly, who doesn’t.

That aside this is a story of war, but one told from the inside. No battle tactics or troop formations. No general’s machinations and planning. No bird’s eye view. Here is close combat told with a personalization that was startling. Not just men were killed, but how they were killed; specifically. And who was killed; by name. And who did the killing; also by name. So many Greek names as to be dizzying. After a while it almost became like a dance, which I suppose was the point. To make us find beauty in war. It’s there, although you have to really force the metaphor to find it.

I’m no classical scholar, so a lot of high-falutin’ stuff probably eluded me and I've probably oversimplified things in a way that will make scholars cringe, but I did enjoy reading this in a strange, voyeuristic way. I did it to get a better understanding of Achilles, Hector and Odysseus; names so often referred to in the rest of literature as to be almost without meaning. Over and over they’re used to prop up or illustrate one point after another; some clashing ideas together and creating that confusion. I will probably go on to read other classical works like The Odyssey and The Aeneid; both tales of heroes after the war, but I don’t think I’ll stop reading the companion modern fiction though.

Dr. Haggard's Disease by Patrick McGrath, 1994

2011-03-04T08:54:00.003-05:00

Read (finally, unbelievably) in 2011

Synopsis: Set in Britain on the eve of World War II, it involves Edward Haggard, a young doctor in a London hospital, who falls for Fanny Vaughan, the wife of an older physician. The attraction is mutual, and they begin a brief, passionate affair. After a calamitous run-in with the husband, Haggard leaves London, buying a crumbling seaside mansion and the practice of a retiring doctor. His feelings for the now-deceased Fanny grow to unbearable intensity several years later after a visit by her son, a young fighter pilot, and his obsession takes a bizarre erotic twist. An example of the psychological side of the gothic, this is a haunting portrayal of a man broken by passion.

It is said that when a person dies, his life flashes before his eyes. At the end of this brilliant novel, that’s the realization that flowered inside my head; this was that flash.

Through ominous hints dropped at the ends of paragraphs, I thought I had a sense of where this was going. Dr. Haggard’s psychological unraveling came on steadily and although you know he’s an unreliable narrator, you are still surprised by how fast he came unwoven at the end.

I’m stymied in my attempt to review this book because it’s so subtle in its power. The way McGrath chooses words is masterful. To wit this description of the boarding house where Dr. Haggard lives when he first meets Fanny – “The front door, four or five steps up from the pavement, behind high spiked iron railings, was inset with a panel of stained glass and opened into a dark hallway dominated by a sideboard like a catafalque.” Now that’s setting the stage. Not only does he convey what the structure looks like, but the feel as well. Catafalque. That’s what does it.

Not only is it McGrath’s choice of vocabulary to establish mood and setting, but it’s his foreshadowing technique. Spike is referred to often as something that has to be appeased, quieted and dealt with. We know Dr. H now has to walk with a cane. We know Fanny is dead and the affair ended. We suspect her husband, but all this is allowed to swirl in our minds; incorporeal. It’s just one of the unknowns that so keenly provide tension and suspense. McGrath is almost without peer in this technique.

Another aspect illustrating Dr. Haggard’s growing mania his story’s sexual element. At first during his narrative he is shy and reticent, always keeping the veil in place as is proper since he’s relating this tale to her son. Over time though, the telling becomes more frantic and explicit. At times he seemed to shift and talk not to James, but to Fanny directly. It was disconcerting and made me squirm. Not in a bad way though. I love it when an author can command my response so completely.

And where would a gothic tale be without its settings? First the hospital with its rigorous routines and schedules. Dr. Haggard is bound up so thoroughly in his work and pressures from his superiors that his new-found freedom with Fanny is palpably joyous. We revel when he does. Then, when all is over, he moves to a stalwart mansion perched on a cliff-side that will surely crumble in time. This perfectly mirrors Dr. H’s state and reinforces the impending doom. The nearness of the war itself adds the final note of danger that can’t be evaded. Fighter planes, bombers, soldiers and black-out curtains are important reinforcing aspects to the situation and his psyche. The ending is surreal and literally a bombshell. Perfect.

Gideon's Sword by Lincoln Child and Doug Preston, 2011

2011-03-03T08:22:00.003-05:00

Read in 2011

Synopsis: At twelve, Gideon Crew witnessed his father, a world-class mathematician, accused of treason and gunned down.

At twenty-four, summoned to his dying mother's bedside, Gideon learned the truth: His father was framed and deliberately slaughtered. With her last breath, she begged her son to avenge him.

Now, with a new purpose in his life, Gideon crafts a one-time mission of vengeance, aimed at the perpetrator of his father's destruction. His plan is meticulous, spectacular, and successful.

But from the shadows, someone is watching. A very powerful someone, who is impressed by Gideon's special skills. Someone who has need of just such a renegade.

For Gideon, this operation may be only the beginning . . .

Have you ever eaten instant mashed potatoes? Yeah, so have I, unfortunately. So, do you like ‘em? Ugh, me neither. I don’t think there’s a real potato within 10 miles of the factory.

So why am I starting a book review with mashed potatoes? Because the latest effort by the writing team of Preston and Child is just like a box of Spud Buds. The time, effort, craftsmanship and possibly sheer luck are completely missing from this imitation product. It’s a bummer because I was looking forward to having another intriguing character to follow through from one impossible situation to another. Now it only means fewer Pendergast novels and more waiting. No, I won’t be following Gideon through any more of his adventures and I really hope the lamefest doesn’t spill over into the Pendergast series.

What’s the disconnect? I’ve given it some thought. Back when Relic and its bastard offspring Reliquary were written, Pendergast was a supporting character. He was weird and certainly a force in Relic, but he wasn’t yet the eye of the tornado he is now. By the third book, Cabinet of Curiosities, the writers knew what they had on their hands, but even then I’m not sure they knew exactly where they were going. That worked. That forced them to only give us small details; tidbits of information about Pendergast and his shadowy past. Teasing us into wanting more and more. Piling one puzzling clue upon another, leaving questions unanswered. It was one of the best sales techniques I’ve been the willing victim of. As preposterous as he is, there is enough, I don’t know, heft, to Pendergast that we (at least I) keep coming back for more.
Not so with Gideon. Him they want to force upon us fully grown and realized. As Garza says in the end, he hasn’t made his bones yet, but we are still expected to take him seriously. I just can’t do it.

The first problem is the story; Gideon’s father is framed and made the scapegoat for a dismal failure of a government project that results in the deaths of many well-placed spies. For some bizarre reason he and his mother are called to the scene where dad is holding someone hostage to make the government fix the mistake. Instead they shoot him while he’s trying to surrender. Fast forward to the present day and Gideon is about to make good on his promise to make the architect of his father’s downfall pay; one General Tucker. An elaborate and unbelievably implausible operation ensues and is over in about 50 pages. Not only does he get to the evil mastermind, but he also turns the mastermind’s most loyal minion. He does this with about 2 pages of bad dialogue. In what universe?

If they wanted to present Gideon’s initial success, they should have given it to us as back story; a fait accompli, not given us a blow-by-blow of the operation in all its unlikely aspects in 50 pages. It’s so completely stupid that I rolled my eyes the whole time. Credibility points – 0. The story is so forced, so rushed that they can’t establish any fact without just coming out and telling us. I would have rather had the General Tucker story take a whole book, keeping the watcher who appears to hire Gideon in the background; a sinister presence we aren’t sure of. Save their meeting and initial project for the second book. I could have lived with that. It would have been a better mechanism for showing us what Gideon can do.

So we’re told that Gideon is some kind of science dude at Los Alamos, has degrees up the wazoo and graduated from MIT (despite his mother being destitute as a result of dad’s death and disgrace). He’s also a master of disguise (am I the only one who pictured Inspector Clouseau?), a superb con-man, a self-affirmed wiseass (complete with full wise ass mode), is in great physical shape, has striking good looks (and floppy hair), is a gun expert, a computer hacker, a meticulous planner and makes women’s clothes drop off (but only the pretty ones). Yeah, sure, some of these super powers were shown to us, but in such an bald and factual way I don’t buy it. Oh yeah, and he also used to be Neal Caffrey. Please.

I think you get it by now…this book is unbelievably stupid. Even for these guys, who, let’s face it, write cliff-hanger pulp fiction. I enjoyed it up to now because the stuff I had to suspend my disbelief over was so big that it was easier to do so. The details were more coherent and plausible and that somehow makes the giant weird stuff easier to just go with. If I didn’t see their names on the cover I wouldn’t have believed Preston and Child were capable of this crap. Were they broke? Did they fall for some slick, bullshit-slinging publicist that said this would be ok? Whatever it was, it was a mistake. I’m not coming back for a second helping of Spud Buds.

Provenance by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo, 2009

2011-02-28T08:35:00.003-05:00

Subtitled How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art.

Read in 2011

Synopsis: Provenance is the extraordinary narrative of one of the most far-reaching and elaborate deceptions in art history. Investigative reporters Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo brilliantly recount the tale of a great con man and unforgettable villain, John Drewe, and his sometimes unwitting accomplices.

Chief among those was the struggling artist John Myatt, a vulnerable single father who was manipulated by Drewe into becoming a prolific art forger. Once Myatt had painted the pieces, the real fraud began. Drewe managed to infiltrate the archives of the upper echelons of the British art world in order to fake the provenance of Myatt's forged pieces, hoping to irrevocably legitimize the fakes while effectively rewriting art history.

The story stretches from London to Paris to New York, from tony Manhattan art galleries to the esteemed Giacometti and Dubuffet associations, to the archives at the Tate Gallery. This enormous swindle resulted in the introduction of at least two hundred forged paintings, some of them breathtakingly good and most of them selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many of these fakes are still out in the world, considered genuine and hung prominently in private houses, large galleries, and prestigious museums. And the sacred archives, undermined by John Drewe, remain tainted to this day.

Although I know next to nothing about the art world, I found this book pretty interesting. Sometimes I think the magnitude of what John Drewe did escapes me, but the overall impression of a manipulative scumbag was pretty clear. It isn’t the actual forged painting that did the most damage, but the provenance and thus the title of the book. I don’t know if he and the painter really did rewrite the history of art, but they certainly did bilk people out of a lot of money and ruin reputations.

In some ways, I’m sympathetic to Drewe. These people were asking for it. Valuing art for its circumstances and pedigree rather than its merits makes it really easy to be taken. Greed blinds us all and Drewe knew it. Pretty much everyone who was taken was a willing victim, ignored contradictory evidence and just wanted to be the next star in their particular firmament. It makes it hard to have sympathy for them; too much ego and too much money. Myatt’s musing about how that money could have been better spent is spot on. The grandiose waste is appalling and it’s delicious irony to know that many of his forgeries are still on display, cherished for their provenance rather than their aesthetic. It’s easy to believe these people got what they deserved.

My sympathy is directed at the archivists and the artists who were lied to, betrayed and taken advantage of. At the beginning of the book the author states that archivists are the lowest rung on the art world ladder; the least appreciated, but the most important in terms of preserving provenance and thus proving a work’s credibility. That credibility is what drives up the perceived value of a work and thus the price at which it can be sold. Drewe knew this, too and found a way infiltrate and corrupt a totally legitimate archive.

Even though he’s a lying asshole, Drewe is a talented lying asshole. A plot this intricate and far-reaching is impressive no matter how damaging. His ability to set up events far, far in advance is mind-boggling. Attention to detail, imagination, foresight and a deep understanding of human nature are only part of it. The kind of confidence Drewe displays is his biggest key to success. People want to believe him. They’re dying to be led, shepherded and mentored by such a luminous figure. His looks, accent, clothes, supposed contacts, job and bits of spouted science are enough to convince people he is what he says he is. Daring. I’d never even dream of pulling off that kind of farce. In some ways I have to admire the bravado, but that kind of soulless existence also gives me pause. Crossing with art at its most essential, as human expression, is the most extreme contradiction I can think of. A soulless human cannot create art, but it can exploit it and even art at its most corrupt is susceptible to its charms. You’d think an already morally bankrupt system would recognize one of its own. As I said, greed blinds people and that’s what this is ultimately a story of. The power of greed.

So Many Ways to Begin by Jon McGregor, 2006

2011-02-27T18:02:00.002-05:00

Read in 2011

Synopsis: So Many Ways to Begin is a potent examination of family and memory, a look at what happens when life forces you to let go of the person you might have been. David Carter is an obsessive collector and the curator of a local history museum. In addition to overseeing the community's archives, he has, since boyhood, diligently archived the items that tell his own life story: birth certificate, school report cards, movie and train tickets. But when a senile relative lets slip a long-buried family secret, David is forced to consider that his whole carefully cataloged life may be constructed around a lie. In fits and starts, his world begins to unravel.

I chose this book as an early reviewer selection because I recognized the author’s name and felt badly that I couldn’t get through the last book of his I was sent. Maybe I could redeem myself with this one and find a story I liked. See, McGregor can write. That much was clear with the last book and I wanted to try again. I’m glad I did.

This book was first published in 2006 so it can’t quite be called an ‘early’ review, but I think that the publisher wants to bring attention to McGregor's work and rightfully so. It is well written with excellent pacing, structure, characterization and an intimacy that isn’t stifling or voyeuristic.

David Carter wants you to know about his life. The way the writer threads the story is through the use of David’s keepsakes. As a boy, he clung to all types of mementos and has grown up loving museums, collections and archaeology. As an adult he’s fulfilled his dreams and become a museum curator. Each chapter he writes is headed with a description of one of his life mementos. A pair of gloves, theater tickets, snapshots, a job application, university prospectuses; each has significance in the chapter and you can imagine David telling you this story, bringing out each one and shyly offering it to you. It’s an excellent device and very believable. Not only does it give you tangible detail, but is almost more revealing of David’s character than what he says.

Although there are no big secrets in this book, there are many little ones. Small things are revealed subtly and tension builds if you recognize them for what they are. Eleanor’s agoraphobia for example was obliquely referred to in the very beginning, but took time to manifest itself in real time. Same with the actual reason for David’s hospitalization; as soon as it was hinted that it wasn’t for the reason given to Kate, I knew he had to have run afoul of Chris and could only turn the pages helplessly as it came to pass.

Mental illness is a major theme in this book, but it’s never made pathetic or something to be ashamed of. David is patient and loving in the face of it and even though it makes his life difficult at times, he’s never ready to walk out on the women he loves. The ending is a bit hard to take after so much yearning, but it is a fitting one. I think both David and Mary healed in small ways and rather than being frustrated, both seem satisfied.

Hannibal: One Man Against Rome by Harold Lamb, 1958

2011-02-14T13:21:00.005-05:00

Read in 2011

Synopsis: "HANNIBAL: One Man Against Rome " is the breathtaking adventure of the great Carthaginian general who shook the foundations of Rome. Eluding several Roman legions sent out to intercept him in Spain and France, Hannibal astoundingly leads his small army of mercenaries over the Alps and thunders down into the Po Valley in 218 B.C. This violent and exciting narrative will thrill you with the accounts of heroism and brilliance displayed on both sides as the war rages mercilessly across the entire Western Mediterranean. Learn how the patience of Fabius Maximus and the genius of Lucius Cornelius Scipio finally turn the tide in this, the world’s first "global" conflict.

Hannibal Barca (ca. 248 B.C – ca. 183 B.C.) is widely considered the greatest military commander of all time. He grew to manhood in Spain under the careful tutelage of his aristocrat father, the Carthaginian, Hamilcar. Upon the death of his brother-in-law, Hasdrubal, in 231, he became commander of the forces there and, backed by the Carthaginian government, subdued Spain south of the Ebro. At the end of the Second Punic War and his defeat at Zama, Hannibal settled down in Carthage to restore its broken fortunes. He succeeded so well that he raised the ire of the Romans and was pursued relentlessly to the East. Rather than fall into Roman hands, he committed suicide at Libyssa on the shore of the Sea of Marmora.

It is so true that history is written by the winners. While I found this book to be well written and reasonably interesting, it wasn’t terribly engaging. Most of it was the story of troop movements, battle formations and tactics and not stories of the man himself. He remains to me almost as mysterious as he was before I read this, only knowing of him through the eyes of Roman accounts and personalities. Carthage must be destroyed, indeed. What’s left of source material about Hannibal is twisted by Roman propaganda of the time and historical axe-grinding (Livy is a perfect example of this) and so makes for a vague biography of a man who must have been quite feared if his name ended up so blackened by his enemies. Still, his name lives on and is more famous even than his enemy’s, the victor Publius Scipio Africanus so I guess the winners can’t have everything.

There’s nothing of Hannibal’s childhood or education, political struggles in coming to power or his domestic life and children; the things we need to fully engage with him as a person, not just a persona. Even his military tactics and planning were shrouded in mystery, told through the fact of their occurrence more than why Hannibal did what he did. I’d love to be able to read about conversations and meetings he had with his subordinates. I’d love to know why he seemed so indecisive after winning key battles. For example after Cannae, why didn’t he march on Rome itself? The Roman army was basically wiped out and nothing stood in his way, but he held back and instead marched through Italia confiscating crops. I would like to have known what it was like to be persuaded by his charisma as his whole army must have been or else they would have mutinied on more than one occasion during their long and arduous campaigns.

What information there was to be had Lamb worked into an interesting and well crafted storyline. Of course much of the story is about battles and who won what and when. Not only when Hannibal was in command of troops, but his father Hamilcar and others like Hasdrubal. At the time Lamb wrote the book he says that military historians still had not found out which route exactly Hannibal took over the Alps in his famous march. Amazing. Is it weird that I felt more sympathy for the poor elephants than I did for the soldiers?

One complaint I have is for the audio publishing company – why didn’t you include maps??? It’s not so hard people. Luckily I have plenty of other physical books with maps so I could picture the movements, locations and distances. For those without maps in their homes, a quick trip to Hannibal’s Wikipedia page will definitely help.

The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier, 1957

2011-02-14T08:41:00.004-05:00

Read in 2011

Synopsis: Two men--one English, the other French--meet by chance in a provincial railway station and are astounded that they are so much alike that they could easily pass for each other. Over the course of a long evening, they talk and drink. It is not until he awakes the next day that John, the Englishman, realizes that he may have spoken too much. His French companion is gone, having stolen his identity. For his part, John has no choice but to take the Frenchman's place--as master of a chateau, director of a failing business, head of a large and embittered family, and keeper of too many secrets.

Loaded with suspense and wit, The Scapegoat tells the double story of the attempts by John, the imposter, to escape detection by the family, servants, and several mistresses of his alter ego, and of his constant and frustrating efforts to unravel the mystery of the enigmatic past that dominates the existence of all who live in the chateau.

Doppelganger. Isn’t that a great word? Many stories have been written about doppelgangers and what happens to them when they switch places, but none so well as this one. du Maurier is known most for her novel Rebecca, but she could easily be known for The Scapegoat instead, it’s that good. In a way it might be better than Rebecca. The opening is shorter and the plot gets underway much quicker which means I get a lot more ‘quality time’ with the characters and the scenario.

It’s that quality time that really hooked me. At first I found John, Jean and Jean’s family to be remote and difficult to connect with; everyone seemed deliberately odd and cartoonish . Then, through John’s careful management of his bizarre situation, I began to connect with them and see how they’d been used and abused by Jean. Eventually you start to root for John and how he tries to set right all the damage his wayward double has created. All the while knowing it can’t last. You hope though and that’s what sets this novel and du Maurier’s talent apart from others.

The way the unknowns are revealed is masterful; you feel as lost and at sea as John must feel, stepping into the role of pater familias. A few of them were relatively easy to guess, particularly the gulf of silence between Jean and Blanche. After a few mentions of Mr. Duval it was pretty clear what happened and Jean’s rationalization of it made it all the more heinous. In the end, Jean went from a mere selfish cad to a violent psycho and I wonder if his family will survive his return. I have to keep in mind what Bela said to John at his leave-taking, that now John has acted so well and nobly that from now on Jean’s family would look for John’s character inside Jean’s, not the other way around. Going forward Jean will have to try to live up to John’s precedent and the family will have to stand up to him if he doesn’t.

A word of warning for the hyper-literal – yes, it’s a stretch. There’s probably no way two complete strangers can exchange lives even for a few hours never mind a few days. Yes, people would be suspicious and many, many things would give each person away. That’s not really the point of this novel. It’s the vehicle only. The point is to see what good can happen to John (and maybe even to Jean in the end) and how he can save himself.

During the set up, we come to understand that John is nearly crushed under the weight of ennui and dissatisfaction with his life. He considers himself to be a failure. He wishes he could set free that part of his personality that he’s never allowed flight. The one who takes chances and wants real people in his life, not just historical figures and the occasional student to tutor. In his hopelessness, John is planning to visit a monastery in a last ditch effort to find a solution. Little does he know his cure doesn’t lie in that direction. Instead he is driven headlong into someone else’s life where he can have the freedom to shake off the crippling insecurity and act like the man he wants to be. In the process he changes Jean’s family’s lives, too and that’s what brings a sense of hope to an ending that could have been bleak.

I’m not sure this book is still in print. I bought a used copy online and still paid something like $15 with shipping for a trade paperback. Find a copy for yourself if you can. It’s worth it and I know I’ll be re-reading this one.

Revelation by C.J. Sansom, 2008

2011-01-27T14:54:00.002-05:00

Read in 2011

Synopsis: Spring, 1543. King Henry VIII is wooing Lady Catherine Parr, whom he wants for his sixth wife. Archbishop Cranmer and the embattled Protestant faction at court are watching keenly, for Lady Catherine is known to have reformist sympathies. Matthew Shardlake, meanwhile, is working on the case of a teenage boy who has been placed in the Bedlam insane asylum, before his terrifying religious mania leads to him being burned as a heretic. When an old friend is horrifically murdered Shardlake vows to bring the killer to justice. His search leads him to Cranmer and Catherine Parr - and to the dark prophecies of the "Book of Revelation". As London's Bishop Bonner prepares a purge of Protestants Shardlake, together with his assistant, Jack Barak, and his friend, Guy Malton, investigate a series of horrific murders which are already bringing frenzied talk of witchcraft and demonic possession - for what else would the Tudor mind make of a serial killer...?

Another satisfying Shardlake mystery. I’m spacing these out and reading them slowly so that I’ve always got one to look forward to. So many historical mystery writers have problems balancing the history and the mystery. Not so Mr. Sansom. He gets it right. I’m alternately fascinated by the culture of Tudor England and the clues to the puzzle. Matthew Shardlake is a highly interesting lead character; sympathetic, but not a wimp, decisive, but not reckless and smart, but not preternaturally so. He’s just a guy doing the best he can. Yes, he’s a straight-shooter, but he has dark thoughts just like anyone.

In this outing we get a lot of Guy and Barak and Matthew’s relationship with each of them. Both are under strain, but for different reasons. It’s harrowing to read because they are so important to Matthew and his success, as well as his well-being. Another social aspect is brought into this one in the form of Dorothy; his good friend’s widow and old flame. I had hopes for Matthew with her. It’s strange to feel so much empathy with a character, but I do for Shardlake and wanted him to find romance. Alas, it was not to be in this novel and looks unlikely for the future. Bachelor he will remain. And Barak who is no longer one seems to long for that old life. Marriage isn’t what he expected it to be, especially after their first child is stillborn. Matthew does his best to help them through it, but they cannot talk to each other. Seems nothing does change under the sun.

The mystery itself is good, but I found the idea of a serial killer in this type of novel a bit questionable. It injects too much of now into the past for me. Sure, there were those types of killers back then I suppose, but somehow it seems out of place. Especially with Guy’s analysis to help push the investigation along scientific lines rather than demon possession which is pretty much the accepted reason why anyone does anything weird in 1543. I rather liked the political aspects of the murders in the past and sort of missed them in this book. Yes, Cranmer and the assistant coroner put him in a rather precarious position and he had to watch his step, but it was not in the same league as the Cromwell business. I wish that Sansom had focused on Guy’s problem as a secondary storyline instead of the one we had. After a while the deal with Adam and the Bedlam hospital just got repetitive and I wanted that to be over. I knew there was something screwy with Guy’s assistant after a while and really hoped there would be more repercussion for the jerk than there was. Possibly he’ll be a future enemy we’ll see crawl out from under a rock. Like Bealknap.

The thing that exasperates me the most about the Shardlake series is the religious climate of the times. Accurately portrayed or not it makes me shriek with outrage and roll my eyes at the stupidity. I really, really wish mankind could evolve away from this make-believe. It’s so destructive; corroding reason and destroying sanity. Everyone in Shardlake’s world is subject to religious foolishness in a really negative way; so far I haven’t read about one person it helped or even affected neutrally. The killer in the book is only one example of the extreme nature of religious zealots and is unfortunately realistic enough.

Losing Everything by David Martin (2008)

2011-01-20T14:44:00.002-05:00

Read in 2011

Synopsis: One evening in the mountainous forest of his isolated West Virginia farmhouse, Martin became disoriented when searching for a horse who had wandered off the property. Wading through the dark and guiding his horse with a belt around its neck, Martin felt as though every step was taking him deeper into the mountains. Instead, he unknowingly spent the night walking in a wide circle that brought him back to where he started. This quickly became a metaphor for Martin's life. "The more lost I get, the closer to home I come."

After growing up with a violent father who nearly killed Martin's clinically insane mother, Martin pursued a writer's life with a vengeance, becoming vulnerable to struggles with alcohol, financial ruin, and legal feuds. Then, after a betrayal by his soul mate, Martin's sanity was in as much jeopardy as his mother's had ever been -- a state of mind that in his case led to gunfire, divorce, and at least one trip to the emergency room.

But Losing Everything is less about getting lost and more about finding your way home again. In his pursuit of stability, Martin uncovered lessons that might help others who have encountered loss: take pleasure in something as small as an ampersand, keep a list of people you know who have died, meet your own death like a warrior, and be glad you don't own a monkey.

Deeply personal yet surprisingly universal, Martin's story is for anyone who has wandered astray. If not a road map, his journey is a guide, providing hard-earned wisdom to illuminate the path home.

I bought this book because I wondered what the heck happened to David Martin. In the 90s I bought and read several of his books – all thrillers as he categorizes them. Gruesome. Dark. Evil. Unspeakable. But they fed something in me that needed that at the time. When he dropped out of sight, I wondered what happened and now I know. I almost wish I didn’t.

It’s not his tale itself that puts me off, but how it was told. He interjects from time to time that he didn’t write the memoir to go on the shelf next to those other harrowing, daytime movie of the week books, but other than to get it off his chest, I don’t know why he did write it. He admits and I agree that others have gone through far worse, but sometimes his self-pitying tone is a bit much. The opposite swing from that is the self-congratulatory tone; especially when documenting (for our edification) his many conquests of the female persuasion. And his boozing. And I can’t help but visualize his many descriptions of the second worst night of his life with a patina of cartoon violence. He says he just crawled on the floor, swinging his head back and forth and mumbling. That and the gun in the mouth were the extremes of what he calls his madness. His insanity. The night in Tennessee insane.

He also did not name either of his ‘esteemed’ wives, each with 18 years of suffrage with him. Whether this was by request of both women or fear of law suits, I don’t know, but it seemed odd. Latter-day coworkers get named, wives don’t, they go by title and number only. His first wife gets barely a chapter devoted to her, but the second gets considerably more. Neither is characterized fully or well, but if he was as erratic and irresponsible as he says he was, they both have my sympathy.

Ultimately I suppose, the book’s message is that even when life sucks the most, when you can’t escape your tortured childhood, when you follow bad decision with bad decision, there is still something in your life that makes it worth living. You just have to stop chasing what you’ve lost and pay attention to what you still have.

Palace Council by Stephen L. Carter, 2008

2011-01-10T08:56:00.003-05:00

Read in 2011

Synopsis: In the summer of 1952, twenty prominent men gather at a secret meeting on Martha’s Vineyard and devise a plot to manipulate the President of the United States. Soon after, the body of one of these men is found by Eddie Wesley, Harlem’s rising literary star. When Eddie’s younger sister mysteriously disappears, Eddie and the woman he loves, Aurelia Treene, are pulled into what becomes a twenty-year search for the truth. As Eddie and Aurelia uncover layer upon layer of intrigue, their odyssey takes them from the wealthy drawing rooms of New York through the shady corners of radical politics, all the way to the Oval Office.

Mild spoilers.

I think I relished Palace Council more while reading it than I did the first two Carter novels (The Emperor of Ocean Park and New England White). There are more breadcrumbs to follow and more delicious foreshadowing to savor this time around. In this novel he successfully marries the story he wants to tell with the way he's telling it. In the others, he had compelling stories, but was mired by too much introspection and slow pacing. Here we have a compelling story that is told in a compelling way. The novel is a polished product that seems much more deliberately crafted than the first two. The thought and design are more obvious, but not limiting or controlling. Plus there were many historical figures worked in and all that realism makes the whole story less fictional if you know what I mean. The scenes with Kennedy, Hughes and Nixon make you think things like that probably really did happen. Who doesn't love a conspiracy?

That's what's at the heart of Palace Council; a conspiracy to control top levels of government. Like most juicy conspiracies, it takes place over a period of decades and involves many people. If you like fiction that is simple with all of the dots connected up for you don't read this. If you like short casts of characters because remembering someone who only showed up for a couple of minutes 300 pages ago is too hard, don't read this book. If you don't like extremely abstruse details becoming important and then connecting up in vague and non-obvious ways, don't read this. Really. You'll just be frustrated. If you like all those things and don't need the solution handed to you and don't have the memory of a goldfish, go right ahead.

That being said, I think the underlying conspiracy, the Project as it's called, could have been more concrete. As it is you have to draw a lot of lines to connect the dots yourself. Were certain deaths part of the Project or just collateral damage or coincidental? While I can make those conclusions, there isn't enough evidence to support them and it makes the big reveal have less effect than it should considering the build up.

And the build up is good. Carter uses chapter headings and titles to telegraph a lot of the action. I like this method a lot better than the cliff-hanger type of chapter endings that so many thriller writers use these days. As if their stories don't have their own impetus to drive them forward, the fake tension created by this method is just annoying. With Palace Council we get a chapter called Arrest and so now we know what's going to happen, but not specifically enough so we read it. Instead of leaving you hanging at the arrest and starting another chapter to resolve it, we get the entire scenario delivered from lead up to final exits. Very nice. The tension flow is even and the scenes aren't too stagey.

Another source of tension is in the character relationship between Eddie and Aurelia. Their relationship is important, but it's not allowed to overshadow the conspiracy itself. It wasn't a given that they would get together, but you root for them. Separately it is obvious that each will only get so far, but together you know they can solve the mystery and when they finally do join forces it isn't sappy or overdone. It's satisfying, but still somewhat tense and not a guarantee of happiness. Great verisimilitude.

Once again Carter is not here to stand on the soapbox and preach about race relations. He doesn't have to, the circumstances each character finds himself or herself in speak loudly enough. That and the times themselves; the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s were all about racial equality and the struggle for civil rights. Carter uses many factual examples of that struggle, but they are never delivered with haranguing, accusatory speeches. Starkly portrayed they have more impact. Although I know these things happened, they still shock me that people treated each other this way over something so stupid. Humans are weird.

The loose connection to a certain segment of the darker nation is nice, but not necessary and you don't need to read the first two novels before this one. Because it takes place so much earlier than the other two, it could even be read before the others, but his talent and expertise shine greater here and you can discern his growth as a writer if you read them in publication order. I hope he writes another one. And if you read this, Mr. Carter, more Mona!

The Worst of 2010

2010-12-29T08:17:00.005-05:00

There has to be a flip side, right?

Books I abandoned without finishing not included. These things I actually polluted my brain with in their entirety. An author gets at least one star for my making it through their crap.

Naked in Death (J.D. Robb) - the first in an apparently wildly successful series that is part cop thriller, part romance, part sci-fi and all suck. Overwrought. Needlessly hysterical. Preposterous. Nonsensical. Unoriginal. Bad sex scenes that just went on and on and on and on. Eve is a joke, right? The "leading man" is a controlling asshole who needs to be on a leash. Stereotypes and caricatures abound. Everything is black and white; gray does not exist. Vomit-inducing, eye-rolling stupidity. (1-star)

Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf) - I decided to read one of her books because she’s an important author (authoress?) I’d never read before. Unfortunately I’ll never read her again. The most boring book I've ever read. I know it's supposed to be beautiful and like a novelized impressionist painting, but it was dull, dull...god it was dull. I'd glaze over for minutes at a time, hearing the narrator in my ears, but not really listening. It didn't matter. The same old trivialities were brought up, discussed, picked over and studied. To what avail, I don't know. The madman had some potential, but he was made boring as well. No wonder Woolf did herself in if this was her life and how she viewed it. (1 1/2 stars)

Lost Boys (Orson Scott Card) - another author much lauded and unread by me. Never again. Good premise, but it should have stayed a short story. And, hello! Haven't we all seen The Sixth Sense by now? Tedious, slow-moving and dull. Also unfortunately, I now know WAY more about Mormons than I ever wanted to, right down to their magic underwear. (2 stars)

Medium Raw - reading this right after Kitchen Confidential was a mistake. Anthony Bourdain loves being Anthony Bourdain and he really, really wants you to know it. Yawn. Remember when Metallica wrote really great songs, played hard and kicked a lot of ass? They were young, lean, hungry and desperate and it resulted in great work. Now they are fat, happy, art-collecting yuppies and it results in flabby crap (and Bob Seger covers?!). Well guess what, it's not just for metal bands anymore. (2 stars)

The Strange Case of the Composer and his Judge (Patricia Duncker) - I should have known by the title alone that this woman liked to use a lot of words to convey even the tiniest morsel of information. Problem is that many times she used the wrong ones. This author needs a copy of Lynn Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves and the OED, stat! And then there was the stilted dialog, uneven prose, constant harping on the apparent midget stature of the heroine and the go nowhere, do nothing ending. Oh man.

A Dishonorable Mention goes to Legacy (Andrew McGinn) - a comic book (oh, excuse me, a graphic novel) screed about a boy who can't grow up and leave his teen-aged angst behind. Determined at twenty-something to out-cool his parents at any cost he sabotages his father's life's work in search of his own identity only to realize money is really the most important thing in life and decides not to slaughter the cash cow after all. (2 stars)

Well there you go. Don't say you weren't warned.

Best first reads of 2010

2010-12-27T09:07:00.002-05:00

Ah, choosing the best and the worst of the year is upon me. This year wasn’t too tough and these are the ones that stuck with me -

The Human Stain - my Philip Roth epiphany. Seriously. I couldn’t believe this was the same guy who wrote Sabbath’s Theater which I tried 3 times to read and couldn’t get past the first chapter or two. Perfectly woven, it is a tale of tangents told with such deliberation and thought that I was in awe of how it came together. Human insights abound in this story, but is devoid of that judgmental tone authors can get. Neither did he overly flatter his subject, but presented him as a human worthy of both scorn and compassion. Roth is a master for all the right reasons. (5 stars)

The Earth Abides - post-apocalyptic literature these days tends to be shrill, overly dramatic and devoid of thought (and largely originality) and makes this book all the more valuable. Told with introspection, it does not go out of its way to shock and awe the reader, but to make her think about the true nature of humanity and what is really important. (4 1/2 stars)

The Angle of Repose - another quiet novel of decades past, this one tells of a man in search of his roots; specifically his grandmother. During her lifetime she was an illustrator of some note as well as a woman of nearly-infinite sense, backbone and loyalty. She and her husband were what we now think of as western pioneers and because of her isolation in various mining camps over the years, the letters she sends and receives are her lifeline. Much is revealed and much is hidden, but in the end the portrait of western life and a proud woman’s individual contribution is uplifting despite not always being especially happy. No wonder it won the Pulitzer. (4 1/2 stars)

The Greatest Show on Earth - I didn’t read this to be convinced that evolution is a fact and I’m not sure how many “history deniers” will be converted by reading it either, but it is a well-presented book. Despite his tendency to be smug and superior, Dawkins knows how to get stay on target and stick to his points. Many examples of why natural selection works and governs all life are given, from the microscopic to entire ecosystems and one would really have to be dense to continue disbelief. Yeah, maybe it is preaching to the converted, but I liked it enough to maybe even read another one. (4 stars)

Dark Star - while this book was just about perfect in its execution, I don’t know if I’ll read another. Mainly it’s because I know how things end. WWII isn’t exactly mysterious and so it makes reading about the private anguish and actions of a single spy agonizingly futile. I mean, it wasn’t as if the plot would set the course of the war onto a different path; nothing this man could do would change a single thing. His initial involvement with the government that controlled him was reasonably benign, but then he was put in impossible situations and left out in the cold. The portrayals were terrific though, understated, but intense just the same. If you like espionage you can’t do much better. (4 1/2 stars)

Runners Up -

Augustus - an excellent portrait of Augustus (nee Octavian) that only occasionally slips into hero worship mode. Reading this changed my overall impression of the man from one of action to one of resignation. Not the best introduction to Imperial Rome since many of the supporting cast members go without much explanation of who and what they are in the grand scheme of things, but there is enough to make the situation understandable. Of course most of the book is devoted to his early life and rise to power, while regrettably his 50 year reign is given much less space. I’d like to have had more context regarding his policies and laws; how they persisted into the future far beyond his lifetime. (4 stars)

Sea of Poppies - a multi-perspective novel of the early Indian trade in opium. Lots of characters and unusual situations made even the quotidian interesting. Unlike many other authors who do multi-perspective stories, Ghosh gave remarkable detail into the person’s background and current situation. This served to really make the reader care about each segment of the story. Also the way each person’s situation came together with the others in the end was very well done and I’m looking forward to the next installment. (4 stars)

Well that’s it for this part. Next will be the best re-reads and the worst of 2010. I don’t think there as many turkeys as last year, but there’s definitely some dreck in there.

Past Caring by Robert Goddard, 1986

2010-12-21T08:47:00.003-05:00

Read in 2010

Synopsis: At a lush villa on the sun-soaked island of Madeira, Martin Radford is given a second chance. His life ruined by scandal, Martin holds in his hands the leather-bound journal of another ruined man, former British cabinet minister Edwin Strafford. What’s more, Martin is being offered a job—to return to England and investigate the rise and fall of Strafford, an ambitious young politician whose downfall, in 1910, is as mysterious as the strange deaths that still haunt his family. Martin is intrigued by Strafford’ s story, by the man’s overwhelming love for a beautiful suffragette, by her inexplicable rejection of him and their love affair’s political repercussions. But as he retraces Strafford’s ruination, Martin realizes that Strafford did not fall by chance; he was pushed. Suddenly Martin, who has not cared for many people in his life, cares desperately—about a man’s mysterious death and a family’s terrible secret, about a love beyond reckoning and betrayal beyond imagining. Most of all Martin cares because the story he is uncovering is not yet over—and among the men and women still caught in its web, Martin himself may be the most vulnerable of all.

After this paragraph, spoilers abound, but right now you’re safe. If you’ve never read a Goddard novel, do it. His stories are long, complex and wholly satisfying if not entirely original. I read a lot of thrillers and mysteries, so quite often I can predict how a plot point is going to turn. The thing of it is, Goddard binds his readers to the story with this knowledge not by astounding you every five minutes with some fantastical twist. He doesn’t need smoke and mirrors to keep a reader going. He does it by knowing how to set tension, creating interesting characters that still have surprises up their sleeves and by helping you get ahead of the story and urging the protagonist to catch up. I’ve read his first novel (this one) and his latest (Long Time Coming) and both are equally good; quality, long-arc thrillers spiced with historical detail and real-life characters. I will definitely read more.

Spoilers set to kill.

While only my second Goddard novel, I’m not surprised at how he weaves his tales. This one is long and complex with lots of players, but I loved every minute of it. Edwin’s memoir is so tantalizing as a device and for itself and so was the search for the post-script. As soon as its existence was revealed I knew where it had to be hidden and silently urged Martin to think and could hardly bear his fumbling when I knew where it was all along! It takes a deft hand to tie a reader to the story so completely. The current trend seems to want to only do this with unknowable and unforeseeable twists in the story, but Goddard does it with knowledge, binding you to his protagonists through mutual desire for success.

From Martin’s dissipated self-interest to Eve’s two-faced game playing and Edwin’s ineffectual victimhood the story never felt slack or stale even though I could guess a lot of it. What else but a secret marriage would be Edwin’s undoing? What else could have been Martin’s undoing? Of course Eve was not as she seemed. Alex was on shaky ground to begin with. And of course Elizabeth would always be the long-suffering innocent. The only thing that threw me was Leo’s ultimate purpose. It seemed really strange to me that he’d take out his vitriol and long-distilled hatred on an innocent old woman who had nothing to do with his circumstances. Strange, but the way he morphed from kindly patron to vicious criminal mastermind was very well done. Sure he was a bit of a cliché and the whole gun incident set up the penultimate ending, with Martin’s reward at the end being the capper. Satisfying if not wholly original. I’ll definitely read more of Goddard in future.

The Sentry by Robert Crais, 2011

2010-12-20T08:04:00.003-05:00

read in 2010 as an ARC

Synopsis: Dru Rayne and her uncle fled to L.A. after Hurricane Katrina; but now, five years later, they face a different danger. When Joe Pike witnesses Dru's uncle beaten by a protection gang, he offers his help, but neither of them want it - and neither do the federal agents mysteriously watching them.

As the level of violence escalates, and Pike himself becomes a target, he and Elvis Cole learn that Dru and her uncle are not who they seem - and that everything he thought he knew about them has been a lie. A vengeful and murderous force from their past is now catching up to them ... and only Pike and Cole stand in the way.

After reading this I can’t help but conclude that Crais’s management suggested he shift the focus of his series from Cole to Pike so that it would compete better with the Jack Reacher phenomenon. In some ways it does, but it veers sharply off Crais’s normal story-telling path and he covers some new ground. In this 3rd Pike novel his character is largely left unexplored which is good. Unlike Reacher, I don’t want insight into what makes Pike tick. He’s better left mysterious and unknowable.

The action comes at a break-neck pace in the Pike books. There is little room for thought, planning, reflecting or decision making; it’s all go-go-go. Because Pike doesn’t really seem to have a life, he can devote himself to this Dru character and her weird situation no matter how complex or dangerous it becomes. Funny thing that he recognizes that Cole is the idea man and that’s really the big difference between the two series; Cole is thoughtful where Pike is impulsive. That’s not to say he comes off as dumb, he doesn’t, he just makes a decision so fast that it seems he doesn’t give it much thought. The Elvis Cole chapters show up this difference well.

The plot was convoluted and had a lot of players most of which die. I thought the ending while it did tie everything up, was a bit rushed. I kept looking at the number of pages I had left and wondering how in hell he would get it all done in such a short time. The bit about the bags and how many were delivered was a little tease toward the future, I suspect. Also I thought it was funny that the cat is 23 years old now and still as active and ornery as ever.

If you’re new to Crais’s work, start with the first Joe Pike book, The Watchman, instead of this one, although it’s really not that necessary – Crais does a good job of making the newcomer feel oriented. If you like the Cole character start with The Monkey’s Raincoat and work your way through. They are very different, and somewhat dated now, but a lot of fun.

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson, 2004

2010-12-12T09:50:00.002-05:00

Read in 2010

Synopsis: Benjamin Franklin, writes journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson, was that rare Founding Father who would sooner wink at a passer-by than sit still for a formal portrait. What's more, Isaacson relates in this fluent and entertaining biography, the revolutionary leader represents a political tradition that has been all but forgotten today, one that prizes pragmatism over moralism, religious tolerance over fundamentalist rigidity, and social mobility over class privilege. That broadly democratic sensibility allowed Franklin his contradictions, as Isaacson shows. Though a man of lofty principles, Franklin wasn't shy of using sex to sell the newspapers he edited and published; though far from frivolous, he liked his toys and his mortal pleasures; and though he sometimes gave off a simpleton image, he was a shrewd and even crafty politician. Isaacson doesn't shy from enumerating Franklin’s occasional peccadilloes and shortcomings, in keeping with the iconoclastic nature of our time--none of which, however, stops him from considering Benjamin Franklin "the most accomplished American of his age," and one of the most admirable of any era. And here’s one bit of proof: as a young man, Ben Franklin regularly went without food in order to buy books. His example, as always, is a good one--and this is just the book to buy with the proceeds from the grocery budget.

I can't really tell you why this biography took me a year to finish. Laziness on my part most likely rather than any fault of the author or his subject. After reading the exhaustive work on John Adams by David McCullough, I felt like I should read about Adams's contemporaries and when I noticed this book collecting dust at my mom's house, I took it home. I guess it was the known quantity aspect of the biography that made it slow going for me. In broad strokes I knew how things would turn out; that eventually we'd get France's reluctant backing in the separation from Britain, that we'd win the war and that Franklin's behind-the-scenes efforts to effect both outcomes were constant and often the only efforts.

Franklin the man was a sketch for me though, even if I did somewhat know him through the long tunnel of history. I knew of his scientific and inventing contributions, but didn't know how early on he made some of his discoveries - the popular motif of Franklin as an old man with a kite is way off base. I also had no idea of his origins, how he came to the Colonies or early civic activities and now I feel on better ground. Everything he did was motivated out of a desire for a practical benefit. This might not put him in the same league as theoretical or "pure" scientists, but it does make his contributions feel more lasting.

I also have a better understanding of his attitude toward setting up an independent state and his role in doing so. He was a master of diplomacy and compromise in the face of strong personalities with little patience for the process. His ability to work with others and get the best out of them proved invaluable to not only the Declaration of Independence and the diplomatic missions it spawned, but the Constitution itself - calling it as near perfect as it could be.

Isaacson presents his information in an ostensible chronological format, but often the facts he presents seem to be competing for attention. They come thick and fast and are sometimes difficult to digest before another one comes along. He does, however, try to present all sides of his subject, not just dwelling on the inventor or diplomat. I don't have enough experience with biographies or enough expertise on the academics that are thought of as proper, or research techniques thought of as rigorous, but I did not doubt that Isaacson gave us the facts as he saw them. I was glad for the information at the back about characters and sources.

Kicked to the Curb

2010-12-06T12:14:00.004-05:00

So recently I've run out of room on my bookshelves. Even with my reduced book-buying, space is at a premium. So another purge is in the works. I'm revisiting books I haven't read in over a decade and of which I have vague or no memories at all.

First to go was Imperfect Strangers by Stuart Woods. Brings back all the memories I have of why I stopped reading him. Imperfect Strangers is a silly pastiche of Strangers on a Train, but without the psychological insight. Just a book to showcase how much Woods thinks he knows about the upper class, American lifestyle. Lots of references to snooty wines, hotels, restaurants and private planes. The protagonist buys houses on the Vineyard, a winery and lots of other toys. Yawn. And lets not get started on the dialog - who talks like this? One minute he's trying to roughen up a mechanic/pilot's speech by peppering in swears, 'pal' and 'fella' and the next the guy's using the word phraseology. Talk about a tin ear for dialog. And then there's the sappy romance and cut out bad guy. Ugh. Also added another Stuart Woods that hadn't made past purgings.

Next in the Kicked to the Curb Collection are my Phillip Margolins. All legal thrillers of the lowest order. Transparent plots. Thin characters. Repetitive situations (from book to book not just within one). Uninspired prose. Moronic situations and people. I read about 3 chapters of The Burning Man and gave up. All five are on the pile.

A few ARCs I gave bad or mediocre reviews to are in there along with some chick lit that I have no idea what possessed me to buy. A lot of bad novels and genre fiction that didn't stand up to a first reading, never mind re-reading so they go, too.

Now it's just a question of what to do with the books that have been Kicked to the Curb. I know of a used bookstore/book-swap type place that I may visit. The problem is going there won't help with my reclaiming shelf space. I still have tons of books on my want list and my vague interest list (yeah, I have both). It's crazy and so MORE purging will have to be done. Hey...is that a Howard Stern book I see over there?

American Pastoral by Philip Roth, 1997

2010-12-01T09:16:00.004-05:00

Read in 2010

Synopsis: Philip Roth's 22nd book takes a life-long view of the American experience in this thoughtful investigation of the century's most divisive and explosive of decades, the '60s. Returning again to the voice of his literary alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, Roth is at the top of his form. His prose is carefully controlled yet always fresh and intellectually subtle as he reconstructs the halcyon days, circa World War II, of Seymour "the Swede" Levov, a high school sports hero and all-around Great Guy who wants nothing more than to live in tranquillity. But as the Swede grows older and America crazier, history sweeps his family inexorably into its grip: His own daughter, Merry, commits an unpardonable act of "protest" against the Vietnam war that ultimately severs the Swede from any hope of happiness, family, or spiritual coherence.

I'm so glad this wasn't my 2nd attempt at Philip Roth's work, it would have put me off him forever. It must be a generational thing because I didn't get it in the way I'm sure someone my parent's age or my grandparent's age would have. This is not to say I didn't understand it; I did, but the way it was presented was comical and trying in the extreme. It made me feel pity for that generation in their locked in state; unable to flow or to grow with change, wanting everything the same for ever and ever.

Waaahh, my daughter didn't turn out exactly like me. Waaahh, the American Dream is dead. Waaah, politicians are unscrupulous. Waaahhh, war isn't fun. Waaahh, why can't everyone just love and respect 'the greatest generation' and not make us responsible for anything? Waaahh, why can't I be a Jewish WASP? Waaahhh. Ugh. What a horrible follow up read for me on the heels of The Human Stain. I won't give up on Mr. Roth, but this novel was so long, drawn out and simultaneously self-pitying and self-congratulatory that I had to force myself to finish it.

I also found the use of Zuckerman as narrator kind of sloppy. Unless I missed something, Nathan didn't know any of what was told to us until AFTER the Swede's death. How could he have gotten such intimate, firsthand detail from a corpse? Is he a medium? Did he channel the Swede? It's as if Roth forgot the circumstances and just wrote it regardless of continuity problems. Strange.

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King, 2010

2010-11-25T08:33:00.004-05:00

Read in 2010

Synopsis: "I believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger . . ." writes Wilfred Leland James in the early pages of the riveting confession that makes up "1922," the first in this pitch-black quartet of mesmerizing tales from Stephen King. For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife, Arlette, proposes selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in motion a gruesome train of murder and madness.

In "Big Driver," a cozy-mystery writer named Tess encounters the stranger along a back road in Massachusetts when she takes a shortcut home after a book-club engagement. Violated and left for dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face-to-face with another stranger: the one inside herself.

"Fair Extension," the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest and certainly the funniest. Making a deal with the devil not only saves Dave Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a lifetime of resentment.

When her husband of more than twenty years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers the stranger inside her husband. It’s a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, and it definitively ends a good marriage.

Like Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight, which generated such enduring films as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me, Full Dark, No Stars proves Stephen King a master of the long story form.

Full Dark is right. These stories are dark, and yes as Steve says in the afterword, sometimes hard to read. I'm relieved though that they aren't grim like Under the Dome was. At no time while I read these four did I feel like I was having the will to live crushed out of me. While each person does a morally reprehensible thing on the surface, underneath there is reason to at least understand why he or she did it, even if we can't condone it.

1922 is told with a distinctive voice which only falters here and there. It's the one that reads the least like King's typical story. The time and circumstances come through strongly and I especially liked the haunting madness as aftermath of Wilfred's crime - shades of Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. It's true he doesn't get caught, but he does pay. His downfall is complete, but not without pity.

Paying is what Big Driver is all about. For me it was the hardest to read. Probably men didn't have as much gnashing of teeth about it because what is rape to them except an impossibility, but King did a decent job trying to get into the mind of his victim. When the full conspiracy flowered in all its poisonous glory, I felt Tess's rage and rooted for her. Realistically though, her successful revenge was a bit too easy and complete for me to swallow (a bit Lisbeth Salander if you know what I mean), but I did enjoy it.

Fair Extension captures the secret glee of the vengeful. Rightfully or wrongfully it was fun to read about Goodhugh's downfall. At first. Then as the bad luck spread it became a lot less fun. I was surprised Streeter could stick it since his perceived bad luck never touched his kids or his wife and I was equally surprised at how King just let the revenge be. It worked and Streeter was happy and there were no consequences pulled out like a rabbit from a hat. Thoughts of some of Bradbury's stories rolled around in my head while reading this one...not a bad tribute.

The interior of a marriage has been a King hobby horse for decades now and he's always coming up with new angles. This time he wonders what a woman will do when genuinely surprised by her discovery of her husband's secret life as a serial killer. So many wives are suspect after he's caught; she MUST have known what he was. Darcy didn't, and she handled it in a way that was technically wrong, but morally right (in an old testament kind of way).

None of these tales has any major supernatural element; three of them don't at all and they reminded me of Different Season's stories in a way. Darker surely and more of a kind. Purposeful. After reading them and evaluating them in my mind, I thought of when Gordie (or maybe it was Chris) reminded the rest of the boys that maybe they shouldn't be having too much fun on their way to see a dead kid. These stories are like that. There isn't a lot of levity in them, but there is hope. No need to run a bath and bring a razor blade along this time.

