Category: Book Report

Sadly, 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.

This 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.

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.

You 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.

I 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:

 

As 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:

This 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:

 

Wow, 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:

It’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:

After I read a science fiction paperback recently, I chose from shelves laden with thick important tomes another of the many thin genre paperback novels: this book. I had already read this book, some 20 years ago when I was in high school and when I’d borrowed the paperback from the Community Library in High Ridge (memory and logic serves that I borrowed it from the Community Library and not the high school library because I read a paperback, not a paperback in library binding).

The plot: A Federal Marshal goes to a mining colony on Io where miners are cinematographically killing themselves. Sean Connery, back when he had color to his hair, uncovers a drug ring run by the colony’s administrator, and has to deal with hired killers. An Amazon reviewer calls this High Noon in space, and I immediately tut-tutted it, but there is a countdown-to-the-killers element, but it’s not a direct transfer and there’s more to it than that, but the film certainly nods to the classic.

So it’s a good lightweight science fiction book. Wait, some aficionados would call this a Western in space (see above). But you know what? That’s what science fiction really was before Niven and the engineers took over the genre. Accessible, breezy, and commonly themed stories set in space that people could relate to without pulling out the slide rule.

Books mentioned in this review:

I’m not above reading a book based on a videogame (see also The Dig). Heck, I’m not even above reading a novelization of a movie based on a video game (see also Street Fighter). So a science fiction novel set in the universe of a video game franchise? Why not?

The book doesn’t depend upon the knowledge of the video game series. It drops in some terminology that you’ll recognize if you’ve played the games, but it doesn’t rely on them. It’s fast-enough moving and original, unlike a film script, so between the pre-existing mythos upon which it draws and the fact that it doesn’t just run a series of scenes with depth make it a bit deeper of a book than a screenplay adaptation.

It fits into the game series, I discovered on Wikipedia, but I’m not sure I care how. They say that these detailed games are an art form in and of themselves, but I don’t think videogames can eclipse books/movies/stories, since in addition to requiring a media player (like movies and recorded music), it also requires enough patience and skill with a controller to get through the story. I have a theory that I’ve alluded to about the degrees of art, where primary art requires only the art work and the art lover (live theatre, live music, books, art works), the secondary requires the art work, a mechanism to recreate the art work, and the art lover (recorded music, movies, text on a screen). Video games requiring skill to advance the narrative represents a third degree, if possible, which diminishes their experience.

The author is a technical writer at Microsoft who apparently cranked the titles out in a matter of months. You know, I’d like to think I could do that, too, if I had full time paid work of it, but I could disappoint myself.

At any rate, I enjoyed the book so much that I looked for more by the author when I went to Hooked on Books last week, but I didn’t find any of the Halo books. I’ll keep an eye out in the future, though, because I’m running out of things to read.

Books mentioned in this review:

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.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

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.

Books mentioned in this review:

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.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

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.

Books mentioned in this review:

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.

Books mentioned in this review:

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.

Books mentioned in this review:

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.

Books mentioned in this review: