Category: Book Report

I admit, I fall behind on the Robert Crais reading. I don’t know why I haven’t been seeking out his books at the library like I have John Sandford’s (until recently). But I haven’t. I read Chasing Darkness over four years ago.

But when I fall behind, my beautiful wife is there to provide me with nice hardback copies of the books for Christmas, like this one. And I read it promptly.

It’s a Joe Pike-centered novel, where Joe runs into a crime in progress and intervenes, only to learn that the victim is on the run from a vicious, relentless killer who has been looking for his targets for years. Joe’s heart goes pitter-pat, such as Joe Pike’s heart does, over the “niece” of the victim who really isn’t his niece at all.

So the basic outline of the book is that Pike and Cole try to uncover who these people are and who is after them while also trying to find where they’ve run to next. It’s pretty standard stuff, but I rather enjoyed the book. I got the feeling that I did when I read the old Parker books: I wanted to be like the protagonists. I aspired.

It’s not something I tend to get from the Davenport books or the John D. MacDonald one-offs, or even the Executioner series.

My beautiful wife gave me three of these books, and I’m looking forward to reading them, not just finishing them.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book smells like the 1970s: it’s an inexpensive paper and an inexpensive hard binding designed for school libraries. Or maybe that’s just how they did it in Great Britain in those days. I dunno. It’s got a bit of a musty odor that it shares when you read it.

As the title says, it’s a a book about how to take a couple of sticks, some paper, plastic, and/or other material, and string to make a kite. Like most craft books, it starts out with basic techniques and moves to specific projects of different types of flat kites (box kites are not included). Also, note that the book does not include directions for embedding glass in your kite strings, so no fighting kites, either, children.

But it’s something interesting to consider as a project to work on with one’s children. You could go to the drug store and buy a wing-style plastic kite for two dollars, but if you really want to make an impression in their future memories, you can take a couple dowels (or better yet, tree branches) and do the same thing.

Maybe I’ll do that one of these days.

At any rate, this book is only 28 pages, so it’s not a grand tome on the history of kites through the ages (which is what it would have been if it had to be padded to an adult craft book). It’s just sticks, papers, designs, and some instructions on flying a kite. A simple pleasure, or so I remember.

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Reading the pulp fiction blogs newly in the sidebar reminded me that I had not read a John D. MacDonald novel in quite some time (not since The Damned in March 2012). So I picked up this book.

The novel focuses on an American ex-pat in Mexico who wants to get a little extra income to supplement his savings, so he talks to another ex-pat, a decadent aging beauty who suggests an artist workshop. They line up a couple of artists to teach, rent a rundown failed hotel for the summer, gather a staff of inexpensive indolents, and lure a varied cast of characters to the workshop. Students include a retired career military man who likes to paint landscapes where battles were fought; a newly married couple on a honeymoon, a recent widow who is beautiful but who seems to have given up on life; a player who’s out to conquer more women in his scientific study of the species; an artist working low-paying jobs; a high school teacher with a hunger for sex; a couple of rich Texan girls; an ad man who suffered a mental breakdown; an architect whose firm is breaking up because his partner’s wife has fallen in love with him, and a couple of older women who paint as a hobby.

That’s pretty much the plot, too. They come together, meet, interact, pair off somewhat, and then they leave.

With a MacDonald book, you kinda wait for the death or crime as a pivotal moment, but there isn’t one in this book. I’m not sure there’s even a pivotal moment, although a party has some dramatic impact on the people and turn their lives a bit.

But it’s an interesting book, and one filled with MacDonald’s writing. So if you’re a fan, you’ll enjoy it more than if you’re not, but it’s worth a read. Also, you should be a MacDonald fan. Thank you, that is all.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book in the discount bin at the grocery store a couple years back. It’s an art gallery style book sampling modern comics, particularly focusing on independent artists who are doing creative work with the new technologies.

I mean, there are some smaller books in the Marvel line mentioned, but most of it is smaller artists publishing their own work. The focus is not American comic art, either; the book features a lot of British, Brazilian, Japanese, and European artists. The author is himself a British comic book editor, so there you go.

The biggest insight I got out of it really has more to do with my own relationship to the comics, such as it is these days. As I was going along, I read the captions for the art first and only then, sometimes, looked at the images briefly.

So that might explain why I take a little less out of books like Frik’in Hell and why I don’t do comic books as much as I did when I was younger; I’m more into the prose than into the art, and when that art takes precedence over the story, I’m not sold on it. I’m that way with films, too, I guess. Come to think of it, I’m that way with prose books, too.

So it’s an interesting book to page through, and I liked it. But not enough to go buy a stack of comic books.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a coffee-tablesque biography of Mike Royko written shortly after his death in 1997. Strange, I think I read Royko in his lifetime, but if I did, it must have been his syndicated work in actual newspapers, as I did not get a job with Internet access until 1998.

Long time readers know I like Royko (see my book reports on One More Time, Like I Was Sayin’, and Dr. Kookie, You’re Right!). I think I’ve got another collection of his around here somewhere, and I’ve also read his profile of Mayor Daley I, Boss, in the days before the blog.

Interesting side note: According to this book, Royko was encouraged to write Boss by Saul Alinsky.

This book takes an overview of his career from his time in the military through the three Chicago daily newspapers. It has some interviews with people who knew him, particularly his sons by his first wife. It’s a bit hagiographic, but as I’ve mentioned, I don’t mind admiring a figure about whom you’re writing (or reading).

It’s not a deep biography, weighing in at only 114 pages and featuring a lot of photos, but it offers some insight into the man behind the columns that the columns themselves didn’t provide on their own.

I enjoyed it. If you liked Royko, old man, you might, too.

On the other hand, I’m going to have to get away from biographies. Man, they’re all like, It’s going good, it’s going good, he’s dead, the end. At the end of the year, these can hit one right in the depressive cleaving groove.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a Jesse Stone book, but it’s not a Robert B. Parker book. It’s written by one of the guys behind the Jesse Stone television movies, so it comes out of that milieu. It definitely has some television moments in it, but unlike the television excesses that Parker injected in his book after writing for the Spenser: For Hire television show, this book has some description and prose in it that are not dialog. But some moments in it are definitely televisionish in other ways, like when Jesse Stone breaches a room where an armed man might be by hitting the door and rolling into a sitting position with his gun up.

It’s also like Parker filtered through Ed McBain after a fashion: there are multiple, unrelated plot lines running through it. It takes place as Paradise is getting ready to go into the important summer tourism season. A ring of car thieves threatens the town, and then one of the thefts goes awry and leads to a homicide. A criminal from Stone’s past comes east from LA to get revenge. A girl holds her school principal at gunpoint and Jesse Stone helps intercede. The plots don’t all start or end at once; the car theft thing starts the book out, and ultimately gets a mob-assisted resolution midway through the book. The third plot starts out in the middle of the book and resolves over the last half. The main plot, the revenge one (although you might be forgiven thinking the plot that starts the book is the main plot), kinda weaves through a bit and then ends climactically in an episode that makes you go, “What?”

It’s meant to fill the book equivalent of two hours, and it does. It’s not as fast of a read as Parker’s work, but really, they’re two different animals. How different? Jesse Stone gets a cat. Not a shorthaired pointer. Not a bull terrier whom children say reminds them of Spuds McKenzie, a marketing icon from twenty-five years ago.

So it’s a so-so read. Not as good as the Ace Atkins Spenser novel, but Atkins is a novelist by trade. Still, this book is weightier than Parker’s last entries in the series, so it’s got that going on. But a direct comparison and contrastation does us no good.

Books mentioned in this review:

I borrowed this book from the library specifically for browsing during football games; I started the Sunday night when the Packers played the Giants, but I did not end up watching a lot of football that evening, so it was later that I returned to the book and finished it off during the Eagles-Cowboys game before halftime.

It’s a picture book featuring scenes from Paris. The first bit of text in the book talks about, at a high level, the history of the city from the times of the Parisii through Roman times to the modern day. It covers the famous artists who lived there, and I can’t help note that it puts more paragraphs on homosexuals (Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, Rimbaud) than on individual heterosexuals. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, gets a passing mention in a comma-separated list of people. Perhaps it’s only to emphasize the open, accepting culture of Paris. I dunno. But I noticed it because the culture wars have really made me sensitive to it.

At any rate, I don’t know what to say about the photographs themselves. Paris has a lot of things to depict, so I get the sense one could take meaningful and appealing photographs of Paris if one dropped one’s camera periodically.

Still, the text of the book provided me with some insight into the history of the city and the images were pleasing. So the book was educational as well as useful in my annual march toward 100 books. Which I will not hit this year, but there’s always next year.

Books mentioned in this review:

One of the 1000+ page books I’m working on this year to which I constantly refer is the Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft. Man, I hit “Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” and bog down every time, which is why I have not ever read that story before and why I keep putting the volume of Lovecraft down. So in the interreadnum, I picked up this book by Frank Belknap Long because I know he’s associated with Lovecraft, it even has the title like something Lovecraft would have written.