Shadow Pass by Sam Eastland, 2011

2010-11-17T08:40:00.003-05:00

Read as an ARC in 2010

Synopsis: Inspector Pekkala is enlisted by Stalin himself to look into the death of one of the Soviet Union's top military engineers. Colonel Nagorski was given untold millions to build a weapon that could end all wars and give the Soviet Union the type of military might that would make all its enemies tremble. When he is found dead next to his weapon, a marvel of technology called The Red Coffin, Pekkala is called upon to investigate a murder tantamount to treason. But finding the truth is never easy in the Soviet Union, and Pekkala must use all his clandestine experience and unrivaled intelligence to navigate the treacherous waters of Stalin's politics. For while some truth must be revealed, some secrets must remain buried...

Three stars for atmosphere. Even though the callow corruption and everyday betrayals are laid on a bit thick, it makes the very political situation in Stalinist Russia a character all by itself. I can't even imagine living in a state like that where your every innocuous word or action can be cause for arrest. Where consistency of law is a joke. Where liberty is unknown. Once again the Lubyanka and Siberian prison camps loom large. Chilling.

Minus two stars for a lame duck plot. Spoilers engaged people. Seriously, don't read further if you think you want to read this book. I recommend it and the new series starting with Eye of the Red Tsar. Eastland has done heavy research and brings not only Stalinist Russia to life, but Tsarist Russia as well. Alexandra, Tsar Nicholas, Alexei, even Rasputin are part of the flashbacks interwoven into the story and are fascinating.

Ok...back to spoilers.

Konstantin? Really? Because his mommy and daddy were getting a divorce? Really? That's the best Eastland could come up with? A secret military weapons facility, bitter rivals, the NKVD, Stalin's paranoia, the Germans, the mysterious White Guild and we get teenaged angst? Oh man. What a disappointment.

No wonder we had to have a tertiary plot involving the magical weapon's theft. I liked how that culprit was revealed with just enough information for the reader to put it together herself. A little ah-ha moment to savor. Too bad setting up Kirov's marksmanship was so clumsy by comparison. I also love how when Stalin tries to send in an Army commander to help recapture the weapon, he forgets that he's had the man liquidated and needs to be reminded. If it weren't for Stalin's ruthless paranoia, I think WW2 would have ended quite differently. Virtually all of the competent and experienced people serving the state were dead or imprisoned. Makes it hard to win wars that way.

While the flashbacks to his time in the Tsar's service were interesting, I'm not sure they didn't come too thick and fast. Vignettes about Alexandra, Rasputin and Alexei sprinkled in the action took us out of the plot itself and somehow indicates weakness there. As if Eastland knew we wouldn't stay interested for long and needed something to divert us. They are great for fleshing out Pekkala though, who thankfully, was less of a superhero in this one. At the end of the book there's a set up for the next one which will probably prove to be the most harrowing for him, both psychologically and physically - Stalin sends him back to the work camp near where he was imprisoned. It's the worst of the bunch. Should be cringe-worthy and I'll definitely read it.

Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane, 2010

2010-11-17T08:34:00.003-05:00

Read in 2010

Synopsis:

Amanda McCready was four years old when she vanished from a Boston neighborhood twelve years ago. Desperate pleas for help from the child's aunt led investigators Kenzie and Gennaro to take on the case. The pair risked everything to find the young girl—only to orchestrate her return to a neglectful mother and a broken home.

Now Amanda is sixteen—and gone again. A stellar student, brilliant but aloof, she seemed destined to escape her upbringing. Yet Amanda's aunt is once more knocking on Patrick Kenzie's door, fearing the worst for the little girl who has blossomed into a striking, clever young woman—a woman who hasn't been seen in weeks.

Haunted by their consciences, Kenzie and Gennaro revisit the case that troubled them the most. Their search leads them into a world of identity thieves, methamphetamine dealers, a mentally unstable crime boss and his equally demented wife, a priceless, thousand-year-old cross, and a happily homicidal Russian gangster. It's a world in which motives and allegiances constantly shift and mistakes are fatal.

In their desperate fight to confront the past and find Amanda McCready, Kenzie and Gennaro will be forced to question if it's possible to do the wrong thing and still be right or to do the right thing and still be wrong. As they face an evil that goes beyond broken families and broken dreams, they discover that the sins of yesterday don't always stay buried and the crimes of today could end their lives.

The ten-year pay off wasn't there; domesticity and children take another victim. Why do people do this? Lehane marries again, breeds and says that Patrick spoke up again so he needed to write this book. And surprise, surprise, Patrick is a breeder, too. How original. I hate to be so caustic, but I really hate kids and this is just another example of how they screw up my life. One of my favorite series gone down the tubes. I don't like the kinder, gentler Angie and Patrick. I don't like the diaper bags and the bedtime stories. I don't like the hesitation and second guessing. I don't like the homey little domestic scenes. Bah.

Yes, I realize that characters and situations must change, but did it have to be in such a boring way? I mean what is this, 1950? Angie the little homemaker and Patrick the drudge (which is what he's on his way to becoming). Part of what makes detective fiction work is the fact that so much of it is outside the reality of most people's lives. Marriage and breeding are not. It isn't sexy. It isn't dramatic. It isn't interesting. At least not to me.

Lehane says this novel is about the bad economy and people making do. There's a lot about Patrick and Angie's financial situation and much is made of recovering his stolen laptop because he can't afford another. He's fed up with the PI scene, but doesn't have any other skills so he keeps plugging away. Problem is his sense of duty makes him take the McCready case when it won't pay instead of working a job for a big firm. The big firm mainly defends bad guys and so this goes against the grain too often and Patrick offends the clients by uncapping his judgmental attitude in their faces. Thus the big firm won't hire him permanently, but jerks his leash when they want him. I liked Patrick's struggle, but wish he could have found a way to reconcile both aspects of his life; his need for cash and his ethics. If there is another book, he'll no doubt have his leash jerked by someone except that this time it will be attached to his sense of duty and he'll have to come out from behind his desk. Too bad the gun's in the Charles. Oh wait, Bubba can solve that little problem.

The actual mystery was unusual if a bit far-fetched, but it's fiction so there's latitude. Amanda was brought back to life and not given some typical persona that would maybe have been easier to take. Instead we get a nearly emotionless girl bent on becoming some kind of madonna/christ figure. She wants to be a savior and a holy mother all in one. She's luckily only picked up some of the criminal activities her mom is involved in. The ones that won't make us not like her any less than we already do; just identity theft and and wholesale fraud. And oh yeah, the ability to become a criminal mastermind, manipulating the decisions and actions of Russian mobsters twice her age. What? Well, ok. If that's the way you want it, Lehane.

The dry humor is still there and I laughed in places I should and once where I shouldn't. Lehane describes some train tracks as going through the woods, by a big swath of red maple. Problem is, it's December. Uh...I know you're a city boy, but even city boys must know about the leaves falling and how they're not on the trees anymore in December. That and that I've never seen red maples in the woods...always on someone's lawn. But, whatever. I'm disappointed in the way this concludes (if it is a conclusion) and wish he hadn't gone in such a boring, been-there-done-that direction. Some originality would have been more in keeping with a series that crackled with it for so long. But then again, once a person has kids, they rarely think outside that sphere and only go on and on about their brats as if everyone was dying to know every detail. Oh well. Human creativity only goes so far.

The Human Stain by Philip Roth, 2000

2010-10-31T11:55:00.004-05:00

Read in 2010

Synopsis: It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret. But it's not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with Faunia Farley, a woman half his age with a savagely wrecked past - a part-time farmhand and a janitor at the college where, until recently, he was the powerful dean of faculty. And it's not the secret of Coleman's alleged racism, which provoked the college witch-hunt that cost him his job and, to his mind, killed his wife. Nor is it the secret of misogyny, despite the best efforts of his ambitious young colleague, Professor Delphine Roux, to expose him as a fiend. Coleman's secret has been kept for fifty years: from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman, who sets out to understand how this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, had fabricated his identity and how that cannily controlled life came unraveled. Set in 1990s America, where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions are made manifest through public denunciation and rituals of purification, The Human Stain concludes Philip Roth's eloquent trilogy of postwar American lives that are as tragically determined by the nation's fate as by the "human stain" that so ineradicably marks human nature.

My Philip Roth epiphany. Spoilers engaged.

When I’ve read a book that I think is brilliant, that I did not want to end, that I enjoyed and was challenged by on many levels, I find it hardest to write the review. Doubly so when the author is new to me and a venerated literary figure. So bear with me as I try to distill into this review why I liked The Human Stain so much.

I first tried to read a Philip Roth book in my 20s. It was Sabbath’s Theater and I failed. I hung onto it though and tried again in my 30s. Another failure. The character of Sabbath was so violently misogynistic that it was painful to read. I have since given the book away and am sad that I can’t try again (without getting another copy) now that I understand Roth’s style a bit better. He doesn’t pull punches with language and I have to deal with that conscious choice and what it does to the story much better than I have so far. I can’t let the PC police interfere with deliberate craft. I need to realize there are valid reasons for choosing certain words. Coleman’s ridiculous downfall smacks me over the head with that truism.

Granted, reading a solitary book by a prolific author doesn’t make one an expert, but it has given me an appetite to read more. Partly it was the way the story and back story was revealed. Not so much a narrative, but a novel of tangents. At first it was disconcerting to be forcefully dragged down a rabbit hole that seemingly had nothing to do with what I’d been reading just before. He establishes character so well that when he gives you contradictory or surprising information, it literally stuns you. Makes you feel at once triumphant for the revelation and embarrassed at having been duped. The technique only serves to reinforce what I think is the main theme of the book; that you can never truly know anyone.

More than once our narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, asserts that the trap of thinking that you know a person is one we fall into all too often. Obviously the main character, Coleman Silk is its victim and it is delicious to know (ah, there’s that word again) just how wrong the pompous Delphine Roux is about him; that he must be a deviant, a misogynist, a racist and intellectual fraud. The character most completely assumed about, though, is Faunia. From all sides she is boxed and categorized according to what people think they know about her and I found her tangents to be really interesting and sort of liberating in my own assuming things about people. The most challenging and difficult tangent to read is the first one about Lester. So violent and extreme that I feared the knowledge that certainly some men must have come back from Vietnam in the exact same condition. All during the scene on the frozen lake with Nathan I dreaded what might happen. Would Lester snap? Did I think it was inevitable? Did I know?

Human sexuality is the aspect Roth uses most to illustrate this theme. Not only with the backdrop of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, but the center stage affair between Coleman and Faunia. The opening sentence of the whole book introduces the affair. Instantly we categorize Faunia as a sex-object and it is doubly, triply reinforced by Lester’s outrage that while his kids were trapped in the burning house, his wife, their mother was busy going down on some guy. Later still, the rabid gossip and presumed reason for the car accident that would kill them, was Faunia’s salacious, corrupt need to perform oral sex on a man. Any man it was implied almost as much as Coleman’s contradictory forcing her to do it. She can’t possibly be in control here, this can’t possibly be her will, she must be a victim of her own deranged lust and Coleman’s dominant personality. Why humans are so judgmental and hypocritical about sex is baffling to Roth and outrages him as demonstrated by the idea of draping a banner over the White House that reads ‘A Human Being Lives Here’.

Another theme I latched onto is the capricious nature of humans and the narrow confines of what an individual considers normal and reasonable. We do weird stuff for weird and unfathomable reasons and other people seem to think this is weird. To an outsider those reasons can seem insignificant, flimsy and immaterial causing us to judge that person severely. I agree with Zuckerman (Roth) that we as a society aren’t very good at stopping to think outside our own prejudices before we go for the pitchforks and torches. Coleman’s sister talks to Nathan about this at the end explaining that today it would be tantamount to criminal for a black person to try to pass as Colman decided to then. Her and her family’s assumption about why he did was off the mark. In reality he didn’t hate his race and didn’t want to insult anyone in it, he just wanted to shed it. To make it unimportant. A non-issue. For the vast majority of white people, race is not something that takes up room in the consciousness; it just is. For the vast majority of black people it is the opposite. I think Coleman wanted to haul it out to the curb to make room for something more worthy of his consciousness. This is not the conclusion we jump to though, when we first learn of Coleman’s deception. We think his reasons cannot be innocent or even otherwise.

The same holds true for Faunia I think, though to me, her trade is even less understandable. To pretend illiteracy is just unfathomable for me. I cannot conceive of going through life ignoring words. To close myself off to that route to my imagination (to freedom, to knowledge, to fantasy, to learning!) is alien. Reading and literacy to me are so totally a human reflex that it’s shocking and fantastic (in that meaning of the word) to see Faunia suppress it. The assumptions, judgments and even more, the pity she received as a result would be unbearable to me. How she reacts to Coleman’s seminars with her is revealing. She is not stupid, she is not uneducated, and she is not unperceptive. She just understands, perceives and values things that the rest of the world deems worthless. I don’t get it, but it is fascinating in an other-worldly sort of way. The deliberate setting of the trap though, I do understand. Did she savor and gloat over the secret knowledge of her diary in the night when she wrote in it? Did she laugh at Coleman and the other scholastic luminaries she served? She’s the most intriguing character of all of them. Her earthiness and directness is unusual in a female protagonist and surprising. Did she reach Coleman in the end? Did she free him? I don’t know, and maybe that’s the whole point.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, 2009

2010-10-13T08:49:00.005-05:00

Read in 2010

Synopsis: The Little Stranger follows the strange adventures of Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country doctor. One dusty postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, he is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for more than two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline — its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more ominous than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.

Very different from the only other Waters novel I've read (Tipping the Velvet) and shows her ability to stretch as a writer. The two novels contrast in many aspects - many characters v. few, many locales v. few, lots of action v. little, hectic pace v. sedate. Overall I think The Little Stranger works, but not quite as well as perhaps Tipping the Velvet. I felt that while Dr. Faraday was supposed to be cast as an unreliable narrator, he didn't come across that way. I couldn't get a handle on him and so Caroline's outburst at the end seemed even more alien and unjustified. Sure, he was half in love with Hundreds as much as he was with Caroline herself, but I never saw him as grasping or mercenary. He seemed more bumbling and out of touch with his own emotions and motivations to me. A bit backward and hemmed in by his role in his small community.

I also could not and did not get a handle on what exactly the Little Stranger was. Deliberate, to be sure, but I wished for something a bit more concrete to drive me to a conclusion. For once the ambiguous ending bugged me a bit. As a character, Hundreds Hall is wonderful though. The descriptions both overt and implied brought it to vivid life in my imagination. I felt pity and sorrow for its loss and the loss of other estates like it. So much history, culture and ways of life destroyed by ruinous taxation and changing values.

Foreshadowing is another of Water's strengths. Never once did I feel optimistic about circumstances or events. Everyone went from one tragedy to the next without hope of salvation. It was palpable, but somehow not depressing. I kept reading knowing the good doctor and Caroline were doomed and wanting to see how.

Disruption

2010-10-07T07:00:00.004-05:00

I haven't been able to concentrate much on reading in the last week because my sweetest boy kitty Chuck had a stroke and was declining rather rapidly. On the 5th he got bad enough that I could bring myself to have him euthanized. It was the worst thing I've ever had to do and the weight of my grief over him is immense. He was 18 and I had him since he was a tiny kitten. I will miss him forever.

This is the last photo I ever took of him.

So pardon the disruption...I still can't really concentrate on anything with my Orange Menace so recently departed. You can see and read more here.

Anna's Book by Barbara Vine, 1993

2010-09-25T07:15:00.004-05:00

non-North American title = Asta's Book.

Read in 2010

Synopsis: This work is set in 1905. Asta and her husband Rasmus have come to east London from Denmark with their two sons. With Rasmus constantly away on business, Asta keeps loneliness and isolation at bay by writing her diary. These diaries, published over seventy years later, reveal themselves to be more than a mere journal, for they seem to hold the key to an unsolved murder, to the quest for a missing child and to the enigma surrounding Asta's daughter, Swanny. It falls to Asta's granddaughter Ann to unearth the buried secrets of nearly a century before.

Strangely I wasn't as compelled and enthralled by this book as I expected to be. It was a bit domestic and estrogen soaked for my taste and had too much about children in it. I just can't get all worked up about children. The journal parts were done well, but I couldn't relate to Anna (Asta) at all. She was passive, yet sly. Opinionated, yet unsophisticated. I didn't need to like her to find her interesting though, like a strange bug you find in the yard.

I wish the Roper saga could have been sprinkled in and interleaved the way Ann and Swanny's more modern stories were. As it was it derailed the already slow-moving train of the main storyline. It made sense to put it where it was given the mini-series angle, but i still found myself thinking that this better have a good pay off.

It did and in a marvelously convoluted way, signaled by the abrupt and slightly menacing entrance of an unexpected character. Minor, but key to the final solution. Overall I liked this and enjoyed reading it, but not as much as her first two Vine novels. I think it marks the beginning of a lot of experimentation that the Vine persona allowed. The Rendell name as a brand was well established by the early 80s and maybe she felt confined by it. A pseudonym is a great way to break out of a mold and try new things, The Vine novels are always surprising and that's why I keep coming back to them.

A couple of quick ones

2010-09-10T11:36:00.004-05:00

First - The Brimstone Wedding by Barbara Vine, 1995

Synopsis: Jenny's marriage is loveless, and she is having an affair. She works at an old people's home, where she is especially fond of Stella, a woman dying of cancer - whose own secrets parallel Jenny's - with the difference that she may have been involved in murdering her lover's wife.

Semi-spoilerish if you can't spot the obvious.

