Book Report: Buried Prey by John Sandford (2011)

Book coverThis book is the best Prey book in a long time. Partly that’s because half occurs in the late 1980s, whose memories are warm, fuzzy, and indistinct enough that there’s no sudden eruptions of “Reagan sucks, huh?” or “The tired old man we elected king is going to start a nuclear war while calling for his nurse!” Well, nothing along those lines in the olden times. When we get to the modern day, Sandford gets to put in a character who is a gun nut (and Davenport doesn’t care for gun nuts), but this particular “gun nut” is an archetypical “gun nut” put into little social lesson for readers. But this gun nut is not anything like the gun nuts I know. Sandford manages to get him shot to prove that having a gun for self-defense doesn’t help in books.

But aside from that.

As a prequel of sorts, the book deals more with Lucas Davenport investigating rather than project managing an investigation. Which is cool. The plot deals with the first case Davenport handled when he was temporarily made a detective out of necessity. Two young girls disappear, and Davenport investigates. The police find a suspect, a homeless man with mental issues, but Davenport is not entirely convinced. However, he cannot pursue his alternate suspect because the brass decide the case is closed and Davenport becomes busy with other investigations.

25 years later, roughly, the girls are unearthed in a suburban neighborhood far from where they went missing and far from the homeless man’s territory. Davenport has to deal with the guilt he feels once he realizes he let a killer continue killing, and one of the recently slain is a longtime friend and series recurring character.

It’s a particularly good book because the political stuff (both fictional and social messaging) is left behind. Mr. Sandford, (or his proxy who Googles him regularly, tell him that) you could probably write more early Davenport books set in the past without losing your readers. Let’s face it, your books aren’t being bought by millenials who need Davenport to have a cell phone and Internet connection. Your books are getting bought by old timers like myself who remember pay phones and dial-up connections.

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Book Report: In Odd We Trust by Queenie Chan and Dean Koontz (2008)

Book coverI didn’t like Odd Hours when I read it last year, so you might have believed, as I did, that I would not rush right out to get one of the Odd Thomas graphic novels. Well, we were both right: I only bought this on a trip to Hooked on Books because I’d already picked up something else that was not quite ten dollars, and I still like to push my credit card purchases over that threshold whenever possible.

In Odd We Trust is a graphic novel prequel to Odd Thomas, so Thomas is still in Pico Mundo, bein’ a fry cook. A child is murdered, and Thomas uses some of his skills to find out whether there’s a child killer lurking in the town or if the killer had something else in mind.

As a graphic novel, the interior voice of Oddie is muted, which is double-edged. As I’ve mentioned in previous reviews of the series, sometimes that interior voice is engaging, sometimes it’s padding. With a graphic novel, you don’t need padding. The book also make allusions to a darker, greater evil game afoot, which fits the Odd Thomas mythos.

So it’s a graphic novel and won’t take too long to read. Basically, a short story with pictures. I’m almost seriously reduced to reading coloring books to fill my annual reading total. But I’ve hit my mark already, and this is book 105 for the year as I prepare to turn the spreadsheet and start listing for 2012.

Books mentioned in this review:

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Book Report: General George Patton: Old Blood and Guts by Alden Hatch (1950, 2006)

Book coverThis book is a brief biography of General Patton written not long after he died and with input from his family. So it’s completely laudatory, a homer bio, but, hey, it’s Patton. What’s not to like?

The book, as I mentioned, is very short (like 150 pages), but if you don’t know anything about the man, you’ll learn the basics. He came from a well-to-do Western family from the old West. He chased Pancho Villa. He rightly equated the tank with cavalry. And he beat a soldier who said he just couldn’t handle it, when the soldier was also stricken with malaria instead of just shell shock. He held his men to a high standard, and they ended up loving him for it. You know those signs in foreign lands saying, “George Bush, help us”? In the 1940s in Europe, they chanted for Patton to free them.

The book is too thin for a Management Lessons from George Patton piece (sorry, Jim), but worth reading just for the overview of an American icon.

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Book Report: Attila, King of the Huns by Patrick Howarth (1995)

Book coverI had hoped that this book would be something like Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, but alas and alack, this was not to be the case. Where the book on the Mongols was dymanic and narrative, this book was rather academic and stretched out what little we know about Attila the Hun, mostly anecdotal, into chapters.

Attila the Hun ruled the Huns for eight years, which means basically eight campaigns (although he shared rule with a brother for some time before that). Since he ruled in the 5th century, in the Dark Ages, in an illiterate tribe, there are no Hun records themselves, and all accounts–such as those spare ones are–come from exterior sources. So the elements of the book that are about Attila are sparse anecdotes stretched into chapters. Kind of like how this report is stretched by repeating itself.

The author throws in a goodly number of name-checks of the other rulers of the era, which is after the split of the Roman Empire and before the final collapse of the Western Empire, so you get a summary history of the era, but the book lacks flavor.

I dunno; this book is subtitled The Man and the Myth, and I get the sense that Attila really punches above his weight in historic notoriety based on a couple things: he came along at a time when both remnants of the Roman Empire were weakening, the papacy was strengthening, and they needed a scapegoat or common enemy. He appears more in fictional accounts of his life or other lives than in actual history accounts, for hundreds of years after his death. Face it, he was the early middle ages equivalent of Hitler: if you needed someone in your opera who was archetypically evil, you threw in Attila. For millenia. Why, George Patton called the Germans Huns in the 20th century. If we didn’t have Hitler and Nazis these days, movies would have asiatic horsemen detonating nukes at the Super Bowl.

I mean, he couldn’t conquer France for crying out loud. A couple kickball teams allied together could conquer France, and I don’t mean the children’s gym class kickball teams; I mean the real sissies: the adult kickball league kickball teams.

It’s a pretty short book (187 pages of text), though, and it is a good primer on fifth century southern Europe. And, apparently, it gives one enough confidence to spout off on the relative weight of the Hunnic “Empire.” I mean, with an Empire, you sort of expect that it will last over a couple decades and maybe a couple generations of successful leaders.

And I did get two blog posts from it: this one, and Management Lessons from Attila the Hun.

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Book Review: Love and Marriage by Bill Cosby (1989)

Book coverSadly, it’s not uncommon for me to accidentally re-read a book I’ve already read if I buy it again, but this book presents a special case. I did not even choose to read it. Well, not exactly.

As is my wont, I keep a book of short pieces, columns, and whatnot at the bed side so I can read in 600- or 1000-word increments until I am ready to sleep. It’s also not uncommon for me to bring a book up, brush my teeth, and determine that I am too tired to read after all, so a book will sit on the headboard until the next such time I want to read in bed, which can be a week or two later.

So, anyway, one night, the book was there, I was there, so I started reading it. Little did I know that it was my beautiful wife who brought it up so she could read it, but in the time between when she brought it up and I discovered it, the headboard book shuffling that occurs during dusting had put it onto my stack of books. So this might be the very first time that I’ve re-read a book accidentally in this fashion, although now that my wife knows I can fall for this sort of trickery, I might start finding other books she wants me to read on the headboard.

So my reflections on the book closely mirror what I said in 2004: the book is bifurcated into a part about adolescent love, which is spot-on and amusing, and the second part is about being married to his wife which focuses on the nitpicky little ways they get on each other’s nerves. Maybe those moments make for the best comic recounting, but as for a book that celebrates marriage, they really give short shrift to the basic daily comfort of having a life partner and the joys that surpass the general contentment of a good marriage. That’s, again, probably just because the comedian has to focus on the disparaties, but it doesn’t serve as encouragment to wed.

Not the best Cosby book, but I still love the man and his work.

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Book Report: Colorado Kill-Zone by Don Pendleton (1976)

Book coverThis book is the 25th in The Executioner series. Within it, Mack Bolan finds himself drawn into a net in Colorado, a trap designed to kill him but also to do something else, something bigger. Bolan finds himself encircled by a paramilitary force that has all the earmarks of the United States Army, cut off from support at a ski resort during a blizzard, and the only way to save the President is to attack. Of course.

Hey, it’s a pulp Bolan book. It’s a fun little read. I still like them, which is good, since I still have 20 or so on my bookshelves to read.

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Book Report: Wild Horse Mesa by Zane Grey (1928, ?)

I have this book in the Walter J. Black edition, which is part of the Zane Grey series you find often in book fairs. It’s the second Western I’ve read this year (The Virginian being the first), and I can see the debt that Zane Grey owed to Wilson and to Frederic Remington, the artist. Grey writes a standard western plot and then fills the book with lush, at times too-lush, description of the landscape. It actually detracts from the pacing of the book, but it’s an eighty-year-old narrative, so it has that going against the pacing for a modern reader, too.

Within it, a horse wrangler named Chane meets some horse thieves and whips one of them before being driven from his camp by the gang. The one he whooped shows up at a large, Eastern-based wrangling operation and assumes a position of power, but not before drawing the ire of Chane’s young brother Chess who caught on with the same outfit. The daughter of one of the financial backers is along, and when Chess can’t win her heart, he promises that Chane will.

So you’ve got some romance, some Western violence, and whatnot. It’s not a bad read, but not something I’m going to make a habit of reading. I’ll have to try something from Louis L’Amour to see if that suits me better. As L’Amour wrote his work a little later than Grey and he has a pulp background, I’ll bet it’s more punchy.

And if you want to know what I was talking about when I mentioned reading a book about horse wrangling while watching Krull, there you go.

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Marcia Muller and the Simple Art of Sucker Punch

In an article in Mystery Scene magazine #122 (not available online), Marcia Muller, creator of the Sharon McCone mysteries, explains that when in doubt, have a man come through a door with gun control in his hand:

“Every now and then I like to sneak in a little message about social issues and hope that the readers pick up on it. It’s funny, but readers will pick up on it if it is something they believe in, and if it is not something they believe in, they don’t even see it. So I am not influencing anyone. The current book I am working on is about gun control and I think the gun people will just ignore that part,” said Muller.

Well, no. John Nolte and the crowd at Big Hollywood call this a sucker punch. You’re reading a book and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a blatant political message that jars you from the story. In most cases, these sucker punches lean to the left, like illuminating readers on the importance of gun control.

Ms. Muller is mistaken when she thinks that people that disagree with the important PSA in the middle of the narrative don’t notice it. They notice it, and they stop buying the books.

Which explains why I personally got recent books from John Sandford and Robert B. Parker from the library when I bother to get the new titles at all: because sometime after 2000, these authors started making sure that the bad guys were conservatives and/or religious characters. Suddenly, the throwaway asides were insulting the president. The general disappointment with the system and the idyllic past that was lost morphed into anger at one party in particular.

I’ve not read any of Ms. Muller’s works to know how subtle her “social messages” are, but I bet they’re received more clearly by the people too unsophisticated to believe as she does than she thinks.

Personally, as a writer, I think it’s foolish to gamble with social messages that might alienate almost 50% of the country. But what do I know? I’m not influencing anyone, either.

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Fred Worth Is A Bad, Bad Man

In October, I finished Fred Worth’s Incredible Super Trivia, and I found at least one error in it. I said about the book:

Incredible, as in you cannot believe any of it. Quick, what’s wrong with that entry?

Apparently, Fred Worth purposefully inserted incorrect information into his books and eventually sued the makers of Trivial Pursuit for violating the copyright on his creative writing endeavors:

In October 1984, Fred L. Worth, author of The Trivia Encyclopedia, Super Trivia, and Super Trivia II, filed a $300 million lawsuit against the distributors of Trivial Pursuit. He claimed that more than a quarter of the questions in the game’s Genus Edition had been taken from his books, even to the point of reproducing typographical errors and deliberately placed misinformation. One of the questions in Trivial Pursuit was “What was Columbo’s first name?” with the answer “Philip”. That information had been fabricated to catch anyone who might try to violate his copyright.

Wow. Just, wow. It wasn’t a mistake. It was a purposeful attempt to snooker his readers.

I know this sort of thing is not uncommon in out-of-copyright reprints and translations, but in a book of erstwhile facts to find such willful mendacity really further erodes my belief in human integrity.

But, on the other hand, I have an excuse if I get the chance to blow my turn on Jeopardy!: Fred Worth made me do it.

(Tidbit originally seen in Mystery Scene magazine, but it doesn’t provide its tidbits sections on the Internet, apparently.)

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Book Report: Home for Christmas by Lloyd C. Douglas (1937)

Book coverIf you like Holiday Inn, White Christmas, or The Bishop’s Wife, you’ll probably like this book.

Written by a Lutheran minister in the heart of the depression, it recounts the story of a sister who retained the old farm when her parents died and her efforts to get her reluctant siblings–cosmopolitan and successful people now–to return to the farm to have a Christmas like they used to when they were children. She asks them to leave their children at home so they can do things the old fashioned way.

It’s a nice little story, short at 118 pages, but a nice pseudo-Dickens. As it was written when and where it was, particularly dealing with rural Michigan instead of the big city, you have the residents driving cars, but some residents still with buggies. As you might recall, that was the way with rural communities even into the 1940s. Strange to think how late the complete changeover was, and how it happened without government bans.

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Book Report: Kill Me Tomorrow by Richard S. Prather (1969)

Book coverYou would think that since I have chased poor Rob Prather around the Internet for a decade, from his old blog Insults Unpunished to his guest time on Outside the Beltway to social media outlets telling him “I love your Shell Scott novels!” that I would have read more than two in that time period. You would be mistaken. I’ve read Kill Him Twice in 2008 and this book in 2011. I have read more than that, anyway, since I have at least one other paperback on my read shelves and might have gotten some from the Community Library back in the day.

Shell Scott goes to an Arizona resort to rest up and recouperate after being shot in a disagreement with some mob types, but shortly into his stay, movie star and Sophie Loren proxy Lucrezia Brizante seeks his help. Her father is in some kind of trouble, so Scott goes down to the Arizona retirement community to find out if the old man is really in danger. And he finds the mafia moving in, looking for some government money that’s coming to the retirement community.

The style of the book blends some lighthearted, irreverant humor with complicate plots endemic of Ross MacDonald or Raymond Chandler. It’s not quite as campy as the Dean Martin Matt Helm films, but Scott doesn’t take himself seriously, and one expects that Prather doesn’t take him entirely seriously either as some realism is sacrificed for spectacle. I think I was a little more down on it in 2008, as the review isn’t without reservations, but I guess if you’re in the mood for this particular style of book, it’s better than if you’re not.

So it’s worth a look if you’re in that mood.

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Book Report: Ghost Radio by Leopoldo Gout (2008)

Book coverI have an advanced reader’s edition of this book, and, blimey, I wouldn’t send this out for review. It contains misspellings and improperly formated sections. As some of you know, I’m working over another book presently, and I’m gnashing my teeth about every last missing comma and whatnot. But the difference between me and a professional is that this ARC contains those errors, but the pros will weed them out by the time the book has gone to press, whereas I’ll publish something with typos in it. And it drives me crazy.

Oh, right, we weren’t talking about me. We were talking about Ghost Radio.

This is a story about a young man with a radio program about the paranormal who has to deal with a ghostly sound pattern communicating with him. He suspects it’s the ghost of his friend Gabriel, who like Joaquin (the narrator) survived an automobile accident that orphaned them both (maybe). Gabriel died during an electrical storm as the duo, rockers and sound engineers, commandeered an abandoned radio station for an impromptu performance.

You know, I can’t really some up the plot for you because it bends and twists reality a bit, and you can’t be sure how sane Joaquin is and what’s going on. The book moves among flashbacks and the present as well as shifting from the first person narrators of Joaquin and his girlfriend/radio partner Alondra. So it moves along, keeps you guessing, and, if you’re like me, you eventually worry that the thing is going to go all Lost and end up sucking. Well, it’s not that bad, although I was a bit disappointed in the resolution. The book’s ending reminded me a lot of Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma (which I must have read before I was blogging since I can’t find a book review for it–did I read before I blogged? What was that world like?).

Still, it’s a pretty good book. And Gout has not published anything since. I hope he’s working on something.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

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Now Available for the Kindle: The Courtship of Barbara Holt

Book coverAs you might have heard, I’ve been working to prepare another book for publication. This book is The Courtship of Barbara Holt with Dennis Thompson Goes On Strike, a five-act play followed by a short one act play. Here’s the back matter/summary:

The Courtship of Barbara Holt:
Mark Dever, English major, has trouble talking to women. It’s worse than being speechless: When Mark is interested, he speaks in blank verse, like some Shakespearean courtier. When he meets Barbara Holt, his inadvertent poetry goes into overdrive. But Barbara is not interested in some wishy-washy English major, unlike her friend Jenn, who is an English major herself. Can his friends help Mark woo Barbara successfully and, more importantly, woo Jenn?

Dennis Thompson Goes On Strike:
Dennis Thompson has had enough. All his life, some nameless author has been writing the book that is Dennis’s life, and Dennis has decided that he’s not going to play along any more. If The Author says, “Jump!”, Dennis is going to say, “No.” It’s like Six Characters in Search of an Author, but with a twist.

They’re definitely the summation of all the things I thought were awesomely funny 20 years ago, and they still crack me up.

The book is available for Kindle now at the low, low price of 99 cents.

I hope it looks all right; as you know, I don’t have a Kindle proper, and I had to rely on the Kindle for PC reader and the online Amazon Kindle emulator to see how it laid out, and in the process I found bugs in both Microsoft Word and the online Amazon emulator which led to a lot of frustration and hours upon hours of trying to lay it out properly (a play is different from a novel in that its layout is more complicated and depends upon more than a couple page breaks here and there). So if you see something egregiously wrong with it, let me know.

The book form is working its way through the channels (my proofreading and parlaying with the POD solution), so it might be available on Lulu in a couple of days and on Amazon.com by the New Year. It will be $6.99 for the paperback edition with the handsome cover I designed aw by mysewf.

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Book Report: Daytrip Missouri by Lee N. Godley and Patricia M. O’Rourke (1998)

Book coverThis book essentially collects and standardizes information from the various visitors’ bureaus in a number of cities and towns throughout Missouri to show you what you can find if you hop on a highway for an hour or two in the state.

The book is sectioned into highways; that is, a collection of towns on or near Interstates 44, 55, 70, and 29 and Highway 36. Each section is broken down into major cities on the route (Springfield, Columbia, Kansas City, Cape Girardeau, Hannibal, et cetera). Each chapter then has a brief history of the city (a couple paragraphs) and then information on historical sites, arts destinations/venues, shopping, dining, and sometimes a map or checklist of tips for traveling to the city. When applicable, the book also lists other towns nearby with interesting points of interest, although sometimes “nearby” is a little flexible.

A healthy little primer on some of the cities in Missouri, especially the distant corners where one has yet to visit. And if you’re in a traveling mood, it might give you some ideas. Although the book is the 1998 edition, since the book focuses on enduring sites within the cities–historical venues and shopping districts–the information has a better shelf life than if the book had identified the hot shopping spots and the latest faddish restaurants at the height of the tech bubble. So one should not fear for the timeliness of the information. It’s probably pretty accurate for the most part.

Books mentioned in this review:

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Book Report: The Book of Questions and Answers by Joshua Coltrane (1994)

Book coverAs advertised, this is a book of questions and answers about various things, such as why the sky is blue except at sunset, why the ocean is blue, who Dr. Pepper was, why the mile is 5,280 feet, and whatnot. It runs about 128 pages and is probably geared to a younger audience, so don’t expect that it’s a science textbook. The questions are not so esoteric that Cecil Adams would cover them in The Straight Dope columns nor Slate in The Explainer columns.

But if you’re a bit rusty or if you want to bone up for obvious questions from your children, it’s probably not a bad idea.

Books mentioned in this review:


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Book Report: Daytrip Missouri by Lee N. Godley and Patricia M. O’Rourke (1998)

Book coverThis book essentially collects and standardizes information from the various visitors’ bureaus in a number of cities and towns throughout Missouri to show you what you can find if you hop on a highway for an hour or two in the state.

The book is sectioned into highways; that is, a collection of towns on or near Interstates 44, 55, 70, and 29 and Highway 36. Each section is broken down into major cities on the route (Springfield, Columbia, Kansas City, Cape Girardeau, Hannibal, et cetera). Each chapter then has a brief history of the city (a couple paragraphs) and then information on historical sites, arts destinations/venues, shopping, dining, and sometimes a map or checklist of tips for traveling to the city. When applicable, the book also lists other towns nearby with interesting points of interest, although sometimes “nearby” is a little flexible.

A healthy little primer on some of the cities in Missouri, especially the distant corners where one has yet to visit. And if you’re in a traveling mood, it might give you some ideas. Although the book is the 1998 edition, since the book focuses on enduring sites within the cities–historical venues and shopping districts–the information has a better shelf life than if the book had identified the hot shopping spots and the latest faddish restaurants at the height of the tech bubble. So one should not fear for the timeliness of the information. It’s probably pretty accurate for the most part.

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Book Report: The Executioner #24: Canadian Crisis by Don Pendleton (1975)

Book coverThis books finds Bolan hitting a joint in Buffalo to rescue a Canadian undercover policeman who is the brother of a dead compatriot of The Executioner. Bolan catches wind of a plot to take the Mafia international with a meeting in Montreal. While there, Bolan impersonates an Black Ace, again, to infiltrate the hotel taken over by the mafiosos and their crews. Once there, he finds a group of terrorist Free Quebeckers who might be planning something for the 1976 Olympics–or maybe just for Mack Bolan.

It’s a quick read with a lot of “snorters” flying through the air. The political takeaways from this: One, Mack Bolan believes that people should have the right and the ability to defend themselves. Two, Mack Bolan doesn’t have much truck for revolutionaries who are just playing at it, much as he thinks the Free Quebeckers in the book and other young student-type revolutionaries are. He points out that in those kinds of civil wars, a lot of innoncent people die needlessly, especially when terrorists attack soft targets instead of engaging the military. Of course, he compares this to his War, which is different, and it is.

The book reminds me a little of the Robert B. Parker Spenser novel The Judas Goat because the climax of that book is set at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. What a big deal that must have been that it makes its appearance so frequently in pulp of the era. Maybe the London 2012 Olympics has the same cachet in modern pulp, and I just haven’t gotten to it yet (and probably won’t for 30 years).

Books mentioned in this review:

 

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Book Report: The Pork Choppers by Ross Thomas (1972)

Book coverWow, this is one cynical little book.

I bought this book in April with a bunch of Ross Thomas’s other titles, and I put them in chronological order in case they’re a series. This book is the first of the ones I got.

The book deals with a labor election, where the longtime president is standing for reelection and the secretary-treasurer is challenging him. The president regrets not having gone to LA when he was offered the opportunity for a screen test when he was a young man. Now, he’s a raging alcoholic who’s bored with the job but wants to keep it. His wife is thirty years younger and is hungry for sex that her husband can’t provide when he’s particularly alcohol-consumptive, as in the stress of the election. The man’s handler provides booze for the husband and sex for the wife, thinking she’s going to divorce the labor leader for him. The secretary-treasurer is an ugly man and a bully with the tendency to break into violent childish tantrums. Then there are the campaign workers, the power brokers, and the influencers who machinate in their ways to get their man elected. And the hitman hired for a couple bills to kill the labor president.

As I said, cynical. There’s really not one unflawed character amongst them. You feel a little sympathy for some, but I couldn’t relate to any, really, except perhaps the labor president’s son, a former policeman fired for being too compassionate, who returns to help his father.

The book moves really well as it shifts between characters and scenes. Each has a good deal of background thrown in fairly expositorially, but it’s not so much as to bog the novel down. The author reminds me a bit of John D. MacDonald for some reason, perhaps the pace and topic matter, but without the main character that the audience should sympathize with.

Another thing: the book dates itself mostly not because of the technologies used and whatnot, but it talks about salaries, and they’re low. Wealthy fatcats make $90,000 a year, and a lot of middle class types make under $10,000. Each one jars you a bit.

Then the book ends, kind of abruptly. But it’s a pretty good book and I enjoyed it. Which is a good thing, since I bought three other books by this author up in Bolivar.

Books mentioned in this review:

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Free Books

As you know, I buy my books in bulk at book fairs and often end up with duplicates. A recent cleanup of my bookshelves has yielded the following:

Free books

They include:

Shoot me an email or comment if you want any or all of them. First come, first served.

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Book Report: I’m Not Anti-Business, I’m Anti-Idiot by Scott Adams (1998)

Book coverIt’s been six months since I’ve read a Dilbert book. I don’t know if that’s a record or not; it’s just an excuse to link back to the previous Dilbert book I read.

So if you read that review, you know what I’ll say about it: The humor holds up over the intervening 13 years (since the book was published, not since May). You could still stick these on your cubicle wall. It’s not that hard to read and is a nice respite from longer works or for browsing while you watch a sporting event on television.

Although maybe the deeper meaning in the deeper meaning of Dilbert lies in the fact that these books, of which I own 8 (numbers 6-14 now, so I’ll try to remember if I go looking in book fairs for the rest) is that they’re amusing, they’re relevant, but they’re not really deep and resonant that I remember any of the real ongoing storylines. The characters sketched, yes, but the plots? Not so much. They’re more like the Executioner novels than other sorts of fiction, enjoyed as one consumes them, but only really for the time one is reading. Not that it’s a bad thing, mind you, but nothing more, ultimately.

Books mentioned in this review:

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