Month: October 2011

I think I’ve talked myself into liking the book.

Which wasn’t a slam-dunk, I tell you. Its main character is a Christian formerly into S&M and drugs before his conversion experience. He’s enjoying a nice autumn afternoon with his wife and children in a Midwestern state when his girlfriend from his bad old days calls, and she needs his help. Since he’s got to go to New York City to tend to his mother’s estate, he stops into see the ex-girlfriend some 17 years after their thing and his old life ended. She tells him that his daughter he didn’t know about has run off, and she wants him to find her. When he does, the daughter is whacked out on drugs and bad living and might have seen a murder committed by her terrorist (maybe) boyfriend. And the main character, with much soul-searching, has to get her out and stop a catastrophic attack.

I’ll tell you why I didn’t care for it: For starters, it’s very slow to get rolling. Klavan uses some obvious foreshadowing where the narrator says that this or that particular incident or detail is going to be important. But the beginning of the novel includes an awful lot of navel gazing and exposition before the action takes over. Secondly, the story seems very contrived at the beginning, where the main character feels the need to see his ex-girlfriend after the elapsed time and he wonders why he’s helping her and whether he believes the girl is his daughter and he has to deal with his mother’s death and her descent into schizophrenia at the end and…. Well, it does go on so, and it passes several points where I personally would have abandoned it and the main character continues on only to continue the plot.

Secondly, it gets a little politically polemic at times, and even though it’s politically polemical in ways I agree with, it’s kind of jarring. Almost like an Ayn Rand novel with better dialog. Klavan’s not afraid to pitch this book specifically to the people who by 2008 were reading his blog and watching him on PJTV.

Third, the celebrities depicted within it are too apparently based on actual celebrities. There’s thin representations of Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie, and there’s William Shatner. It’s too obvious that these are the people in the book, thinly veiled, and instead of blending the novel into our world, it breaks up the novel’s internal reality.

However.

The main character is a bit Hamletish in his interior anguish over his decisions (in retrospect, as this double-effect narrator recounts things in the recent past). He’s worried about his descent into schizophrenia like his mother. He bears great, almost debilitating guilt for his former sins and whether his salvation will stick when he’s in his old milieu (and whether he really wants it to). So once I accepted that the narrator might be a little tetched and unreliable (not unlike the narrator of Slaughterhouse Five), I could get over those elements. Eventually, the action rolled and things happened and now the narrator was doing things instead of agonizing over things, and I could understand the interplay of his guilt and the questions of free will, salvation, and redemption presented within the novel.

So it’s okay. I didn’t abandon it like I abandoned the audiobook version of Chasing the Dime by Michael Connelly when I tried that on audiobook (the main character is doing that, why exactly? A phone call to his new number for the person who used to have it? REALLY?), and when I immediately finished it I wasn’t so keen on it, but I thought about it for a bit, and it’s an interesting enough book for me not to pan it.

This is a short book that collects some outrageous lawsuits and notes their results. They’re grouped by topic, and each features a clever picture of an actor portraying a shady lawyer. Each explanation of the lawsuit is a couple paragraphs. It’s like someone made a book of distilled “That’s Outrageous!” columns from Reader’s Digest and distilled them. It’s like Overlawyered.com condensed and with more snark.

In short, a quick browseable book suitable for sports viewing, but not likely to leave much impression on you once you’re done with it. If you’re like me.

This is the third novel in the Three Aces omnibus edition I’ve been reading for quite some time now. Set in 1961, it deals with a rich woman who comes to Nero Wolfe to help ransom her kidnapped actor husband. Wolfe helps, gets his fee, but the freed husband dies in the family manse and the woman’s children come to Wolfe for help in recovering the ransom money. This leads to complications, including an arrest warrant for Archie Goodwin.

It’s an okay read, more slowly paced than modern mysteries. But I still like them, albeit paced out so that I’m going to read some quicker fiction here in a bit.

A couple things to note: One, the book makes an allusion to a contemporary (1961) television program when Goodwin explains that an FBI agent drew his identification like Paladin drew his gun. This alludes to the television program Have Gun, Will Travel. The strangest bit? I’ve never seen it. I just knew it. Two, one of the characters has a bit of information revealed about him: He was on a Nixon political campaign committee of some sort (for the election of 1960). In a stunning turn of events, this was just a note about the fellow, an attorney. He was not the bad guy.

Maybe I shouldn’t hurry back to modern suspense fiction just yet.

This book is a similar to Bruges and Its Beauties in that it talks about the history of a city in hopes of making you want to visit. Unlike the Bruges book, though, this book did make me want to see Orvieto myself.

Orvieto dates back to Etruscan times, which is before the Romans in Italy, you damn kids. Over the millenia, the city has built up and into a hilltop of tufa, a volcanic stone, and overlooks valleys ripe with wine grapes. They’ve got tunnels and catacombs as generations upon generations have mined the tufa for building, and they used it for buildings and for the walls that defend Orvieto. It was a papal and other churchly retreat, so it features a number of ornate cathedrals dating back only seven hundred or eight hundred years, although they have recently (relatively) discovered the foundation of an Etruscan temple (in the olden days, Romans and later Catholics built their churches over the remains of others’ temples, so the religious buildings were layered in most places).

I like to fancy myself a history buff and study local history wherever I am, but here in the New World, prehistoric is only 600 years ago. There’s a lot less for me to worry about than people in areas where they’ve had recorded history for millennia.

So partially on the basis of this book, I bump Italy up to second on the list of countries I’d like to see. Of course, as an untraveled American, I’m not that eager to go to foreign lands where I might be singled out for maltreatment because I’m an American, and these days I count most of Europe in that category. So I won’t see Orvieto anytime soon. I’ll have to wait for the pendulum of sentiment to shift (that is, until my children and this nation’s army bail Europe in another large war and Europe is briefly grateful) or until one of Victor Davis Hanson’s tours goes that direction. Because say what you will, I do believe that if an anti-American mob chose to attack a tour group and the shit got real, VDH would know how to form the tour group up into maniples and march us to Gibraltar. Yes, I know, Xenaphon would have used a phalanx formation, but the maniple is a more effective fighting unit, and VDH knows it, too.

You can easily tell from the title what this book is: it is 28 projects for making table lamps out of wood and lamp kits. It’s a 1950s book, aimed for the high school shop market I think (at least, this particular book came from a high school library). It talks about the different styles within the book, from contemporary to more traditional. Strangely, sixty years later, even the “contemporary” styles are traditional. I mean, how many lamps made of wood have you seen recently?

I’ve rewired some lamps, so I am familiar with that part of the process and am unafraid of it. This book gave me some ideas and inspiration, distantly, of how I could make a lamp out of a couple pieces of wood and a band saw. A number of the pieces, though, require a wood lathe, and I don’t have one of those yet, and if I got one, one would have to wonder how long it would sit in its box untouched (my new table saw is at 10 months).

A worthwhile browse.

This book says “for all occasions,” but I get the sense from the nature of the gags that most were written for presentation at a Catskills resort in the middle part of the 20th century. Most of the jokes have a Jewish flavor, relying on characters named Moishe, Max, Shmuel, and so on who work in the garment district on Manhattan. Most, but not all. The books aren’t anti-semitic, but poke fun at some of the stereotypes as seen by New York comics.

Other jokes and anecdotes run to the preachy, lacking punchlines but offering a certain moral to the story. I don’t disagree with the morals, of course, but they weren’t funny.

Was the book funny? Not really; in the 34 years since its publication and probably 60 years since much of the material was fresh, humor has gotten punchier. Most of the stuff in this book wouldn’t make the cut at Reader’s Digest or the Saturday Evening Post.

However, I did find some movie ties. The joke told by Eddie Murphy (made up as an old Jewish man) in Coming to America? It’s in here. The anecdote that introduces us to Clint Eastwood’s character in The Eiger Sanction (“Professor, I would do anything to improve my grade.” “Are you free such-and-such night?” “Yes.” “Good, because you need to study.”)? It’s in here.

But that’s the best redeeming feature of the book. Also, the Cardinals and Packers have done well while I’ve flipped through it.

This is a simple book of one liners from famous comedians (circa 1996). The quotations are presented one to a page, and the book itself is comb-bound. So this is not Bartlett’s by any stretch.

The book chooses one liners from great comedians, and the selection has held up. You got your Carson, you got your Carlin, you got your…. Richard Lewis? Well, it is a book from 1996. Some of us in the Jeopardy! contestant pool remember Anything But Love.

I tweeted one of the quotes in the book by Steve Martin:

When you study philosophy in school, you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.

With any such book, I think that’s the measure of its worth.

So definitely worth a browse.

When I mentioned this book when I bought it last week, I said it was trying to piggyback on Dilbert’s success. That’s not accurate, actually. Although Dilbert might have made a book of business cartoons palatable in the middle 1990s (see also The Complete Geek (An Owner’s Manual)), this book is more akin to the photocopied-to-death cartoons passed around the office in the era before the Internet. The cartoons are single-panel and usually revolve around a gag wherein a corporate buzzword or situation is expressed humorously with the punchline written in strange fonts. Clearly, the things were designed to be tacked onto cubicle walls.

As such, it’s rather dated and has not held up too well in the intervening 17 years since its publication, whereas Dilberts from the era have. There’s a fascinating study in that.

Apropos of nothing, the last book I reviewed was written by someone named Ripley about an artist, and now I’m reporting on a book by named for a cartoonist named Ripley. Believe it! Or, you know, not.

Some of you might even remember the Ripley comics in the Sunday papers, or some of you might remember the television series with Jack Palance. If you do, you know what kinds of things you’ll find in here: just nuggets of human oddity. This being a 21st century representation of the franchise, you get pictures and captions instead of line drawings. I browsed it while watching a ball game, but I’m not sure I remember anything from it, so this isn’t helping me with Jeopardy! much.

Although I did get a firm appreciation for how Ripley parlayed a sports cartoon into a multimedia empire and museum chain that continues 52 years after his death.