Category: Book Report

I think David Barry wanted to write A Christmas Story for our generation. The book is short (117 pages, which is just right for a movie script). It’s a sweet little story that’s not full of quite the absurdity of his normal work or his full novels, and it’s cut into a short number of scenes. It tells the story of a dog’s death on Christmas Eve against the backdrop–or maybe it’s the foreground–of the children’s participation in the Christmas pageant.

Now, the text itself is not 117 pages. As a matter of fact, almost fifty percent of the book is old pictures and illustrations designed to visually evoke the scenes, although they are not direct illustrations of the scenes. It’s Lileksian.

It’s a plenty short piece and an easy read, so it’s worth its time.

This is a lightweight tip book, a self-help bit. It focuses mostly on staging your home when you’re still in it and provides a lot of ideas about how to alter your furniture arrangements and little things you can do with your accessories to help sell your home. As such, it wasn’t that helpful for me, since we’re vacating before selling.

However, if you’re selling your house with your stuff is still in it, this book is probably worth your time.

It takes a strong man to buy a book of photography depicting cats and then to admit it on his blog, publically. At least that’s what I tell myself before the beatings start.

This book focuses on cats in the workplace, mostly in New York City, in 1979. It’s worth more for the backgrounds of the workplaces than the cats in the foreground. A liquor store that Ed McBain would have described. The window of a bodega looking out on the New York street. Broadway full of 1970s cars. That sort of thing. I think I’m turning into James Lileks. Moreso. Of course, I’m not scanning them and making a Web site dedicated to them. Yet.

Also, if you like kitties, this book has them. No chinchillas, though.

Of course, I’ve seen the film with Alan Ladd as the titular Shane, and I own the The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking album which samples from the same, so when I saw the book, I bought it. It is the short novel (120 pages) upon which the film was based. Like True Grit, the book is told in the first person narrator through the eyes of a child. In this case, it’s the son of the farmers with whom Shane comes to becomes friends.

The book differs from the film in that Shane’s relationship with the husband is more brotherly, and the husband knows that his wife is attracted to Shane. At one point, he gives her a very Hank Reardon sort of “I understand because he’s so much better than I am” speech. I guess they couldn’t develop that sort of relationship in a short movie. Also, I don’t remember the film taking place over the course of a year, but I might be mistaken. Also, the boy does not chase after Shane when he rides off.

Still, an enjoyable read. A lot of people must agree, since the 1983 printing I have is the 65th.

Let’s face it, looking at the cover of this book, a cheap black binding with only the words “Private Edition” underlined in pink cursive, one gets the sense that this might be a certain type of book. When one reads the first line of the first story, “As I fastened my dress–the soft, pretty one of pongee that I made especially for Dad’s arrival…”, one might think, Holy pongee, it is that kind of book!.

But one might then remember that this is a Macfadden Publishing collection from its old True Confessions style magazines. Instead of hardboiled morality plays featuring violence and stoic codes, we get gushy melodramas about how to deal with moral failings of the heart and lovelife. Unfortunately, many of them deal with contrived and rather silly “failings.” In the first, a woman’s hopes of a good marriage to a loving man are almost lost when it’s discovered that his first wife, presumed dead, is alive, so the protagonist is not really his wife. She shuns the husband then, fearing a scandal. Or another woman calls off a marriage and enters a life of charitable service–because her mother was a shoplifter!

The book isn’t a very good read, and it is most interesting as a historical document possibly offering insight into the mind of a young woman in the years after the war. These were her concerns, these were the parables to show her how not to get into trouble and how to find redemption if she got into trouble. Or at least these were the concerns peddled to her by Macfadden Publishing. Given that it made Macfadden himself rich, he must have touched someone and convinced them to buy these stories.

This is a shorter 87th Precinct novel from the 1970s, before hardback bloat demanded every book be 300 pages. A blind man is murdered, and then his blind wife is murdered and the apartment tossed. Is someone murdering blind people, or were they targeted specifically? That’s the question for Carella and the gang.

Funny, the book deals with veterans back from the War (Vietnam) and shenanigans in the military, but in 1977, McBain didn’t feel the need to foam about LBJ, Nixon, or Carter. Was George W. Bush just that evil that McBain couldn’t refrain in later books? It’s fortunate he did, otherwise he would not have sold so well nor built a legacy which makes his later political rhapsody tolerable.

I might count this as a historical novel. Well, a pulp novel from history. The cover says Tarzan is perhaps the most famous character this extraordinary writer ever created, but I know Burroughs mostly for John Carter, the Warlord of Mars. Tarzan has gotten quite the screen time, though, hasn’t he? I remember the television program that KPLR ran on Saturday mornings before its movie triple feature. Remember when independent stations ran those?

At any rate, this book follows the plight of Tarzan’s parents, the Lord and Lady Greystoke, marooned on the African coast, the raising of Tarzan, his growth and eventual ascendance among the apes, and the arrival of other maroonees at the same spot. There, Tarzan saves Jane, and the hearty French (!) rescue Jane and her family. Tarzan then, in the final bit of the book, goes to civilization and ultimately Wisconsin (!) to save Jane again, but ultimately lets her wed his cousin who has assumed the title Lord Greystoke.

The end bit runs very quickly (quicker since it’s missing 6 pages of the climax). Taking Tarzan out of the jungle ultimately doesn’t work, but I bet others in the series will return him to the wild. I bought a number of them at a recent book fair and left some of them unpacked, so I imagine I’ll read it in the next month.

All the cool kids, and by that I mean Kim du Toit (PBUH), love the Flashman novels. So when I lit upon one for a couple bits at a book fair, I bit. You know if you’ve been reading here any length of time (and don’t skip the book reports) that I’ve been reading historical novels, particularly the Sharpe series, so I have to draw a quick contrast between the two. Unfortunately, this book and probably series might fall short.

In this book, a ne’er-do-well aristocratic prodigal son gets thrown out of school (apparently, the books take off of a bully and boor from another British series of schoolboy books), gets his colors, and ends up getting sent to India and Afghanistan as an officer. He gets reknown and reputation for surviving massacres simply because he runs away, lies, and does disreputable things. I kept hoping for some sort of redemptive moment, but at the ending of the book, he finds his wife has been cheating on him while he was away and accepts it because her family has become his family’s meal ticket.

I guess the books were written at different times, which might explain the differences. Fraser’s book came at a time when it was radical to puncture the sense of pride Britain had in its empire; Sharpe’s books, where Sharpe starts out sort of a Flashman sort but with comraderie, kinship, and some patriotism, actually prop up the traditional notions instead of knock them down. Hence, I enjoy the Sharpe books better for the thematic treatment.

I didn’t enjoy this book, ultimately, and I’m not going looking for another in the series. To say I won’t read one, though, might be going a bit far. Perhaps I’m optimistic enough to hope for some redemption somewhere.

I read this book right after the Gates thing and right after a conversation on race that pretty much ended with my black friend saying, “You’re not black, so you can’t understand and you’re wrong.” Maybe this book was penance. Or maybe it’s because it was the first Mosley book I saw at a book fair after I read Transgressions. Pick whichever you want to fit into your narrative of Brian.

This book is later in the Easy Rawlins canon, and it fits into the mold of good hard-boiled detective fiction. Rawlins helps a friend by finding what his wife’s child, the titular Brawly Brown, is into. He peels away the layers and finds that the young man is indeed in over his head in something bad and he has to go to extraordinary means to extract him (in a fashion).

That said, the retro feel of it, the strange lingo, and a certain alienation of the reader from the argot of the story keeps with what one encounters reading the oldies today. However, Mosley pulls the white reader out a little with continued that’s what it’s like to be black asides. The situations Rawlins encounters aren’t that much different from the things encountered by the regular private eye, but the first person narrator dwells upon his blackness an awful lot. I don’t dwell on my race that much, so that’s very alien to me. I’m not sure if it’s authentic or not, either, but if it is, that’s a real tragedy.

Still, I liked the book enough to not shirk other Mosley books in the future.

I read the first book in this series (Sharpe’s Tiger) earlier this year, and nobody saw fit to fill in the gaps in the series for my birthday, so here I am reading the second book.

In this book, Sargeant Sharpe is the sole survivor of a massacre by a treasonous English major. Colonel McCandless takes Sharpe to try to capture the traitor and bring him to justice as English forces march to fight the armies of Northern India. A good collection of details and episodes based on real history.

One thing between reading this book and Space Vulture is how much more detailed modern books are. The old ones provided some sketches and a fast moving plot, but the books these days really lay on the detail. I don’t know, it can take the book out of your imagination a bit and shoehorn it into the author’s. Not that this book is that bad, per se, but I think it’s a general evolution of the common style. I blame Faulkner.

One of the more interesting things about this story is the authors. Childhood friends in the 1950s in Illinois, they went onto different things. One wrote the story that became Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. The other became an archbishop. They got together and wrote a book that would hearken back to the sci-fi space operas they loved as kids. It’s such a neat story, it appears on the back instead of anything of the plot. Probably because it’s the sort of thing that hearkens back to fifties space operas.

The book follows the takedown of the Space Vulture, a criminal genius whose exploits are legendary. Opposing him are the reknowned bounty hunter Victor Corsaire; Gil Terry, a small grifter who was briefly in the custody of Corsaire; Cali, the widowed administrator of a planet raided by Terry and later, more successfully, by the Space Vulture; and Eliot and Regin, Cali’s two plucky young sons who are left behind. In a series of reversals and cliffhangers, the foes gyrate about each other and finally meet for the climactic battle on a slaver planet.

The book walks the line between earnest and campy, staying pretty earnest. The style mimics serials a bit, complete with an ending that indicates another adventure will be available next week. And, with an archbishop co-author, we get prayers and peace in the face of death that you don’t normally see in science fiction, but these are really just flourishes and asides, so religious belief is not core to the story.

Overall, a pleasant reading experience.

This is another of MacDonald’s hardboiled detective things. In it, Lew Archer has to help a family find their son, who has had some mental problems. Of course, it opens into a can of worms wherein the boy might have killed his real father when he, the boy, was eight; people who change names but not skeletons in their closets; illicit love affairs during the war (World War II, remember) whose sins are avenged in the present, 25 years later; and so on, and so on.

You know, while reading this book, I was stricken with insight into why you don’t tend to see a lot of these sorts of plots in the twenty-first century: people move around a lot, particularly the people in larger communities and places where writers live. You don’t tend to get several generations of different families sharing the same space. Maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe I’m projecting. Maybe I don’t read enough contemporary fiction to know what I’m talking about. But a lot of newer books have different sorts of crimes and not so much sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons vibes.

At any rate, a good book. Worth reading and/or rereading.

A better title for this book would have been I Am Legend And Other Stories, as the book contains the 170 page novel that served as the source for the Will Smith movie as well as The Omega Man. However, I thought the whole book was the title story, which meant I expected the title story to extend the whole 300 some pages. When it ended at page 170, I was a little disappointed since I thought the book would carry on for another 130 pages of plot twists. Still, a decent book and worthy of making two films, although I bet neither of them end the way the book itself ends.

In addition to the title story, we get some other tales of varying length. An interesting note: one of the other stories, “Prey”, also made it to the big screen in the film Trilogy of Terror. Of course, true fans of Matheson already knew this, but when I make connections like this between unrelated bits of knowledge in my head, I feel clever.

A good book, and I guess Matheson is well known for his work. It’s punchy prose from horror pulp, and its terseness is quite different from Stephen King, which means it’s a quicker read and just as rewarding. I’ll have to monitor book fairs for more of Matheson’s work, which is the second-best compliment I can give to a writer.

Well, the book had no icepickings, but it had a bunch of murder and mayhem. This is the 56th book in this paperback series following a Killmaster for the secret agency AXE. Nick goes with a revolutionary to Haiti; she wants to invade, he wants to extract a physicist who is building the Haitian bomb. Carter recognizes their guide as a KGB agent with his own agenda. The plot utlimately gets explained as an afterthought. A Haitian nuke? Ah, who cares, BANG BANG naked woman BANG BANG knifing explosion naked woman. That’s why one reads pulp.

As an addendum, I said this when I read another Nick Carter novel:

Fortunately, no trained goats tempted Nick, or it would have been a much different story.

All I have to say about that is this book features a trained goat.