This is one of those Vines where there isn't a clear pro or antagonist. There isn't some heinous crime that either woman is hiding. Yes, there could have been something like that in Stella's past, but it I didn't get that sense of things. Surely there is something she regrets and perhaps is ashamed of, what with leaving her house the way she did (oh and what a romantic name - Malacca), but I never got the sense of real criminality.

This is the story of guilty secrets and love gone wrong. Because Stella and Alan's romance ran aground it's a pretty sure bet that Jenny and Ned's will too. Despite that it was a very romantic novel. Stella's remembrances are tinged with enough sadness to be believable, but not so much as to be sappy. Playing the victim just isn't her style. No wonder Jenny likes her and I like the way Vine brought her to life. Born in a time when graciousness was appreciated in women, Stella is poised and polished. Sheltered, too, because that's how women were treated when she came of age; like exotic birds that couldn't be shown too much of the world for fear they would die. In the end though, Stella has enough backbone to sustain her through a horrific event that should have killed her soul, but didn't. The disillusion of her love was palpably sad and even though Jenny's ended quite differently, it echoed nicely.

Second - Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman, 2004

Synopsis: Two little girls banished from a neighborhood birthday party take a wrong turn down an unfamiliar Baltimore street—and encounter an abandoned stroller with an infant inside. What happens next is shocking and terrible, and three families are irreparably destroyed. Seven years later, Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller, now eighteen, are released from "kid prison" to begin their lives over again. But the secrets swirling around the original crime continue to haunt the parents, the lawyers, the police—all the adults in Alice and Ronnie's lives. And now another child has disappeared, under freakishly similar circumstances.

Sure, there aren't many characters to like in this novel, but I'm not so simple as to not be able to enjoy and appreciate what an author does because there are no sunshine and puppies. If you want a nice little novel about people doing nice little things (yawn) look elsewhere. If you aren't afraid the the dark side of human nature and can enjoy a novel about people you wouldn't necessarily want over for dinner, you could do worse than this book. I found it an interesting look into what women are capable of. So often we want to deny women the ability to be vicious or dangerous, but this novel puts them on equal footing with men in those departments.

Overall I enjoyed the story about these fractured people and how their lives intersected. Helen disturbed me the most and I think the narrator did a great job with her character. Her low self-esteem manifested itself in such bizarre ways that seemed to contradict and then override any maternal instinct she might have possessed. Alice, her daughter, was drawn a bit heavy-handed to be completely believable and I wasn't surprised to see her true self emerge in the end. Ronnie, while not always a sympathetic character, earned those feelings in the end, at least from me. Cynthia was a woman driven by her dark side just as much as Helen was. Nancy wasn't so clearly drawn as the rest. She kept harping on her former need for attention, but it didn't really come through since we were beyond its time frame. While it's not her best work, I think Lippman wrote an unusual story well.

Roma by Steven Saylor, 2007

2010-08-22T11:28:00.009-05:00

Read in 2010

Synopsis: Spanning a thousand years, and following the shifting fortunes of two families though the ages, this is the epic saga of Rome, the city and its people.

Weaving history, legend, and new archaeological discoveries into a spellbinding narrative, critically acclaimed novelist Steven Saylor gives new life to the drama of the city’s first thousand years — from the founding of the city by the ill-fated twins Romulus and Remus, through Rome’s astonishing ascent to become the capitol of the most powerful empire in history. Roma recounts the tragedy of the hero-traitor Coriolanus, the capture of the city by the Gauls, the invasion of Hannibal, the bitter political struggles of the patricians and plebeians, and the ultimate death of Rome’s republic with the triumph, and assassination, of Julius Caesar.

Witnessing this history, and sometimes playing key roles, are the descendants of two of Rome’s first families, the Potitius and Pinarius clans: One is the confidant of Romulus. One is born a slave and tempts a Vestal virgin to break her vows. One becomes a mass murderer. And one becomes the heir of Julius Caesar. Linking the generations is a mysterious talisman as ancient as the city itself.

Somehow I forgot that this was a novel and not a straight up history similar to Rubicon by Tom Holland. While I wasn't disappointed by the reality exactly, I found the constraints of the novel to be too narrow and too open to a kind of Mary-Sue-ism. That is that the people used to illustrate the big moments of any particular time just happen to always be directly connected with that big moment. That and because this novel was meant to instruct and relate vast amounts of information, there was a lot of 'As you know, Bob' in the way it was presented. Parent - child instruction, teacher - pupil questioning, people who should and would have known the reasons or history behind a certain event were inexplicably having to endure explanations from someone else. It got to be a bit annoying after a while and I think on the whole I would have liked a series of loosely or wholly unconnected stories to bring me through the foundation of Rome and its early Republic.

A lot of it was fascinating and while I know a lot of information is simply undocumented and unprovable, many of the vignettes had a ring of plausibility about them. The rise of Romulus and Remus and the monster Cacus are almost completely without basis, but were fun to imagine happening the way laid out in Roma. I especially liked the mass of poisoner women and wondered if it were true in any sense (even if it were just a handful of women and not hundreds as portrayed) and was cringingly delighted to find out Livy reported the incident hundreds of years ago. I'm even inspired now to go read some Livy since I've never actually read Roman history as written by a Roman historian (unless Seutonius counts). So while I may not seek out the sequel to Roma as I'm not that interested in following the Pinarii any longer, it did ratchet up my curiosity about pre-Empire Rome and think Roma should serve anyone looking for a greatest hits of ancient Rome to cut their teeth on.

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zaphon, 2001

2010-08-13T10:18:00.003-05:00

Translated by Lucia Graves (daughter of Robert)
Read in 2010

Synopsis: Barcelona, 1945—A great world city lies shrouded in secrets after the war, and a boy mourning the loss of his mother finds solace in his love for an extraordinary book called The Shadow of the Wind, by an author named Julian Carax. When the boy searches for Carax’s other books, it begins to dawn on him, to his horror, that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book the man has ever written. Soon the boy realizes that The Shadow of the Wind is as dangerous to own as it is impossible to forget, for the mystery of its author’s identity holds the key to an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love that someone will go to any lengths to keep secret.

It's funny. I've picked up The Shadow of the Wind several times before deciding to buy it. Unknown authors are a gamble and I kept forgetting to look it up and see what the general consensus was. Eventually I bought it. When I got it home and entered it into my LibraryThing catalog I discovered it's a wildly popular book with over 10,000 copies already entered. I must not have been paying attention.

Overall the reviews and ratings are good and this one will be, too, however the more I read the less original it became and I figured out what was really going on long before the author revealed it to me. Eh, I suppose I should feel good about that, but mostly I feel let down. It's true there is nothing new under the sun, but I'd have liked even the appearance of new. With that said the story did compel me along at first and I really savored the flowering mystery; it was only later that things stalled somewhat and got bogged in repetition.

One of the things that attracted me to this book was its setting - Barcelona is not a place I go to often in my reading. Also the time - just after WW2 and the Spanish Civil War (which seems to be much more rancorous than I'd given it credit for). Zafon does a very good job describing the city to me. It's at once open and secretive. Quiet streets and hidden alleys. Sumptuous neighborhoods and squares. Sounds like quite a place. The uncertainty and vulnerability of the time comes through as well; people were largely powerless and afraid, but tried their best to get on with life.

At first I thought that Daniel would go about trying to track Carax at the tender age of ten, but thankfully he doesn't. I found the thoughts and dialog of the boy at that age rang false. Maybe it was supposed to be colored by the grown up attitude of the man writing the memoir years later, but that wasn't interjected so I am still dissatisfied with how a ten-year-old boy was written. Too mature and measured with an understanding that I didn't find credible. As he got older I think the character became more relatable - he began to act just like a teen-aged boy should.

Fermin is a delight. When I met him I fell instantly under his spell. He's human and devious and funny. Murky past or not, he's a good friend and a good foil for Daniel's forced sense of propriety and literalness. Fumero was a most excellent villain. Relentlessly cruel and violent his appearances carried a full weight of dread and menace. Bea worked well as the quintessential romantic interest; not quite a femme fatale, but close. Other character roles were equally one-dimensional, but in a story of this type (high-flown Gothic romance) it's expected. Subtlety isn't what's needed here.

Spoilers commence -
No, the characterization and settings weren't what made this novel a bit of a disappointment - it was the plot. There were no surprises. At first I forgot about Sophie's confession that Julian wasn't the hatter's son, but when she started meeting with Don Barcelo again it clicked. Mirroring Daniel's relationship with Beatriz with Julian and Penelope's was a bit twee as was the business with the pen. And it didn't take long for it to occur to me that the mysterious Lian Coubert was Carax himself. I also felt like Daniel had way too easy a time solving the mystery. People and places presented themselves just in time. Information became readily available in an instant and previously mute characters became chatty.

The ending despite its implausible physicality and heroism, works. At least for me. The story so far was improbable, romantic and dramatic, so must the ending be. I found the part where Daniel takes his son to The Cemetery of Forgotten books to be an appropriate bookend to the opening scene and I'm glad his marriage to Bea is a happier one than any other portrayed in the story. Overall I'd recommend this book, but it is not perfect. If you can overlook the unoriginality there is a lot to like in its Gothic romance.

Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain, 2010

2010-08-13T07:07:00.004-05:00

Subtitled A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

Read in 2010

Synopsis: The long-awaited follow-up to the megabestseller Kitchen Confidential

In the ten years since his classic Kitchen Confidential first alerted us to the idiosyncrasies and lurking perils of eating out, from Monday fish to the breadbasket conspiracy, much has changed for the subculture of chefs and cooks, for the restaurant business—and for Anthony Bourdain.

Medium Raw explores these changes, moving back and forth from the author's bad old days to the present. Tracking his own strange and unexpected voyage from journeyman cook to globe-traveling professional eater and drinker, and even to fatherhood, Bourdain takes no prisoners as he dissects what he's seen, pausing along the way for a series of confessions, rants, investigations, and interrogations of some of the most controversial figures in food.

Beginning with a secret and highly illegal after-hours gathering of powerful chefs that he compares to a mafia summit, Bourdain pulls back the curtain—but never pulls his punches—on the modern gastronomical revolution, as only he can. Cutting right to the bone, Bourdain sets his sights on some of the biggest names in the foodie world, including David Chang, the young superstar chef who has radicalized the fine-dining landscape; the revered Alice Waters, whom he treats with unapologetic frankness; the Top Chef winners and losers; and many more.

And always he returns to the question "Why cook?" Or the more difficult "Why cook well?" Medium Raw is the deliciously funny and shockingly delectable journey to those answers, sure to delight philistines and gourmands alike.

Reading this immediately after Kitchen Confidential was pretty eye-opening. The angry, say-anything no matter the cost Bourdain is gone, replaced by a mild-mannered, doesn't want to really offend anyone Bourdain. Sure, he throws punches but every single one of them is pulled. You hate Alan Richman - say it, man. You hate Alice Waters - shout it. Thinks Brooke what's her name at the Food Channel is the devil, go for it. Don't state that they are say The Douchebag of the Year in one breath and then slip one in about how wildly talented, articulate or insightful they are. Makes you look weak. Cowardly even. Yes, Anthony you'll still get invited to those panel discussions, tastings, restaurant openings and guest judgeships even if you do send back Rachael's fruit basket. Yawn.

His attempts at written food porn were flops. Tiny, endangered birds eaten whole and other agonizingly written descriptions did nothing for me. I fast-forwarded over a couple. Ditto for the oh how I love being a daddy bit. Great. Yay. Good for you in fulfilling the lowest biological function on earth for any living creature.

Oh and was all that name dropping supposed to impress me?

And can we say false humility? Every 10 words it seems he has to say that he's not a good cook or that he's 1/2 the cook that XYZ person is. Or that he couldn't compare on his best day ever to what Joe Blow comes up with so easily. Or that his success is the lowest rung on the ladder compared to Ms. Perfection. Who does he think he's fooling, anyway? I know that Mr. Bourdain is excruciatingly happy to be Mr. Bourdain. He always has. Borrowing a well-known phrase; it's self-evident. Please stow the false modesty, ok, it's not working.

You may think that the angry young man shtick in an old man is unattractive, and that may be so, but if you say can't cook what else have you got going for you?

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, 2000

2010-08-10T06:23:00.003-05:00

Subtitled Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly and he ain't kiddin'.
Read in 2010

Synopsis: New York Chef Tony Bourdain gives away secrets of the trade in his wickedly funny, inspiring memoir/expose. Kitchen Confidential reveals what Bourdain calls "twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behavior and haute cuisine." Last summer, The New Yorker published Chef Bourdain's shocking, "Don't Eat Before Reading This." Bourdain spared no one's appetite when he told all about what happens behind the kitchen door. Bourdain uses the same "take-no-prisoners" attitude in his deliciously funny and shockingly delectable book, sure to delight gourmands and philistines alike. From Bourdain's first oyster in the Gironde, to his lowly position as dishwasher in a honky tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown (where he witnesses for the first time the real delights of being a chef); from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, to drug dealers in the east village, from Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain's tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable. Kitchen Confidential will make your mouth water while your belly aches with laughter. You'll beg the chef for more, please.

Going into Kitchen Confidential I didn't have too many expectations. I knew vaguely who Anthony Bourdain was - a guy on some cable channel who jetted around the world eating the strangest stuff he could find and generally enjoying being Anthony Bourdain. Despite the attempt at a cautionary tale, that's the biggest message that comes across in KC - that it's good to be Anthony Bourdain no matter what idiotic and potentially life or career ending decisions he may have made. Others may try, but no one will exactly duplicate the mystical and dangerous journey that is his. Yes, Mr. Bourdain likes himself very, very much.

And he likes food. All manner of food so long as it fits his definition of honest. Three Michelin star, diety inspired bistro and street meat vendor are equally admired and lauded for their contributions to what he thinks is honest. Woe betide you however if you approach your craft from a different angle or with different intentions; Bourdain will let you know the error of your ways in no uncertain terms. Wanker.

The first few chapters of KC made me not want to set foot inside a restaurant again. Scary. Not that I didn't know it from previous reading (ok, ok it was one book, but still I sort of knew what a hellhole most kitchens really are), but this reinforced that. A few more chapters in and I amended my decision to only large restaurants with huge turnovers both of staff (but how will I know that?) and seats. The descriptions of life at The Rainbow Room was enough to put me off the place forever. Not that I plan to visit NYC at any time, but there it is.

So what was me, a decided non-foodie doing reading a book like this anyway? Well I am a foodie, albeit a non-typical one. No, I've never worked in a restaurant - never even been a waitress or taken your order at Micky D's. No, I do not have nor do I read food blogs. Ok, yes, I watch the Food Channel occasionally, but I know it's schlock and full of "personalities" rather than real cooks. Ok, yes, I read Bon Appetit and Wine Spectator, but I do it from the viewpoint of an eater rather than a cook. I'm not even a particularly adventurous eater. My motto is no fewer than two legs no more than four.

But I do know what I like and this book gave me a lot of information about how it's made and the kind of people who make it. Bourdain has a lot of experience and a decent turn of phrase (albeit a bit repetitive) and can spin a tale well. I wasn't put off by the vulgarity or the self-indulgent tone and I enjoyed it on the same level as pecan pie; one piece at a time - have too much and you end up sick and never wanting to eat pecan pie again.

Faithful Place by Tana French, 2010

2010-08-09T07:19:00.006-05:00

Read in 2010

Synopsis: The past haunts in Tana French novels. That which was buried is brought to light and wreaks hell--on no one moreso than Frank Mackey, beloved undercover guru and burly hero first mentioned in French's second book about the Undercover Squad, The Likeness. Faithful Place is Frank's old neighborhood, the town he fled twenty-two years ago, abandoning an abusive alcoholic father, harpy mother, and two brothers and sisters who never made it out. They say going home is never easy, but for Frank, investigating the cold case of the just-discovered body of his teenage girlfriend, it is a tangled, dangerous journey, fraught with mean motivations, black secrets, and tenuous alliances. Because he is too close to the case, and because the Place (including his family) harbors a deep-rooted distrust of cops, Frank must undergo his investigation furtively, using all the skills picked up from years of undercover work to trace the killer and the events of the night that changed his life.

Beloved? Frank Mackey? Are we talking about the same guy? I thought he was a right bastard when I first met him, and still do mostly, but with insight into what makes him a right bastard he’s easier to take. With that family I‘d forgive him almost anything. I liked the cold-blooded manipulation he used to further his own agenda; family, peers or total strangers, all were grist for his mill. Despite the darling little family vignettes, Frank’s default position seems to be selfishness. The way he uses people is pretty unrelenting.

I don’t know what it is, but it seems that every contemporary novel I read lately that’s set in Ireland portrays its working class or working poor as a bunch of blinkered assholes. Is it an axe to grind or really this way? Seriously, wanting to have a better life than the desperate, disease-ridden, gutter-scraping one your parents had is a crime? WTF? In what universe? So bizarre. Better that everyone stay ignorant and backward forever and ever than try to walk on two legs. It’s weird and I don’t blame Frank for staying as far away as humanly possible from Faithful Place. I wanted to burn it to the ground. So drenched in misery that you could practically take a bite out of, The Place is practically a character in its own right. I felt almost as stifled and diminished as Frank must have when he lived there. It’s no wonder he and Rosie were so anxious to get out.

The back story of their relationship was very well drawn, but I still don’t quite know what made Frank become a cop. I guess the drifting from bad situation to worse became too miserable for even him and the self-indulgent wallowing in self-pity not working out for the best. His dealings with Scorcher and the rest of the murder squad was interesting although I kept waiting for Cassie to show up. I have a feeling the next book will be about Scorcher since he was just about the only character you could branch off from at this point. The rest were basically family and none of them cops.

And that family. Jeez. What a pack of ghouls. Mom the soul-destroying harpy. Dad the fist-happy souse. Older brother the menacing half-wit (oh and was it me, or did the narrator make him sound like an Irish John Wayne??). Sisters of the desperately seeking a life other than mum’s but probably not going to make it club. Younger brother the kicked puppy. Holy shit.

Although the story itself pulled me through the novel and was fairly compelling, I don’t think this is up to par with the first two because it was simplistic. Everything in the end is explained and tied up neatly. I know a lot of people complained about In the Woods having loose ends, but I like it when I’m not handed everything on a plate. I like it when I have to use my imagination and intuition to fill in blanks. My brain does work and well, thanks very much. I was relishing some nice little nugget of the unexplained, but alas, got a cute little package all wrapped up with a bow. How dull.

The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge by Patricia Duncker, 2010

2010-07-21T08:46:00.005-05:00

Read in 2010 as an ARC

Synopsis: The bodies are discovered on New Year's Day: sixteen dead in the freshly fallen snow. The adults lie stiff in a semicircle; the children in pajamas and overcoats, are curled at their feet.

When he gets the report, Commissaire Andre Schweigen knows just who to call: Judge Dominique Carpentier, also known as the "sect hunter". She is the recognized expert in this field, brilliant and relentlessly rational, but Schweigen has his own reasons for wanting her on his case. In the vacated chalet, theinvestigators uncover an encoded book of celestial maps that points them to the inhospitable doorstep of a composer, Friedrich Grosz. But as the skeptical sect hunter earns the Composer's trust, she finds herself drawn into a world of complex family ties and ancient cosmic beliefs, unable – and increasingly unwilling – to escape.

When I received this advanced readers' copy I was anxious to get started, but within the first few pages my hopes were dashed. Awkward sentence structure with forced and seemingly random punctuation, combined with odd and sometimes outright incorrect word usage made me groan with the task of actually having to finish the whole book. Here's my first note –

"So far it's a bit torturous to get through. Poor punctuation, word choices and sentence structure are all problems keeping me from enjoying the story, which plot-wise is good. Character-wise they are all drowning in stilted dialogue and uneven prose; one minute it's trying to be all proper as in 'he began to write upon a pad of paper' and a few pages later telling us how a certain person needs to have his cock sucked by underage girls. Gah! How will I ever read the whole thing?"

Eventually I did get through the whole thing, although I marked out my irritations less and less. Yes, I actually got a pen and bracketed the stuff that bugged and irritated me. My dictionary remained by my side because the word choices were so strange I had to re-check definitions. Some were outright wrong like this one on page 8 – "I want to see them before the light goes, before we ignite the generator and the whole place looks like a frontier outpost under siege." Ignite the generator? Ignite does not meant to start. I suppose the confusion comes from the fact that engines have an ignition, which does cause a small spark that starts the combustion process that makes an engine go. In this case I don't think she meant to set the generator on fire which is what she actually wrote. Sigh. I know language is an evolving thing, but this just smacks of ignorance and laziness. There are many instances of this in the book, although none quite so egregious.

The tone of the book was strangely indecisive, one minute there are romantic and very proper, high-flown sentences and the next there are crude amputated stumps. It proved a disjointed and strange mix as when Duncker went off on some tangent about the prowess of the hunters and their intimate and nearly mystical knowledge of the forest. Since the hunters were of no consequence why did she put it in and why did her editor leave it there? Sloppy. Ditto for the nonsensical changes of perspective, lots of first person references in an otherwise third person narrative. Bleah. I did like the touches of French and German though; those were handled deftly.

I suggest Ducker get a hold of Lynn Truss's marvelous Eats, Shoots & Leaves to get a grip on commas and semicolons. Both were either too plentiful, too absent or used incorrectly throughout. Seemingly randomly as well. It is strange coming from a professor, but hell, punctuation is a mystery sometimes and can be used for style rather than to convey meaning. It still bugged me though when I noticed it. Pages 19 and 20 contain some gems.

After only a short time with the book I got really sick of being told how small the Judge is. I mean, honestly, is she a dwarf? Is everyone around her a giant? You'd think so by the constant reminders of her doll-like physique. And do people suddenly remember this after years of knowing and lusting after said woman? Evidently they do; witness – "The Judge stood up and Schweigen realized that he towered far above her." (page 22) Really? He just realized this after five years of knowing her? Great. Certainly this master of observation is the best cop ever.

Speaking of Schweigen, my lord he's an idiot isn't he? How the Judge stands his company I don't know. Moon calf comes to mind although I have no idea why moons and calves should depict the dreamy-eyed, besotted, open-mouthed, empty-headed worshipfulness that Schweigen falls into so constantly. He's an unattractive, demanding, presumptuous jerk to me. The Judge's relationship with him is weird. Her sexuality as a whole seems aesthetic; her unrequited love for Myriam and by extension Marie-T being the best example of this. Her having sex with Schweigen seems an indulgence; a condescension, a gift from on high which is bestowed only at her discretion and demands the basest thankfulness on his part. Ig.

After a while I tried to ignore the things that pulled me out of the story and enjoy the plot more. It had potential although it was a bit unoriginal. Ancient cults and shadowy rites. Coded books and secret messages. Mass suicides. The Composer began as a caricature, but then became a bit less of one. I didn't really like him though. Too demanding and used to having his way. I was glad when Dominique thwarted him during their strange courtship. He's an intense person and the author did a good job of keeping the pedal to the metal on that score. He came through as relentless as I think was intended.

Her character was less clichéd and I did sort of like her, although way too much attention was given to what she drank at every moment of the day. Strange how a woman who drinks so much water, apple juice and coffee could spend so little time in the bathroom. I mean, every other quotidian detail was gone into, why not that? Overall her character was evenly drawn and I felt it gelled well. Her actions and decisions didn't seem out of left field to me.

So after a long and, for me, torturous lead up I got an ending that gave me nothing. No resolution. No satisfaction. Only questions that I don't really want to know the answers to. I don't really care about the Faith or its multitudinous dead. I don't really care about the Judge's seemingly conflicting roles as sect hunter and keeper of the book. I don't really care about Schweigen's shattered domestic life. Darn. What a waste.

Dark Star by Alan Furst, 1991

2010-07-07T06:43:00.002-05:00

Read in 2010

Synopsis: Andre Szara, survivor of the Polish pogroms and the Russian civil wars, is a journalist working for Pravda in 1937. War in Europe is already underway and Szara is co-opted to join the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence agency. He does his best to survive the tango of pre-war politics by calmly obeying orders and keeping his nose clean. But when he is sent to retrieve a battered briefcase the plot thickens and is drawn into even more complex intrigues. Szara becomes a full-time spymaster and as deputy director of a Paris network, he finds his own star rising when he recruits an agent in Berlin who can supply crucial information. Dark Star captures not only the intrigue and danger of clandestine life but the day-to-day reality of what Soviet operatives call special work.

My first Furst was a success overall, however I don’t know how many more of them I will read. What? How can that be if I say it was a success? Well, it was more the feeling of the inevitable and the futility of it all that I had while reading. 70 years after World War II it’s tough to really suspend one’s disbelief during a spy story and pretend we don’t know how things turned out. Even though Szara was thoroughly engaging and human, fought on the ‘right’ side of things and went about his task with a grim instinct for his role, I still felt pangs of ‘what is it all for?’.

As a protagonist, Szara was great. His little side jobs for the NKVD became much more than he bargained for, but he handled it with expertise he didn’t know he had. He’s vaguely romantic in the sense that he has fought in wars and is a widower due to those same wars (the fact that his wife was a nurse makes it even more romantic). He’s got a good head on his shoulders and keeps his cool under fire. He’s not idealistic; he’s trying to do the best he can in a situation he can’t control. He’s shrewd but not cruelly manipulative. A good guy in a bad circumstance is the overall impression and I was glad how things ended for him even if it was so different from how most other espionage novels end.

I also liked how the overall plot wasn’t some gigantic, war-changing operation that was so vitally important as to make all other considerations meaningless. Instead it was a very localized operation moved along by relatively junior personnel. Maybe that’s what lent the feeling of futility to the story. This minor sideline wasn’t going to change anything and so the sense of time wasted, lives wasted was pretty strong for me. After all the plotting, betrayal and bloodshed the information was really not as hard to come by as Szara thought and so what good did it all do? That’s the feeling of futility and doom that pervaded for me throughout, but especially at the end when I got a horrible deflated feeling.

I did like the small sphere Furst gave us though. Through his descriptions of bombings, life as a refugee and as ‘burnt’ spy desperate for a new identity and way to safety, I really felt how trapped and hopeless it was for those people caught by it. It was very quotidian and not over the top and thus much more believable. I could easily imagine people going through with and attempting similar things to Szara. Small cogs just trying to get by. It was touching and somehow familiar although I wonder if they still make people who could do what these did. The absolute audacity of the German regime and the utter passivity of the rest of Europe (well, that’s how it came across in this novel anyway) was pretty shocking. I mean, I understand wanting to keep out of someone else’s fight, but what the hell did they think was happening to these people as they were marginalized, shut out and shipped from one place to another? Unthinkable, but it happened.

A Conspiracy of Paper by David Liss, 2000

2010-07-01T16:17:00.004-05:00

Read in 2010

Synopsis: Benjamin Weaver is an outsider in eighteenth-century London: a Jew among Christians; a ruffian among aristocrats; a retired pugilist who, hired by London's gentry, travels through the criminal underworld in pursuit of debtors and thieves.

In A Conspiracy of Paper, Weaver investigates a crime of the most personal sort: the mysterious death of his estranged father, a notorious stockjobber. To find the answers, Weaver must contend with a desperate prostitute who knows too much about his past, relatives who remind him of his alienation from the Jewish faith, and a cabal of powerful men in the world of British finance who have hidden their business dealings behind an intricate web of deception and violence. Relying on brains and brawn, Weaver uncovers the beginnings of a strange new economic order based on stock speculation--a way of life that poses great risk for investors but real danger for Weaver and his family.

It took me a comparatively long time to finish this novel despite it being a relatively short one. I’ve read this series out of order (2nd, 3rd then 1st) and so maybe it was the lack of real suspense that did it. The more I think on it though the more I am convinced it is because Weaver just seemed to go in circles in this one. Granted it is an early “case” for him and he hasn’t gotten a firm grasp on all the new skills he’ll need, but he seemed really dim-witted in this one. Easily duped. Everyone just played him and he was oblivious. Even the eventual solving of the crime wasn’t Weaver’s own doing; it was basically forced upon him so he’d take immediate and violent action upon a certain person.

At times the book moves right along, but sometimes gets bogged down in its own minutia. Yes, there is a lot of information to impart about ‘stock jobbing’ and the changes it brought to British finance, but couple that with intrigue about Ben’s non-existent relationship with his family, angst over his dead father and situation with Miriam and it’s just too much taking the kettle off the boil to really call this a thriller.

I prefer to think of it as historical noir. It has all the hallmarks. Detective or detective-like figure. Side kick. Femme fatal. Hidden adversaries. Hostile police. Beatings. Chases. Betrayals. Fist fights. Snappy dialogue (well, snappy for early 18th century anyway). And Liss does a good job treading the line between historical believability and modern readability. I just wish the train had a bit more of the runaway about it and less of the commuter.

Burning Wire by Jeffery Deaver, 2010

2010-06-30T07:01:00.003-05:00

Read in 2010 (UK cover shown because I couldn't find a decent US one)

Synopsis: Lincoln Rhyme is back, on the trail of a killer whose weapon of choice cripples New York City with fear.

The weapon is invisible and omnipresent. Without it, modern society grinds to a halt. It is the electrical grid. The killer harnesses and steers huge arc flashes with voltage so high, and heat so searing, that steel melts and his victims are set afire, or subtly reconnects a few wires in one's house or office so that the bathtub, the sink, the computer keyboard, the simple desk lamp can kill.

When the first horrific attack occurs in broad daylight, reducing a city bus to a pile of molten, shrapnel-riddled metal, officials fear terrorism. Rhyme, a world-class forensic criminologist known for his successful apprehension of the most devious criminals, is immediately tapped for the investigation. Long a quadriplegic, he assembles NYPD detective Amelia Sachs and officer Ron Pulaski as his eyes and ears and legs on crime sites, and FBI agent Fred Dellray as his undercover man on the street. As the attacks continue across the city at a sickening pace, and terrifying demand letters begin appearing, the team works desperately against time and with maddeningly little forensic evidence to try to find the killer. Or is it killers....?

Meanwhile, Rhyme is consulting on another high-profile investigation in Mexico with a most coveted quarry in his cross-hairs: the hired killer known as the Watchmaker, one of the few criminals to have eluded Rhyme's net.

Juggling two massive investigations against a cruel ticking clock takes a toll on Rhyme's health. Soon Rhyme is fighting on yet another front -- and his determination to work despite his physical limitations threatens to drive away his closest allies when he needs them most.

Spoiler sensitive need not continue.

He didn't get me this time. I had my suspicions about the real plot and the Watchmaker's involvement. I don't know how much of it was me being clever or just suspecting everyone when I read one of these now, but when he showed up it wasn't surprising. Then it was only whether the thing was a set up (a trap) or if there would have to be some hair-brained rescue at the end since there was quite a bit of book left.

The handling of Dellray's side of the case and his boss's attitude was a bit heavy handed. I mean, what else could happen after all his ineffectiveness and brooding? Vindication, that's what and of course we got it. Eh, I wasn't caught up in it and so it fell kind of flat.

I also tripped over and was distracted by several clunky sentences scattered around, like "the criminalist said". Now really, that's a bit community college Creative Writing 1 if you ask me. We know who Rhyme is and what he is so just tell us who's speaking and leave the aides de memoir out of it. I haven't noticed this kind of amateurish prose in Deaver books before, but it stuck out this time.

Funny that at the beginning of the book I mused that Rhyme's condition didn't take up much time and that he seemed present and in top form at all hours of the day. In the past more emphasis was put on how much of his life was taken up by the necessities imposed by his paralysis and that we'd veered away from that for a while. Then he had that episode and again Rhyme was prevented by his condition from communicating or otherwise helping in an investigation. Trigger guilt and unhappiness. But the visit from Susan Stringer was enough to keep me from thinking the worst at the end and his trip to the hospital wasn't a guessing game for me; I knew he went to have something done to improve his condition and leave him more able and effective. I'm glad it went that way and we'll have a bit of bionic Rhyme to deal with in the future.

Fever Dream by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, 2010

2010-06-26T07:18:00.004-05:00

Read in 2010

Synopsis: Yesterday, Special Agent Pendergast still mourned the loss of his beloved wife, Helen, who died in a tragic accident in Africa twelve years ago.

Today, he discovers she was murdered. Tomorrow, he will learn her most guarded secrets, leaving him to wonder: Who was the woman I married? Why was she murdered? And, above all . . . Who murdered her?

FEVER DREAM Revenge is not sweet: It is essential.

People coming into this book expecting a neat little story unconnected with anything else will be poorly served (you really should read a few older books if not the whole series first). This latest installment of the Pendergast novel does 3 things – it reveals and resolves incidents in Pendergast’s past, it sets up a new villain for him to battle and sets up a situation with Constance that will need resolution on its own. Why people are surprised or irritated by this, especially longtime readers, is strange. The entire series is set up this way. It’s what gives it flow and impetus and I really liked how it was managed in this one and I think it was done better than the ‘break’ books in the past (Crows, Wheel and Dance).

Another thing I liked was how they portrayed Pendergast with his wife. He seemed warmer and more at ease; less watchful and circumscribed. I found it a treat that I could spot it and that it seemed deliberate. Of course the events of that time shaped who P is and why he uses the unconventional methods he often does. Not only his twisted and criminally inclined family made him what he is, but the seemingly random and brutal method of his wife’s death. I sort of liked that older Pendergast, even though it did seem a bit stilted and contrived (one reviewer characterizes it as Nick and Nora and drollness and that pretty much sums it up). I found Helen to be interesting, but slippery. I don't have any strong feelings about her one way or the other. Strange that P was so totally fooled by her, but not unheard of.

I, too, found P’s treatment of D’Agosta mostly perfunctory and doglike and wished he was less of a tool and more of an investigator in this one. Overall I think the treatment of D’Agostas character is uneven. In some books he’s given his own brain and function (he even wrote a book) and in others he is just a servant of P’s will. Hayward seemed a bit too forced in this one for my taste. One minute behaving like a rigid, bureaucratic automaton, the next paralyzed by girly emotions. Bah. If it were my first outing with her I wouldn’t like her at all.

Constance on the other hand came across as her old self and I’m anxious to read about how she fares in the asylum and how much of her story the good Doctor comes to believe. Whether I will like the authors’ new series is unknown, but I’m sad that there will be even more time between Pendergast novels. I’ve come to anticipate and relish them.

The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno by Ellen Bryson, 2010

2010-06-23T15:29:00.003-05:00

Read as an ARC from the publisher in 2010.

Synopsis: Bartholomew Fortuno, the World's Thinnest Man, believes that his unusual body is a gift. Hired by none other than P. T. Barnum to work at his spectacular American Museum—a modern marvel of macabre displays, breathtaking theatrical performances, and live shows by Barnum's cast of freaks and oddities—Fortuno has reached the pinnacle of his career. But after a decade of constant work, he finds his sense of self, and his contentment within the walls of the museum, flagging. When a carriage pulls up outside the museum in the dead of night, bearing Barnum and a mysterious veiled woman—rumored to be a new performer—Fortuno's curiosity is piqued. And when Barnum asks Fortuno to follow her and report back on her whereabouts, his world is turned upside down. Why is Barnum so obsessed with this woman? Who is she, really? And why has she taken such a hold on the hearts of those around her?

Set in the New York of 1865, a time when carriages rattled down cobblestone streets, raucous bordellos near the docks thrived, and the country was mourning the death of President Lincoln, The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno is a moving novel about human appetites and longings.

An intriguing story with a lot of layers and subtlety. Bartholomew Fortuno is a romantic screw-up with delusions of grandeur. The world he inhabits is full of unusual bodies and talents and he falls somewhere near the top in hierarchy, declaring that he is not a gaff (a self-made freak, not a true Prodigy at all). He believes his extreme thinness is a gift to humanity designed to show us our real selves; to enlighten humanity (little does he know that his gift will end up enlightening himself most of all). This makes him proud and arrogant, but he keeps it hidden much of the time as he dislikes confrontation. Still, he considers himself a cut above the rest of the freaks he works with.

Despite this belief he has very little control of his life and completely surrenders to the mighty personality of P.T. Barnum. Under threat of being fired from the museum where he and the other freaks lead pretty decent lives as compared to other venues many freaks are reduced to, he does a few errands on the side for Barnum. These errands are for the new act, one Iell; a bearded lady of extreme mystique and elegance. Soon he’s put between the wills of Mr. and Mrs. Barnum and has to figure out where his loyalties lie; with his employer, with his friend Martina or with his new love, Iell.

All the while he muses over how and when his gift came upon him; from his mother. She looms large in his psyche and he thinks of her often. I was a bit disappointed at this cliché, I mean, does it always have to be mom’s fault? It is she who counseled him to be diligent and control his urges for a man who has no self-control is not a man at all. From this wisdom he divines that food is an excess not to be indulged. But from controlling woman to controlling masters doesn’t a free thinker make. Deluded with his own importance he has no idea how his actions affect other people and he continually does and says the wrong things. Like a child he later tries to make up for these mistakes in simplistic ways. Again and again he is forgiven.

I won’t give the ending away but I saw it coming. Iell isn’t that mysterious to a person with a jaded eye who has lived through the latter half of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. Both in her form and in the secret little packages Bartholomew delivers to her from a dingy shop in Chinatown. That it takes Bartholomew so long to actually find out is part of what kept me going. The plot isn’t a mover or a shaker, but the characters were interesting and the setting as well. Bryson has an excellent turn of phrase and I didn’t get distracted by awkward language or botched sentences.

A lot of people’s reviews seem to want Bartholomew to be more human, but I’m not sure that’s realistic given his distance from humanity. As a freak and a performer he has separated himself from normal human discourse and so doesn’t know how to behave. He has molded his personality on the belief he’s something greater than a mere normal human and so acts accordingly and is very naive as a result. It was pretty clear from the outset that his transformation would be something major and it was, both spiritually and physically. It took place slowly and in a realistic fashion; Bartholomew fought it part of the way, then little by little gave in and allowed the changes. I like to think that with his new-found insight that he felt at home in the world outside the museum.

There are a lot of supporting characters and I loved how Bryson treated them; not lightly. Each one was distinct and not a caricature, especially Matina, Barnum and Iell. Their inner humanity came through and contrasted well with Bartholomew’s awkwardness. The city and museum were almost characters themselves so vivid, but not overdone, were the descriptions. I especially liked the aviary. I look forward to Bryson’s next book.

The Girl who Played with Fire and Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson, 2009 & 2010

2010-06-12T14:08:00.005-05:00

Read in 2010

Synopsis: Mikael Blomkvist, crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium, has decided to run a story that will expose an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government. But he has no idea just how explosive the story will be until, on the eve of publication, the two investigating reporters are murdered. And even more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander—the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker who came to his aid in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and who now becomes the focus and fierce heart of The Girl Who Played with Fire.

Synopsis: Salander is plotting her revenge - against the man who tried to kill her, and against the government institutions that very nearly destroyed her life. But it is not going to be a straightforward campaign. After taking a bullet to the head, Salander is under close supervision in Intensive Care, and is set to face trial for three murders and one attempted murder on her eventual release. With the help of journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his researchers at Millennium magazine, Salander must not only prove her innocence, but identify and denounce the corrupt politicians that have allowed the vulnerable to become victims of abuse and violence. Once a victim herself, Salander is now ready to fight back.

Played with Fire picks up about where Tattoo left off. Basically this is a comic book without pictures. There are very few characters that are not extremes. The villains are super-villains, the heroes are super-heroes. Everything is big, bold and brightly colored. When there is action it is swift and intense. When there is dialogue it’s pithy and snappy. Reality hardly enters into the equation and that’s what makes these so much fun to read. That and the convoluted plot which, however improbable, is engrossing. This book makes an even bigger statement than the first one I think. The central conspiracy is more personal since it revolves around Salander herself. Yes, she’s a Mary-Sue, but like a performer on a stage in front of thousands, he must make every gesture huge, every expression grotesque, every move exaggerated in order for it to come across to the poor slobs in the nosebleed seats. Larsson’s contempt and enmity for men who hate women is an extreme one and a light hand cannot convey what he feels.

I found Salander’s physicality a big stretch though. Continually she gets the upper hand with men who by rights should have squashed her like a bug. I mean really, un-burying yourself alive? Come on. She was practically pulp when dear brother put her in there. And the proficiency with guns and other weapons she’s never so much as touched before. Very cartoon like. I kept expecting her cape to get caught in something. But I guess if dad and bro get to be super-villains, she has to be a super-hero.

The final installment of the Salander trilogy (Hornet’s Nest) was a more introspective novel than the middle one, which was really non-stop action, thrills and chills. It was also a bit more disjointed – perhaps it was left in a more unfinished state than the first two due to the author’s death. In the previous two novels, especially the first one (Tattoo), the multiple storylines and threads meshed better than in Hornet’s Nest. Primarily this last one is concerned with retribution – making them pay for destroying Salander’s life. And that part is fun. The sub-plot concerning Erika’s persecution by an unknown stalker is distracting though and should have really been cut. It had nothing to do with Salander’s situation and didn’t need inclusion. The revelation of her new CEO’s scandalous use of child labor in Asia would have been enough to bring Erika back to the Millennium fold.

In this outing, Blomkvist seems to have become a member of the A-Team. He’s scheming and plotting and manipulating everything he can to assure that Salander’s affairs are set right and that justice gets done. He goes up against seasoned espionage professionals and wins. He ropes others into the cause like Dragan Armansky and his sister Annika and soon Salander’s got a team pulling strings to make things work out. I still can’t really see why everyone likes her so much though. It’s more like they don’t want to be her enemy than want to be her friend. Even her hacker buddies seem more motivated by keeping on her good side than any idea of friendship.

What fascinated me most about Hornet’s Nest was the police and the trial work. I know how American trials and police work (ok, yeah so it’s mostly by watching Law and Order, but hey, at least it’s something) and seeing the way their Swedish counterparts to their jobs was very interesting. Especially the trial, which was immensely satisfying as it was with Annika tearing the stuffing out of the prosecutor’s case and Teleborian. But the way it was conducted was fascinating. The talk wasn’t confined to questioner and witness, but both prosecutorial and defense attorneys could basically pipe up at any time. And there weren’t any “is there a question in there counselor?” objections - the lawyers seemed to be able to editorialize more. The law also seems to be based almost exclusively around the preservation and criminal deprivation of a person’s rights more than to the crime itself. A department of Constitutional Protection almost seems redundant – isn’t that what all law enforcement should do? Fascinating.

The details and back story for the Section could have been shorter and streamlined to better serve the story. Lumping it in all at once was really not the way to keep a thriller thrilling. The information could have been pared down and sprinkled throughout the pieces of narrative that dealt with the Section. Ditto for a lot of the politicking which was told and not shown. It wouldn’t have been difficult to show more of the games people play than to tell about them. These are some of the reasons I think this book might have been a rough first draft or something and not really edited or organized much for publication.

As a final chapter in the long struggle for Salander’s independence it works though. It’s satisfying and thorough and though I will miss the characters and wonder what Larsson would have had in store for them, I don’t mind saying goodbye to them on these terms.

Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor by Anthony Everitt, 2006

2010-05-13T07:52:00.003-05:00

Read in 2006

Synopsis: He found Rome made of clay and left it made of marble. As Rome’s first emperor, Augustus transformed the unruly Republic into the greatest empire the world had ever seen. His consolidation and expansion of Roman power two thousand years ago laid the foundations, for all of Western history to follow. Yet, despite Augustus’s accomplishments, very few biographers have concentrated on the man himself, instead choosing to chronicle the age in which he lived. Here, Anthony Everitt, the bestselling author of Cicero, gives a spellbinding and intimate account of his illustrious subject.

Augustus began his career as an inexperienced teenager plucked from his studies to take center stage in the drama of Roman politics, assisted by two school friends, Agrippa and Maecenas. Augustus’s rise to power began with the assassination of his great-uncle and adoptive father, Julius Caesar, and culminated in the titanic duel with Mark Antony and Cleopatra.

The world that made Augustus–and that he himself later remade–was driven by intrigue, sex, ceremony, violence, scandal, and naked ambition. Everitt has taken some of the household names of history–Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Antony, Cleopatra–whom few know the full truth about, and turned them into flesh-and-blood human beings.

At a time when many consider America an empire, this stunning portrait of the greatest emperor who ever lived makes for enlightening and engrossing reading. Everitt brings to life the world of a giant, rendered faithfully and sympathetically in human scale. A study of power and political genius, Augustus is a vivid, compelling biography of one of the most important rulers in history.

When this book came out initially I was tempted by it, but wanted to wait to see how the reviews went. I never heard anything really bad about it, so when I noticed it on audible.com I bought it. As an audio it was ok, but the reader used strange pronunciation with about ½ of the personal and place names. This constant needling pulled me out of the story a lot and lessened my enjoyment of the tale.

As a history and biography it doesn’t suffer from a case of hero worship, but I get the impression the author had to make himself find and point out Augustus’s flaws and foibles. Also like most treatments of Augustus’s life, this one takes fully ½ of the book to tell about his dealing with Antony, the Triumvirate and his rise to sole power. Granted it is the most interesting part, but I was already familiar with these events and wanted to know more about his actions and motivations once he became princeps. Eventually the author gave me that, but not in as much detail as I had hoped. Maybe this isn’t Everitt’s fault due to the fact that he said most of the direct documentation of this period has been lost. There are some anecdotes surviving in a few places, but a lot of it is conflicting and probably colored by rumor, innuendo or other emotional factors. What’s left is writing after the fact, in some cases centuries after.

While reading I got the feeling that Everitt wanted to deliberately go against the popular opinions of Antony, Cleopatra and Livia. He even seems to champion Cato in all his zero-tolerance glory. In a sense it helps build a more restrained tale, but it just seemed argumentative for the sake of being so. In the end, with no direct and reliable sources, a lot of this biography is shrewd guesswork. Given the type of man it took to get and control this much power we can deduce Augustus was no saint, but at the same time Everitt took pains to portray him as not a total sinner either.

The overall impression I have now of Augustus is that of a man of resignation. Starting with his plan to have revenge on Julius Caesar’s murderers and ending with the failure to continue the Julian dynastic rule, he just seems to crumple under it. Was it really ambition that drove him? It doesn’t seem so. It’s more like some kind of compulsion. He doesn’t act like a man bent on achieving total control; he doesn’t seem ruthless enough. Everitt states that Livia kept all of Augustus’s letters to her, but they must be lost after all since they don’t seem to come into play to help us understand why Augustus did what he did. I can’t point to any specific examples that make me feel this way, it’s just an overall impression that Everitt gives. That Augustus is driven by forces outside his will.

Although his name is not as world-renowned as his adopted father Julius Ceasar, his mark on civilization is larger and more deeply cut and it’s too bad that Everitt didn’t frame the lasting impact he had in a more definitive way. He talks about Augustus’s policies living on, mostly intact, for centuries, but doesn’t give specifics. Other than the obvious repercussions of expanding the Roman Empire to its fullest extent, and therefore ‘westernizing’ a large population, Everitt doesn’t show anything else. What of the laws that came as a result of Augustus’s actions? The court cases he settled? His religious policies? The social ones? How did those help create western civilization? I guess I’ll have to find the answers in someone else’s book.

The Priest by Thomas Disch, 1995

2010-05-08T08:24:00.003-05:00

Read (finally) in 2010

Synopsis: Father Patrick Bryce, a Catholic priest with a present-day Minneapolis parish - and a pedophile past. He's spent time at a church-run retreat for priests of his persuasion and returned "rehabilitated": even better equipped to keep his vice active and hidden.

Until the blackmail begins.

It comes from three different sources (his own bishop being one), and each tops the next in imaginative proposals: Father Pat mus head a militant (and probably illegal) anti-abortion campaign; Father Pat must apologize to each of his victims, face-to-face; Father Pat must read, and be ready to discuss, the work of a bizarre cult science fiction writer, and get the face of Satan tattooed on his chest. But the blackmailers and their demands are the least of Father Pat's problems. More dire is his increasingly incontrovertible sense that the nightmares in which he has been leading the life of a thirteenth-century bishop are not dreams at all. And that the Church, rife with corruption and scandal in both eras, is the only realistic sanctuary for him and his doppelganger, Bishop Silvanus de Roquefort, as they move - at once separately and together - through their own centuries-spanning maze of soul-killing horrors toward a distinctly hellish destiny.

The cover attracted me when this novel first came out, I admit it. When I read the synopsis inside I was sure I had in my hands a book I would devour immediately. How far off the mark was I? Only about 15 years. That's how long it took for me to finally read the whole thing. I'm sure I tried in 1995 and recently found a postcard in it dated from 2001, so I obviously tried again and failed to read it. As part of a half-hearted purge I decided that if I couldn't finish it on the 3rd try I'd kick it to the curb.

Well I finished it and it wasn't as terrible as it must have seemed to me in 1995 and 2001. This time its disjointed nature did more than frustrate me, it sort of jogged me along. The ideas though are too many to distill into a cohesive work, none gets the treatment it needs and so each seems less important than I think the author intended. There's guilt, shame, cowardice, and a host of other unattractive aspects of the human condition. I'd rather have had Disch concentrate on a few and bring them to more fully developed conclusions. I won't say I read it with relish, for I don't think there's a single character with whom I'd care to have dinner, but I did find the strange plot reasonably interesting.

There's the priest referred to in the title - a man, when he's knocked unconscious, who is susceptible to transporting into the body of another man who lived and died in the 13th century. Not so bad, but the reverse also happens - the 13th century man occupies the priest's body in modern-day Minnesota. Meanwhile there's not one, but two people blackmailing the priest for his pedophile crimes of decades past, a horrific tattoo of Satan's face on said priest's chest, a "home" for girls feared to want abortions (really it's a prison to force them to bring their fetuses to term), rogue priests, henchmen and a science fiction author turned cult leader who also believes himself to have been transported to the 13th century (to the very dungeon where the priest's doppelganger holds sway over the inquisition's torture chamber). Phew. A lot going on, but it manages to tie itself up into a reasonable facsimile of a knot. There are a few dangling plot devices and characters and a couple of unknowns, but I didn't like the story or any of the characters enough to care. I won't be reading any of the others in the series.

The Whole World by Emily Winslow, 2010

2010-04-26T08:51:00.003-05:00

Read as an Early Reviewers selection from LibraryThing

Synopsis: Set in the richly evoked pathways and environs of Cambridge, England, The Whole World unearths the desperate secrets kept by its many complex characters—students, professors, detectives, husbands, mothers—secrets that lead to explosive consequences. Two Americans studying at Cambridge University, Polly and Liv, both strangers to their new home, both survivors of past mistakes, become quick friends. They find a common interest in Nick, a handsome, charming, seemingly guileless graduate student. For a time, the three engage in harmless flirtation, growing closer while doing research for professor Gretchen Paul, the blind daughter of a famed novelist. But a betrayal, followed by Nick’s inexplicable disappearance, brings long-buried histories to the surface. The investigation raises countless questions, and the newspapers report all the most salacious details—from the crime that scars Polly’s past to the searing truths concealed in photographs Gretchen cannot see. Soon the three young lovers will discover how little they know about one another, and how devastating the ripples of long-ago actions can be.

This had promise, but came across as uneven and jarring due to a couple of things. First is the misuse of multiple character point of view. For this to work well you need harmony and a way to mesh a character's view of herself and her view of others. Insight is key to understanding motives, actions and how one person relates to another. In this book we get some inner workings perspective, but not much in the way of how one character views or feels about another. That made for a whole lot more surprises than there ought to have been, not only in events that took place, but in the whys and wherefores. It just came across choppy and out of step.

Spoilers below -

The most glaring example is Liv's character. Her lunacy basically comes out of nowhere. Her closest companions don't note much awry in her behavior apart from some petty theft. In order for Liv's ultimate actions to be believable, they needed to be noted and telegraphed earlier. With neither Nick nor Polly being savvy enough to pick up on any weirdness, or Liv too savvy to let on, I don't know, so as a "twist" it didn't really work. Instead Liv's whole stream-of-consciousness chapter just seemed tacked on and a desperate way to wrap things up. Polly and Nick's emotional baggage wasn't well portrayed either. Both lacked the intimacy of a real person's thoughts. It was like reading the clinical notes of some psychologist more than the private thoughts and hangups of a real person.

Another problem is the author's lack of understanding of police work. I mean, if you're going to put a cop into a story with a crime, you better make sure you do your research. Clues and conclusions jump out of nowhere and rang very, very false. I actually laughed out loud at one point when I went back over some paragraphs or pages to find where I'd overlooked some link in Morris's logic chain only to find the whole chain was missing.

I know what the author was going for here, but she didn't make it. Maybe with more practice she will.

The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins, 2009

2010-04-17T16:15:00.004-05:00

Read in 2010

Synopsis: In 2008, a Gallup poll showed that 44 percent of Americans believed God had created man in his present form within the last 10,000 years. In a Pew Forum poll in the same year, 42 percent believed that all life on earth has existed in its present form since the beginning of time.

In 1859 Charles Darwin's masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, shook society to its core. Darwin was only too aware of the storm his theory of evolution would provoke. But he surely would have raised an incredulous eyebrow at the controversy still raging a century and a half later. Evolution is accepted as scientific fact by all reputable scientists and indeed theologians, yet millions of people continue to question its veracity. Now the author of the iconic work The God Delusion takes them to task.

The Greatest Show on Earth is a stunning counterattack on advocates of "Intelligent Design," explaining the evidence for evolution while exposing the absurdities of the creationist "argument." Dawkins sifts through rich layers of scientific evidence: from living examples of natural selection to clues in the fossil record; from natural clocks that mark the vast epochs wherein evolution ran its course to the intricacies of developing embryos; from plate tectonics to molecular genetics. Combining these elements and many more, he makes the airtight case that "we find ourselves perched on one tiny twig in the midst of a blossoming and flourishing tree of life and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random selection."

The Greatest Show on Earth comes at a critical time: systematic opposition to the fact of evolution is menacing as never before. In American schools, and in schools around the world, insidious attempts are made to undermine the status of science in the classroom. Dawkins wields a devastating argument against this ignorance, but his unjaded passion for the natural world turns what might have been a negative argument into a positive offering to the reader: nothing less than a master's vision of life, in all its splendor.

While I am not a scientist, I do possess scientific curiosity. All my life I've taken the theory of evolution as read, but this book reveals that while I was right to trust in its truth, I was taught incorrectly. Either that or my basic understanding became flawed. The 'hairpin species' explanation was my personal watershed. It makes so much more sense than my previous idea of evolution that I can hardly credit my "belief" in it. Contrary to popular understanding we (and every other modern life form) do not descend from a previous species in a ladder-like formation; instead we share an ancestor only. That ancestor propagated not only it's immediately descended changed form, but other forms. The line of evolution forks at that species, does a U-turn as Dawkins describes and produces two new lines of change. I'd never thought of it like that and I'm so glad that I've got a fix on it now.

Ditto for the inherent flaws in current animal and human design as well as whole ecosystems. I'd never given any thought to the waste inherent in say the one-upmanship that goes on between predator and prey (Dawkins calls it an arms race, but I prefer my own term). If an intelligent force developed this system, it's a wreck and also cruel. Ditto for the simple idea of forests. Why do trees produce such massively tall trunks that do no good except to elevate them above other trees? The height itself, independent of its ability to furnish an advantage over other trees, does not help in energy gathering (photosynthesis) - tree trunks are not energy gatherers, but energy wasters in a pure sense. Now if an intelligent designer was at work here, why this needless waste? Trees are basically elevated meadows and are elevated because trees need to compete. If god really is benevolent, why all this clashing and striving? Why not just make all the trees the same height and be done with it? They'd be better off, growing wider and wider and gathering the same amount of sunlight as they do at their present heights, but without all that wasted effort of growing a trunk. Strange. Some intelligent designer, huh?

One thing that does bug me about Dawkins, however I admire his scientific dedication, is his lack of humility. He's convinced that his is the greatest intellect in the universe and there is nothing that he cannot understand or perceive. The idea that there might be something beyond his ability to sense or make sense of just doesn't occur to him. It's a bit hard to stomach at times. He's a smug bastard at his core and a pedant to boot. After a while I was able to ignore his personality flaws and concentrate on the information he presents, because he does present it well.

This is my first reading of a Dawkins book because of this arrogance. I just can't stand a smug person no matter how I might agree with him, but since Douglas Adams waxes on about him so much I decided to give him a go. I may read another, but I've got to have a palate cleanser or ten in between. I may also have to listen to this one a couple more times. It's very information dense and I'm sure that many things sailed past me while I was trying to work out others. I feel sorry and ashamed that so many people do not understand science and instead cling to outmoded beliefs and argue which of their imaginary friends reigns supreme. How can people believe in dog breeds (Hello! Wolves are the progenitors of ALL breeds and look what we've done to them in just a couple thousand years), flu viruses (that change EVERY year and require new vaccinations, why would we need new vaccines if they didn't change?) and corn (that DOES NOT have a wild counterpart and is entirely man-made) and not understand that natural selection works? It boggles.

Lastly, I found the audio presentation by two narrators to be awkward and confusing at times. I'm not sure how they split the work precisely, it seems Lalla (what a name, what is she, 5?) read from others' works while Dawkins narrated his own commentary and contribution. I'm grateful to Simon & Schuster for choosing to include a digital booklet containing all of the printed book's illustrations. I wish more publishers would do this.

Horns by Joe Hill, 2010

2010-03-15T10:35:00.002-05:00

Read in 2010

Synopsis: At first Ig thought the horns were a hallucination, the product of a mind damaged by rage and grief. He had spent the last year in a lonely, private pergatory, following the death of his beloved, Merrin Williams, who was raped and murdered under inexplicable circumstances. A mental breakdown would have been the most natural thing in the world. But there was nothing natural about the horns, which were all too real.

Once the righteous Ig had enjoyed the life of the blessed: born into privilege, the second son of a renowned musician and younger brother of a rising late-night TV star, he had security, wealthy, and a place in his community. Ig had it all, and more - he had Merrin and a love founded on shared daydreams, mutual daring and unlikely midsummer magic.

But Merrin's death damned all that. The only suspect in the crime, Ig was never charged or tried. And he was never cleared. In the court of public opinion in Gideon, New Hampshire, Ig is and always will be guilty because his rich and connected parents pulled strings to make the investigation go away. Nothing Ig can do, nothing he can say, matters. Everyone, it seems, including God has abandoned him. Everyone, that is, but the devil inside...

Now Ig is possessed of a terrible new power to go with his terrible new look - a macabre talent he intends to use to find the monster who killed Merrin and destroyed his life. Being good and praying for the best got him nowhere. It's time for a little revenge...it's time the devil had his due.

Despite the amount of time spent with Ignatius Perrish, I found his true character hard to grasp; he’s a slippery one. The opening sentence tells us that he’s spent a night doing terrible things. Exactly what isn’t known, but after reading the book I have a hard time picturing Ig doing anything even mildly upsetting, never mind terrible. Maybe it’s this Dudley Dooright character that makes turning into a demon more surprising, but Ig never really does anything with is new-found persona. Actually, there probably isn’t much he could do since being a demon never really seemed to help except for the “miraculous” healing he has toward the end of the novel. Wouldn’t it have been better not to get beaten up in the first place? I guess it makes him more sympathetic and easier to relate to.

I found there to be contrasting tones in the novel as if Hill were testing out what kind of book he wanted it to be and for what audience. The flashes of knowledge Ig receives with his new powers are raw, visceral, depraved and insane. Not for the mild-mannered for sure. Overeating girlfriend. Sex-obsessed priest. Doctor drug-addict. Evil grandmother. Hostile parents. And then there’s Lee whom even before it is officially revealed is easy to peg as a deceitful sociopath and a most excellent villain.

I suppose that is the winning card here; Lee’s portrayal. In stark contrast to Ig and Merrins’ dreamy romance, Lee’s covert hostility is made more menacing. It’s clear from the flashback to his first meeting with Ig that he’s not what he seems. Naive little Ig falls for it and we wonder what Lee really wants. It doesn’t take long to find out. Merrin herself seems equally unaware of Lee’s real character, but is in some ways even more stupid. How can she not see the naked desire he has for her? Is she really that dense? Women know this stuff even at an early age. We know when guys are attracted and when they’re not. All that “friendship” was crap and she should have known it. Joe’s women friends should have spotted this and given him a heads up.

Overall though the way the story meshes is very satisfying. Hints and allegations are aligned and connected. Ig seems gratified with his new role in life and prepared to go on with it. That Hill doesn’t make him full of angst and rebelliousness is nice. I also like the narrow restraint with which he contained the supernatural element of the story. It is sort of a throw-away factor, once dealt with and accepted it’s put into the background and it works that way; like an underlying vibration that you feel, get used to, but are always aware of. The bright flash of it at the end seemed fitting. I look forward to more of Hill’s unique viewpoint and execution.

Legacy - a Graphic Novel by Andrew McGinn and David Neitzke

2010-02-28T09:50:00.002-05:00

Read as an ARC in 2010

Synopsis: At risk of alienating you from your grandma, do you hate newspaper comic strips? The ones that never die? So did Chas Brown. Then his father died and he inherited a newspaper comic strip. The really cute kind. The kind Grandma likes. Welcome to the hell that is the syndicated gag-a-day. But Chas Brown, an indie comic book artist with dreams and a reputation of his own, has a way to get out of it. He' s going to get Simple Pleasures, America' s most beloved comic strip, canceled. Will Grandma stand for it? If you've ever felt like sabotaging one of those sweet and innocent comics with double entendres and spectral grandparents in hell, Chas Brown is your guy.

I’m not sure who the intended audience is. The basic story of a kid who inherits his dad’s long-time and ultra-cutesy comic strip is ok, but the inevitable sacrifice of his artistic integrity on the altar of the almighty dollar is a story for whom exactly? As far as I can tell despite his hipster rebel posturing he’s now writing the comic he so despised and thus what was gained by telling his losing battle with his true calling?

Maybe I shouldn’t have used the word kid to describe our hero (?), but that’s how he comes across. Even approaching 30 he still bucks under the weight of traditionalism and tries to find solace in Noam Chomsky and the Pixies. I mean, isn’t he a little old for the teenage angst routine? In keeping with that character, he tries to get out from under his obligations to his dead father by sabotaging the strip dad worked so hard to maintain during his life. Yeah, that’s grown up. Couldn’t you have just said no and been adult instead of playing little games for your own amusement?

Overall the story reads like one big inside joke. It tried hard. I’m not that much older than Chas, but I was never so determined to out-cool my parents that I had to sneer at virtually everything they liked or valued (at least not after I turned 20 or so). Portraying mom as an aging Lucy in Charlie Brown’s sweater. Oh come on. Jealous much? It did make me laugh out loud once though – the Little Piggies panel was pretty good despite the color-by-numbers liberalism in the rest of the social commentary. And so were some of the notes about original panels in the history of comics section – immigrant blood on baby seal skin got a chuckle. But in the end, the lure of an easy paycheck looks like it was too strong to resist. Pretty soon he’s fluff-tumbled into what looks like the same life he thought so little of. I wonder if he’s in therapy over it.

An ironic thing is that I don’t remember reading the comic in question in my life; ever. And I grew up with one of the nation’s most right-wing, conservative newspapers. I am at a loss as to why they didn’t carry it. Too overextended hanging onto Hagar the Horrible, Beetle Baily, The Family Circus, Blondie and Garfield I suppose.

Wordless Wednesday

2010-02-25T16:16:00.003-05:00

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh, 2008

2010-02-12T09:37:00.004-05:00

Read in 2010

Synopsis: At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean; its purpose, to fight China’s vicious nineteenth-century Opium Wars. As for the crew, they are a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a free-spirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races, and generations. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, the exotic backstreets of Canton. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, that makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive—a masterpiece from one of the world’s finest novelists.

At first I wasn’t sure if audio was the right format to use for this novel, but after hearing Phil Gigante do the first of his many characterizations, I was reassured. When he got to the lascars and especially Serang Ali, I knew not only was it the right format, it was the best format. Phil is to be congratulated on his performance. The rolling pidgin dialect was almost musical and almost understandable. Without access to a glossary and without knowing how in the least to spell a lot of what I heard, it was up to my brain to fill in contextual details and make sense of the slang. Maybe I didn’t get very single little syllable, but mostly I got it. Gigante’s vocal fluidity more than made up for anything doubtful. Oh and is it just me, or does the pidgin sound a lot like Hutese, the language Jabba and his cronies spoke?

I won’t go into the plot here since it’s done elsewhere and it would be too exhaustive. Suffice to say that the threads of many separate lives and situations come together in a very confined way. I liked how much attention each character got. When the author dips us into each world, he leaves us there for long enough to be immersed and develop bonds with each character and sympathy for each situation. He didn’t just give us a few short paragraphs and then jerk us into a new scenario, a device I loathe, but neither did he string it out so long that we forgot about others’ details when reintroduced to them. Nicely judged and timed.

The world of 18th century India is largely unknown to me and was fascinating to read about. Ditto for shipboard life. I have no idea how accurate either portrayal is, but they have the ring of authenticity. Both are highly ritualized and have strictures that if broken carry severe penalties. Both feature people desperate to either make the best of them or escape them entirely and I’m anxiously awaiting the 2nd installment.

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, 1949

2010-01-11T10:08:00.002-05:00

Read in 2009

Synopsis: A disease of unparalleled destructive force has sprung up almost simultaneously in every corner of the globe, all but destroying the human race. One survivor, strangely immune to the effects of the epidemic, ventures forward to experience a world without man. What he ultimately discovers will prove far more astonishing than anything he'd either dreaded or hoped for.

I don’t think anyone would write a novel like this today. We’re too action-oriented. We want drama, conflict and violence, something Earth Abides has very little of. It’s an inward-thinking novel. The main character, Ish, does a lot of ruminating and philosophizing. Many of his opinions border on the non-politically correct and some may get offended at his intellectualism. What little action and conflict there is tends to be presented mildly, almost passively, as if the action has very little importance in the grand scheme of things, which I suppose it does. It also doesn’t deal with the technical side of what happened; this is not Michael Crichton or Greg Bear. Global warming hysteria is absent as well.

Ish truly is a researcher at heart. He has trouble making decisions, being assertive or believing in himself enough to turn desire to action. When toward the end of the novel he realizes he should have taken a more aggressive leadership role with the tribe, he regrets his passivity and in a burst of activity, tries to make up for lost time. But by then it’s too late, attitudes have shifted completely in only one generation. Basically it shows man’s base laziness. The younger generation has no desire to create at all; they want to play and continue to eat out of cans. Until by circumstance we’re forced to do something difficult, we’ll always take the easy way out. It reminded me of the fossil fuel situation; we know intellectually that the oil will run out some day, like the tribe knows the canned food will run out, but we and they only make half-hearted efforts to find alternatives. I particularly liked Ish’s devious way of introducing old technology that will save the future generations a lot of hardship and misery. In just one more generation the toy-like bows and arrows have become serious grown-up affairs and so in this instance Ish had success.

At first I expected a post-apocalyptic novel written in 1949 to come across as terribly dated, but it isn’t. Once technology has become unusable, it doesn’t matter how sophisticated it once was. 1949 or 2009 it makes no difference whether the defunct electrical grid once ran only radios or computers; once it’s gone it ceases to matter. This makes the novel fairly timeless.

Another thing that ceases to matter once it’s gone is modern civilization as a whole. Particular organizational structure, rules and norms, habits and taboos – none of this really matters to the survivors except as a point of reference and, occasionally, as a security blanket. The children and grandchildren born to the survivors have not been taught with the old society in mind and thus have no frame of reference for why we all thought it so important. Knowledge and intellectualism as concepts are axes the author grinds frequently by making Ish worry and fret about them a great deal. Ish is concerned that the tribe consists of normal, average, sturdy people instead of thinkers and creators. He worries that the intrinsic value of civilization will be lost. He puts high importance on the intellectual ability of individuals only to find out that like technology, some higher learning just doesn’t matter once the context is gone. Without a society to run, what use are libraries and laws and arbitrary social mores?

There is a new introduction for the audio version I listened to and it states that many people consider this to be the saddest novel they’ve ever read. While I did find it subdued, I didn’t find it overly sad. Ish himself at times is depressed, but only over his perceived importance of the culture he once knew. The post-calamity people aren’t sad and don’t mourn the loss of what they did not know. Instead they are living to suit themselves and doing a fairly good job of it. My overall impression was one of hope, not despair. The people are not portrayed at their worst, instead everyone was pretty reasonable and non-violent. It was surprising and I don’t know if I really believe it could be that way or if it’s just conditioning from dozens of movies and books that deal with this subject very differently. I’d like to think that it could.

Best First Reads of 2009

2009-12-30T09:54:00.003-05:00

Continuing with the yearly wrap up, here's my distillation for 2009. I read a lot, but not of as high a quality as I would have liked.

5 stars - 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann – a superb distillation of many of the new ideas of what it was like to be an American before the label. Backed by archeological evidence and years of study, the Americas are presented as having sophisticated cultures and inter-relationships. So very different from the portrayal of native peoples in the past which were largely relegated to either child-like innocence or hostile savagery. Highly recommended.

4 ½ stars – We Have Always Lived in the Castle – by Shirley Jackson – when I read this I was so blown away by it that I couldn’t put my thoughts and feelings into words to write a review. Shame on me. This is the story of a pair of reclusive women in a small town populated by people who fear and loathe them. Are they mad women or merely misunderstood? The quality of Jackson’s writing is equally obscuring and illuminating. Emotional and mysterious, this is a near-perfect Gothic tale.

4 ½ stars – City of Thieves by David Benioff – yes, this reads like a buddy film and it’s set in the siege of Leningrad during World War II, but it’s engaging, original and has an earnest voice. Punches aren’t pulled and there is a bleak, brutality about it that some found hard to take. However, there is enough levity and vitality in the characters that keeps it from being a total downer. Don’t wait for the inevitable movie.

4 1/2 stars – The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins – it’s too bad that I put off reading this for so long because it’s a brilliant and stealthy thriller. The narrative style takes some getting used to, but once you fall into the groove, the author hooks you and teases you with tidbits of information and nuance that will compel you to finish and find out all you can about the woman in white. Dastardly deeds, foul corruption, true love and revenge; what else is there?

Additional worthies with 4 stars –

World’s End by T.C. Boyle – a twisted tale of a family’s past and future and how the interconnect.

Port Mungo by Patrick McGrath – the master of the unreliable narrator.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood – a highly evocative tale of two sisters; one who dies early and one who tells the tale.