The story is about two scientists and their significant others in Mexico, both of whom encounter a strange beast that arises from the Earth, and suddenly they’re transported to an icy plain. They have to learn to deal with their predicament.

And they do, wordily.

The writing style is the worst of Lovecraft, with a lot of verbiage that throws the pacing off. Working against Long, he writes in the contemporary lingo so the discourse lacks some of the delicious archaism that works in Lovecraft, and some of that wordiness lies in philosophical chit-chat that’s preposterously placed. For example, when one couple comes to their senses on a frozen plain, they talk about whether it would be okay to kill the stranger in the distance for his clothing if he turned violent and did not want to help strangers. They discussed this for several minutes before realizing that they were, in fact, dressed for the Mexican jungle on a frozen plain.

So it’s a short book, more akin to the juvie science fiction work of the 1950s than to actual Lovecraftian horror. The scientists team up, a little woman acts intemperately and gets kidnapped by the large-footed natives of the region, the scientists follow the trail and end up in an arena scene, and suddenly they are back to their own times. They speculate on the titular monster, who does not make an appearance after triggering their transport to the past, and the end. The monster is only the catalyst that leads to their ice age adventure, as it were. Which, I guess, is a bit Lovecraftian; it would not be otherwise if it were answered, bested, or understood.

So it’s a quick little read, probably interesting if you’re interested in a cross between juvie sci fi and Lovecraft that’s unbalanced toward the juvie sci-fi. It’s short enough for a one- or two-day read, too, but it does not lend itself well to continuing “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is really just one book. It’s got a flip cover, where you look at the front and it’s the Polish side and you look at the back and it’s the Italian side. The pages with the corresponding ethnic jokes align with the cover, so halfway through the book, you get to flip it and start the other side. For the record, I only counted this as one book in my annual list.

Ah, me. Ethnic jokes. I remember when I was a child, during the era when this book was in print and, apparently, selling, hearing them. So I bought this collection this year, and it awaited the middle of the football season.

But the humor? Not really funny. I mean, it’s not that I’m offended (you can get the same joke without the offense by swapping out Italian and Polack with dunce or Goofus or whatever). It’s that the jokes just don’t move me. Of course, most joke books leave me cold (see also here, here, here, here, here. Why not add here? That just doesn’t make any sense.).

Which isn’t to say I won’t keep getting them and flipping through them. Because there might be a talking dog joke somewhere that I have not yet heard.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book comes from that great Star Trek dark age, a dark age that was about to lift: The time between the original series end and the motion pictures. I’ve remarked on that dark age before, but I can’t help but notice that we’re about to embark on another one, what with the last series ending in 2005 (that’s seven years already, old man) and the motion pictures probably thinning.

At any rate, this book collects a number of quotes from the original series categorized around a number of topics, from War and Peace to Love to Life and Death. Each section of quotes has a little intro pre-interpreting and hagiographatating the quotes for you, and there are many black and white stills from the series to hold you until the next time the show airs on a UHF station on Saturday afternoon. Or you can scrape together enough money to see them on the big screen. Your 1979 self probably cannot conceive of an 18-year span of television with new Star Trek every week (sorta) nor, probably, the end of manned space exploration. But how time will surprise you.

A cool bit of Star Trekiana. Something to browse during football. You probably won’t see much along the lines of this in print for the latter series, but that’s what the Internet (kinda imagined, but not acutely in 1979).

Books mentioned in this review:

This book stems from what seems like the early days of decks. Maybe it marks a shift in my socioeconomic movement in the middle class, but I don’t remember many decks before the middle 1980s. Patios, sure, but not wood structures above it all. Well, some of the mobile homes in Siesta Manor Mobile Home Park had, instead of a simple set of steps leading to the doors, a couple of square feet with railing around them and storage underneath. Were these decks?

I digress. This book is a picture book for people who are thinking of renovating their yards at the end of the Reagan administration. It talks about considerations with construction, landscaping, and whatnot. It includes a couple of lightweight step-by-step guides. It’s not a guide to how to do the things within, like building a deck or a patio or a shed or installing outdoor lighting, but the guide provides high-level design considerations, photos, material choices, and such and just enough how-to information that you can get a bit of an inkling of what you might be getting into if you decide to do it yourself.

In addition to the deck revolution, the publishing industry might have moved away from books of this stripe–less detailed than your average Sunset book–and into more detailed how-to sorts of things, leaving the magazine market to the design inspiration ideas. Or maybe I don’t know because those books haven’t made their ways to the book fairs yet.

At any rate, a quick enough browse, but no source of inspiration for Nogglestead. Yet.

Books mentioned in this review:

Sure, read a Parker book earlier this year and another one this year, and suddenly I fancy myself some sort of Parker expert, capable of passing judgment on Parker books and the series or making sweeping statements about it. But it’s my blog, and I’m going to anyway.

This Parker seems a little less cold-blooded than the old ones.

The earlier book I read, The Handle, was published in the 1960s, and the series started then and ran until 1974. After that, it lay fallow until resuming in 1997, 25 years later, around the time the film Payback went into production. In the big screen film treatment, Parker has a relationship with a woman (not just a woman, but a woman who looks like Maria Bello), so maybe this book plays off of that, since Parker has a woman in it, too. Of course, I’ve read two Parker books from 36 years apart. Maybe at some point in the earlier novels he began his change and I’m late to the party.

At any rate, Parker gets stiffed in a job and tracks down the guys who took his money as seed money for a heist. This one takes place in Florida, so it brought to mind some of the John D. MacDonald work along with the Carl Hiaasen and the other Florida partisans. It occurs to me that Florida, as a location, matches LA, San Francisco, and New York City as far as the place that is consistently presented as a sort of character. Stark gets this one mostly right, although he talks about West Palm Beach as a lesser light than Palm Beach, and from what I remember in my visits, West Palm is kinda nice, too, relative to everything else. But I might be mistaken.

I almost started the second paragraph in a row with “At any rate….”, but I’m going to break that off. The book doesn’t hang together as a whole very well–some parts are episodic and detached from the main plot a bit, and Stark shifts viewpoints a bit to no great meaning to the story. He was dashing these books off against his other prodigious output. It’s still good enough reading. I’ll continue to keep my eye out for cheap Stark books.

Oh, and apparently this book has been turned into a Jason Statham movie, Parker, scheduled for release in January. Perhaps I’ll go see that. The fact that the film has the name Parker in it might indicate that sequels will be forthcoming. Donald Westlake (Richard Stark) had allowed film treatments of the books, but only if they changed the names unless they were going to make a film series. The fact that the movie is named Parker might mean sequels, or it just might be because Westlake passed away and his heirs are not so demanding.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is a 1979 young adult novelization of the Bill Murray film. It’s quite mindbending, when you think about it. In 1979, Scholastic was publishing 91-page-long novelizations of screwball comedies. A couple decades later, Scholastic would publish weighty young adult fantasy novels that got translated into major motion pictures. A mind bender, huh? An who owns the copyright to the novelization of Meatballs? Haliburton Films. Well, probably not that Haliburton. More likely it’s related to Haliburton, Ontario. But that’s neither here nor there.

So what’s the book like? The movie, maybe. I haven’t seen the film yet. It’s a screwball comedy, with young men trying to attract members of the opposite sex and with a camp of lessers pitted against a camp of athletes and well-to-do. There are a couple set pieces and an uplifting plot of a young boy being taught how to be a better person by the whacky camp counselor portrayed by Bill Murray.

As a book, it’s a collection of disjointed scenes with little continuity between them. In a movie, which I suspect in the matter matches the novelization after a fashion, this works better with the visual comedy and such. But in a book, it’s very juxtaposed to the point of just being juxt.

So take that for what it’s worth. It’s not a bad read, I suppose, if you’re thirteen years old in 1982 and your parents have coughed up a buck and a half for the book club order and you don’t have cable or a Betamax to watch the actual movie (which was a real condition in 1982, and it explains why books like this exist). But the book holds up less well than the film, probably.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book dates from the 1980s, so it is dated in some regards, but only in minor ways. Well, minor ways if lived through the 1980s. No one uses a computer or a cell phone, for example. Cell phone? Geez, even that’s dated; I’m the only one in the world except Jitterbug customers still carrying around anything but a smart phone these days. My poor children have no diversion when we’re waiting somewhere except for horning in on other children whose parents have provided them with a digital pacifier. But I digress.

Some of you might remember this strip, which ran for 34 years in the newspaper (geez, that’s dated, too). It dealt with an 80s career woman who was perpetually on a diet, sort of involved with a lightly stereotyped 80s man named Irving, and dealing with older, traditional parents who did not get her at all.

The material seems to hold up well; although I’m not a career woman, I have seen some struggle with the same issues that Cathy makes light of. Except they have cellular phones now, sorry, smart phones, and computers. It’ll probably hold up a little better than, say, Dilbert, which depends on technology and on surreal humor that will be about as funny and relevant as Bloom County remains today. Sorry, Scott Adams, but there it is. Cathy, like Calvin and Hobbes, comments on the human condition, not just the contemporary workplace or political landscape.

Books mentioned in this review: