Month: June 2015

This book is pretty short, about 130 pages with 30 some pages of introduction. As I’ve recently rediscovered, one should generally read the introduction to classical literature college textbook editions last. So I did with this book.

Spoiler alert: Ivan Ilyich dies.

The story itself covers the life of Ivan Ilyich briefly, discussing his youth, his entry into government service, his marriage (happy, then tolerated), and his pursuits. One day while preparing his new home in the city for his family, he slips on a ladder and hits his back on a knob. Although he laughs about it at the time, the injury eventually causes his death as some internal damage grows over the course of months. Ivan goes to various doctors and tries various medicines and therapies, but comes to believe he’s dying. As he does, he sees life slipping away and people beginning to move on with their lives without him.

It’s a pretty grim story, and one that resonates with me and threatens to trigger my latent hypochondria. I know exactly what little pains revealed my aunt’s and my mother’s cancers which would kill them in a matter of months. Now I’m going to worry about little bangs when I’m working around the house and floating kidneys.

The introduction gives a brief biography of Tolstoy and then muses on death in literature and philosophy for a length equivalent to a third of the book.

The book itself comes from a university bookstore sometime (although I didn’t get it from one, obviously). As such, it includes someone else’s underlining and marginalia. In this case, a studious student, who underlines metaphors and writes “metaphor” in the margin and who underlines names and writes the relationship to Ivan Ilyich alongside the text, which pretty much gives the relationship in the same sentence. Although my professors encouraged me to “dialog with the text” by marking up my textbooks, I didn’t really enjoy defacing the books that way. Fortunately, this one is not marked up to the point of illegibility.

At any rate, it’s a nice little piece of Existentialist Russian literature, a short read that tackles a subject you don’t get in a lot of books.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is my very first manga, and this book report is my first chance to make the joke Manga but pawn in game of life, although it could probably have used more setup. I wonder if anyone else has ever made that joke before; however, in lieu of researching it (I mean, searching the Internet for the phrase), I’ll just accept my primacy.

Where was I? Oh, manga.

Well, this is the seventeenth volume in this particular story, so I’ve missed quite a bit. There’s a page of characters in the beginning and a couple of paragraphs of The Story So Far. So, the story: There’s a tournament of shamans in Japan. Every five years, they choose a shaman king, and there’s a tournament to see who it will be. There are a bunch of young sorcerors fighting each other to win; there are some alliances happening, and one of the boy’s father comes to teach something but first fights a couple of them. Then the bad guy allies of one come to fight the couple using dirty tricks. And then there’s a cliffhanger. To be continued in Shaman King #18. I think there are 36 in all.

This ain’t my bag, baby.

For starters, it was definitely odd to read from right to left. Undoubtedly, it is good for my brain to do strange things like that, but. Also, the influence of video games on the art and plots mean it’s full of interludes, combat, reflections on player stats (everyone goes on about one character’s 1,250,000 mana!), and panels that identify some power, attack, or spirit animal by putting it all in capitals amongst an explosion image. Also, the book contains numerable-but-why-count-that-high panels of character reaction shots where the startled characters say, “Huh?” I don’t know how many ways Japanese language has to convey this; maybe a bunch of subtle things have been simplified for English readers. Or maybe not. Maybe I’m not the target audience, either, since I’m not all about the comic art and gauge books on the words and plots. But I’m unimpressed.

I still have three or four of these to go through from my recent purchases, and I’ve been warned not to judge all manga from a single volume of some series, but I’m not that eager to jump into another one. Except they’re short, and I’ll be able to let my son look through them. So I’ll probably knock through the whole bunch by the end of the summer.

Books mentioned in this review:

My beautiful wife saw this book at the library and brought it home for me to read in a hurry, since it’s a new book and is only available for a week checkout. So I did.

Welp, the book is an Ace Atkins Spenser book, and he’s moving more into his style than merely imitating Parker’s here. In the book, Spenser works to investigate the relationship between a judge in a small Massachusetts town who sentences juveniles to a for-profit rehabilitaton facility and the for-profit company running it. Of course, the new mob is involved somehow, although I’m still unclear as to how.

My enjoyment of the book is probably diminished by how soon after the Travis McGee books it came.

Atkins’ style for these books, as I’ve mentioned, seems informed by television; the scenes are television-like scenes of scenery and dialog, and the ending of the book wraps the plot up with an explanatory resolution and then some things that might be woven into a future episode. Or not.

The writing also suffers from a couple other flaws:

• The reliance on the italicized other point-of-view chapters. Instead of the criminal, though, we get a tangentally related unfolding story of not Spenser’s focal point on the island, but another youth sentenced to the facility for a crime we’re only sort of aware of. His story isn’t fully fleshed out, but it’s included because it gives the book a Youth In Jeopardy storyline so favored in Brandman’s Jesse Stone books and gives the book grounds for a cinematic but otherwise extraneous Spenser swoops in in the nick of time to rescue said youth.
   
• Some extraneous wordage, including some repeated things. At the outset of the book, when Spenser’s in his office, there’s a touch of description and interaction with the mother of a teen sent to the institution, and there’s a sentence tacked on that says his Brooklyn Dodger hat and peacoat are hanging by the door. But the sentence is tacked onto an unrelated paragraph. Throughout, we’re told about his Dodgers hat and peacoat over and over. Aside from that, there’s a whole chapter of Spenser meeting someone at a textile museum that adds nothing to the story but does describe the museum in detail. It makes one wonder if the author researched it or visited it and had to throw that in to justify writing the trip off.
   
• It lacks the depth of MacDonald’s writing, where the asides add some resonance and muse on the meaning of life aside from the crime story. To be fair to Ace Atkins, Parker’s writing started to skip over those flourishes around the time of his trips to California for the television series Spenser: For Hire.

Is it a good book? Is it a bad book? It’s a modern crime fiction book, and it’s probably not a bad example of the genre. But it’s nothing compared to the paperback originals from fifty years ago.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book collects three Travis McGee novels from the late 1960s into a single hardback edition. The originals, it should be noted, were in paperback. The three books are A Tan and Sandy Silence, The Long Lavender Look, and Bright Orange for the Shround.

In A Tan and Sandy Silence, McGee investigates the disappearance of an former lover after her husband comes looking for her upon The Busted Flush and tries to kill McGee. Travis discovers a disturbing financial plot, philandering, and a sociopathic French Canadian accountant involved in a land development scheme with the husband. The book also has a subplot about McGee contemplating retirement and marrying a wealthy widow. In The Long Lavender Look, McGee and Meyer find themselves framed for murder in a remote Florida county where they’re mistaken for murderers of a local hoodlum who just got released from prison after his last score. Locals, including some of the police, are on the hunt for the proceeds of the heist. In Bright Orange for the Shroud, a formerly well-to-do acquaintaince finds Travis and eventually tells of how his new wife involved him in a land development swindle that picked him clean. McGee tries to recover some of the money from the swindlers and finds a backwoods badman of which nightmares are made.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a McGee book (actually, it’s only been four years since I read The Turquoise Lament). It seems like longer, though, because I tore through these in high school and have not made a concerted effort to re-read them since (unlike the Spenser series, which I last read through from start to finish about fifteen years ago–there were a lot fewer to get through fifteen years ago). So after a little taste of MacDonald with End of the Tiger and Other Stories, I picked up this collection I had standing around. And I’ve rediscovered how much I like this series.

There’s action and interesting plots that we discover along with McGee (remember when this was a thing–that the reader discovered the plot along with the protagonist instead of having the bad guys have their own chapters in italics so everything was clearer at the outset? Modern readers must lack patience, or authors fear the old people who still read books might die off before seeing their genius machinations at the end of the 400-page thriller). The books are at times a bit wordy, a bit musing, but the passages include digressions such as this from A Tan and Sandy Silence:

I went below, turned on a few lights, built a drink, ran a thumb down the stack of tapes, picked Eydie, and chunked her into the tape player and fixed volume.

Eydie has comforted me many times in periods of stress. She has the effortlessness of total professionalism. She is just so damned good that people have not been able to believe she is as good as she is. She’s been handed a lot of dull material, some of it so bad that even her best hasn’t been able to bring it to life. She’s been mishandled, booked into the right places at the wrong time, the wrong places at the right time. But she can do every style and do it a little better than the people who can’t do any other. Maybe a generation from now those old discs and tapes of Eydie will be the collectors’ joy, because she does it all true, does it all with pride, does it all with heart.

So I settled back and listened to her open her throat and let go, backed by Trio Los Panchos, Mexican love songs in flawless Mexican Spanish.

Twenty five years later, and I know what he’s talking about.

At any rate, the asides, philosophical musings, and bits of self doubt have more depth in them than the similar things you find in the Don Pendleton Executioner novels; given how Pendleton’s paperback originals came after MacDonald’s, I can’t help wonder if the former didn’t directly influence the latter.

I didn’t remember much from these books–the subplot from A Tan and Sandy Silence being the thing I remembered the most–I should really look back to this series and reread it for pleasure. Although I’ve got few of them on my to-read shelves, and I feel obligated for the most part to hit those before returning to books that I actually enjoy. So maybe I’ll get lucky and find some other omnibus editions in the book sales of Springfield sometime soon. Of course, I have plenty of other MacDonald paperbacks to read, and my recent experience has reiterated that they’re worth my while.

Books mentioned in this review:

I was talking to a friend of mine, and he mentioned that he was reading a Zane Grey western. It’d been a while since I read one (December 2011 to be exact), so I picked up this book.

The book takes place in Australia; two cowboy friends hire on as drovers for a man who is part of a large expedition designed to drive several thousand head of cattle from several “stations” (ranches) across the Australian outback. However, during the course of the trip, one of the two vies for the affection of a lovely young lady with a suspicious drover who has cattle-rustling designs on some of the docile Australian cattle.

The book is 304 pages long, and it feels every one of them. The descriptions are lush, and the action is slow to start as the characters, the relationships, and the courtships begin. Strangely, the confrontation and gunfight with the bad guys takes place at about page 200, which leaves 100 pages of wondering what’s coming next. As it stands, natural disaster and natives provide the set pieces between then and the successful arrival a continent away and the promises of marriage that follow. As my friend says, Western novels are just romance novels with horses and gunplay.

The book isn’t paced as fast as I prefer, and it’s not my bag (although it’s more my bag than, say, the Gunsmith series). Still, the Australian setting triggered my rewatching of Quigley Down Under and might have inspired the recent purchase of Crocodile Dundee. So it’s got that going for it.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a picture book sold at the House on the Rock to help you remember your visit. It does more than that, actually, as the photographers used lights in taking the pictures. You can actually see the rooms.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, the House on the Rock is a domicile of sorts built by a man atop a sandstone column starting in the 1950s. The original house stands atop the column, but over the decades between then and now, the fellow (Alex Jordan) and the people he picked to maintain the building have continued adding to it. So the flavor is something between (I would presume) the Winchester House and Hearst Castle. The original house is now surrounded by gardens, other buildings, and a museum dedicated to Alex Jordan, so it’s not clear to the casual visitor that the house is on a rock at all.

But back to this book: It’s a tourist hagiography of the facility and a bit of Alex Jordan, so don’t expect any depth or criticism. Instead, it goes on in marketingese about the various collections and oddities that the attaction houses, which is useful, since one should expect to be overwhelmed when visiting the place in person. It took us almost four hours to go through all the stuff at a pretty consistent pace throughout, without dithering or lingering on anything in particular.

The images in the book are brighter and clearer than the underlit interior of most of the actual House on the Rock itself which has a definite cave feel. Whether they do this to spotlight different things in each room or just to save money on lighting, I don’t know; however, the images are better than the real thing in the areas that they depict.

At any rate, it’s worth a look if you find the book at a book sale. It might not be worth the $20 they charge for it (shrinkwrapped, so you can’t see its contents until you’ve ponied up the dough) at the gift shop.

This book is a small booklet that recaps the tour of the Original Wisconsin Ducks in the Wisconsin Dells. I recently took this tour, so I know.

I was a little torn as to whether to count this as a book read or to write a book report on it, but I’ve done so for similar booklets offered by tourist attractions I’ve not visited (such as Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello), so I figured why not?

So the trails and tales are the same that you ride on if you tour with this particular flock of ducks (in Wisconsin Dells, there are many, many companies running tours with the Ducks, apparently). The tour talks a little about the Dells, about the history of the area (which includes a lost town of Newport), about the benefactor who donated land for the Wisconsin Ducks to tour on and the home her heirs still share, and about the flooding in 2008 that almost altered the artificial topography of Lake Delton and the Wisconsin River forever until a massive effort of man returned it to its “natural” original artificial existence.

The booklet is very lightweight and doesn’t delve much into the region or any of the historical anecdotes it covers, but it does serve its purpose of refreshing a visitor on the things he or she has seen. It might be a little fresher or novel for someone who hasn’t taken the tour; reading it without the experience of the ride and the guide’s patter as she recounted the stories from the book in order might make the book seem a little deeper (although the paragraphs in the book are slightly more detailed than the audio presentation, but not much) might give one more urge to learn more about the things herein. Or maybe not.

At any rate, it’s worth the quarter I’d pay for it in a book sale, and because I took the trip, it’s worth the fiver I paid for it on the duck.

Books mentioned in this review: