Category: Book Report

This book collects the first two books in the trilogy, natch. A featured selection in the Science Fiction Book Club, too, I learned from the ephemera that came with the book–namely, the flyer for the month where the book was featured.

I like Harry Harrison. I read his Planet of No Return in middle school, and I’ve dabbled with the Stainless Steel Rat series (see also The Stainless Steel Rat for President). I’ve even discovered that I read another alt history book of his recentlyish (Stars and Stripes Triumphant, July 2006). I characterized this as an alt history book as well when I bought it, but it’s more fantasy than straight ahead alt history.

The books center on Shef, a thrall raised by the local karl (minor royalty figure) who kept Shef’s mother. As a bastard, he’s mistreated of course, but he learns some smithing. When a band of Vikings invade to avenge their father, Shef becomes part of their army to rescue his captured stepsister. Then he rises in the ranks and becomes a lord in his own right, guided by a mysterious god-figure who thwarts even Othin.

It’s a fantasy book because it does feature Norse gods as real people, includes a lot of visions and stuff. The two books clock in at 800 pages, so I felt my bottom in the chair, so to speak, although the books were good enough reading as I went along. Although the battle scenes are more Patick O’Brian than Bernard Cornwell in that they’re rather anti-climactic and a bit of an afterthought, with much of the book coming in the in-between things going on. A bit of a knock, but I guess I did end the reading experience with the end of the middle part of the trilogy. If I stopped watching the first Star Wars trilogy after A Empire Strikes Back, I’d been left a little hanging.

Of course, if that’s the metaphor that holds, I’d better not read the third in this series, or I’ll find that the Ewoks keep the Norse gods from winning at Ragnarok.

Books mentioned in this review:

If you take the classic British totalitarian works like 1984 and A Brave New World with the Existentialist preoccupation with unsavory protagonists, you have A Clockwork Orange. In a future England whose government and language appear heavily influenced by the Soviets, a young malcreant and his mates (droogs in the cant) spend their evenings committing crimes and ultra-violence for fun and for money. When Alex, the self-styled leader and your humble narrator is caught, he serves time in an overcrowded prison until he is offered an opportunity for early release through a program that brainwashes criminals into avoiding violent acts. When he’s returned to the street, he is at the mercy of those he victimized and his former droogs until some of the opposition party want to use him for their purposes of bringing down the totalitarian government.

One would hope that not too many readers identify closely with the narrator, a thief, thug, rapist, and murderer; however, Burgess uses the language of the narrator to lure the reader in. When you first start, the nadsat lingo one out of the book, but after a while, the reader understands the argot and this understanding has to act as the only bridge, one hopes, between the reader and the sociopathic I speaking.

It’s a short book–180 pages, like they used to write paperback fiction–and a decent enough read that really does carry the flavor of 1960s science fiction, perhaps even British science fiction. Its intersection of Orwell and Sartre, though, have given it its classic status.

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I bought this book some years ago from the Quality Paperback Club, undoubtedly as one of the four or six books for a dollar deal. I was looking to branch out, and the write up of this book piqued my interest.

It’s about a woman, obviously someone with an English degree, who gives up her current life to return home to a small island off of Maine where the main industries are lobster fishing and working for the summertime residents. The life she gave up was not some sort of Assistant Professor (non-tenure track) position, but that of deep sea fishing boat captain. As a matter of fact, a character based on her appeared in A Perfect Storm played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Looking at the cover photographs, that casting choice might have been flattering.

So I started to read it, and her writing style is choppier than the sea in a Nor’easter. The book has no real narrative flow other than being her thoughts and asides over the course of a bad lobster season. She muses on the life on the island, some of the local characters, and the basics of lobster fishing. Then her mother gets cancer. Then the book ends.

Even though I started out thinking about how choppy the writing was, somewhere into the book I really overlooked it. I really enjoyed visiting a lifestyle so different from mine in a remote location. Also, I decided that the author looks less like Martin Short and more like she could be one of my relatives on the Noggle side, so she became like family. I also bought another of her books at a book fair this weekend, a later book which depicted an older Linda Greenlaw with all her limbs, which indicated that the book didn’t have a “I got caught in a lobster trap, lost an arm, but triumphed!” resolution.

I picked this book up immediately after reading The Tommyknockers, also set in Maine. Like A Salty Piece of Land, the cover of this book depicts the author by the sea. Sometimes I find similarities and threads among the books I read where they aren’t, really, but I mention them anyway.

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I was in the mood for a Florida story after my recent fiction meanderings, and I had this recent acquisition on the outside of my double-stacked to-read shelves. Also, I remembered that Jimmy Buffett novels were supposed to be pretty good. After all, the Author’s Note points out that he is one of six authors to make it to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List in both fiction and nonfiction. So I gave it a go.

Sadly, I was disappointed.

The book started out with a tolerable, although Kenny Chesney song, sort of story. A cowboy on the run from a rich, vindictive ranch owner in Wyoming hides out in the Caribbean with his horse, ultimately settling into a fisherman’s guide job in the Yucatan. No, wait, let me back up: There’s a frame story, said cowboy at the behest of a very wealthy 102-year-old sailor woman, lands on a Cayo with a lighthouse and is tasked with restoring it. Meanwhile, the woman is on the hunt for an authentic replacement for the Fresnel lens that powered the lighthouse. Then we go into the flashback about the cowboy on the run, who meets his folk-singer hero, who lands the job as a fishing guide and runs into an ex-lover upon which he left on sudden terms, who goes to Belize to buy a jeep and has epic sex with a college girl who happens to be the rancher’s stepdaughter and who happens to turn him over to the bounty hunters looking for him, and who smokes a lot of spliffs on the way.

Then we get back to the real time, exposition and a panthenon of deus ex maquina occur as the folksinger hero, on a trip around the world in a restored amphibious plane, finds a Fresnel lens for him and as the rancher dies after a S&M video of her surfaces. The hero meets the grand-niece or something of the rich sailor woman (spoiler alert: rich sailor woman dies), inherits a mansion, and the book ends.

The book starts out in a rambly story telling fashion, then we start getting odder sidebar stories and letters from the folk singing hero telling about his travels, and then the main conflicts are resolved offstage, and the news from England that the rich rancher woman is dead and so on. The book is semi-enjoyable, but ultimately disappoints that the enjoyment that melts into semi-enjoyment goes nowhere.

Also, it gave me the freaking munchies.

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All right, I’m not going to make a habit of reviewing the various and sundry literary magazines that I pick up for the poetry. But this particular magazine struck me on many levels:

Here’s what I found noteworthy:

• The book was laid out before desktop publishing, so it required cutting and pasting. No, the real thing, from which the computer metaphor arose. I did some of that myself in the olden days.
• The magazine was based in the same suburb in which I live now. Meanwhile, in 1981, I lived in a housing project in Milwaukee.
• The mailing address of the magazine is a post office box in the zip code of this very suburb. 13 years after this magazine appeared, I used the same post office for my literary magazine. I did not live in St. Louis proper at the time, but wanted a St. Louis mail address for submissions. I had to drive 45 minutes from Jefferson County to check the box. Which was rarely full.
• Yes, the Image magazine does include a poem by Lyn Lifshin. You know the six degrees of Kevin Bacon? Well, if you’re any kind of poet at all, you’re one degree of Lyn Lifshin. That is, you’ve appeared in at least one magazine with her. Heather has. I have not.

Those are the crazy things that I thought about when I looked through the magazine. The artwork is what would later become known as ‘zine-ish, with a lot of simple hand-drawn bits. The poems are of lightweight literary quality. But I got a kick out of the magazine for the other things which it reminded me of and the wonder of wondering who these guys were that put this out right at the beginning of the Reagan era.

Yesterday’s foreshadowing about the introduction to the novella in Transgressions mentioning this book wasn’t a hint as to the resolution of that story; instead, it foreshadowed that I read this book after that one. Because one decent 780 page book deserves another. Well, truly, this book is only 560 pages, but it took me a while to read it.

In it, the town members of Haven, Maine, start acting funny when a writer begins to uncover an alien vessel buried in their midst.

Well, it’s a kinda short King book, but he still puts in cannon fodder characters that he introduces just to kill off. Also, he spends a lot of time making allusions to other books (The Dead Zone and It in particular) and even alludes to himself (a writer up near Bangor who writes gross books, unlike the writer in this book, who writes Westerns).

In true King fashion, bizarre things occur as people encounter fantasy novel situations and don’t realize they’re in a fantasy novel. However, like many, the writing of the book is very good but the end leaves me a little disappointed. Maybe I misconstrued some of the foreshadowing, but it seems to me that early parts indicated survival of characters who didn’t survive. Perhaps I misread it. But with thousands of volumes left for me to read, I don’t have the need to go back and re-read it to see if I was right.

Now you can understand why I read those Dilbert books I reported on earlier in the week. After 1300 pages in two books that took me weeks to read, I needed to boost my numbers and I’m a little behind on the annual book reading numbers.

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In his introduction, McBain says he wants to honor a mostly-forgotten form from the pulp era, the novella. Longer than a short story, shorter than a novel, the form doesn’t get much love these days. So he rounds up a number of people to contribute works in this form.

Included:

• “Walking Around Money” by Donald Westlake. The story of series character Dortmunder and a plot to break into a printing plant and print a number of bills of a foreign currency from the presses used to make the currency and reset the serial number equipment.
• “Hostages” by Anne Perry. A crime novel, sort of, depicting the seizure of an Irish Protestant leader by Irish Catholics. That’s all secondary to the main plot: Men are stupid, and docile women really have to save the day.
• “The Corn Maiden: A Love Story” by Joyce Carol Oates. A rather pedestrian, almost high-schoolish effort detailing the abduction of a young special needs kid told in a variety of viewpoints, including that of her abductors. Side note: I was very down on the novella at first, but I realized I had confused Joyce Carol Oates with Erica Jong. Once I realized my mistake, I enjoyed it more. Because I don’t have a lot of respect for Erica Jong.
• “Archibald Lawless, Anarchist at Large: Walking the Line” by Walter Mosley. This novella doesn’t feature his series character, but instead a rather crazy setup spun from the Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin paradigm. I enjoyed it a lot and was disappointed that Mosley hadn’t created a series with the characters.
• “The Resurrection Man” by Sharyn McCrumb, not so much a crime fiction piece as a character study about a slave/former slave charged with a grisly task for a medical school in the South circa the Civil War.
• “Merely Hate” by Ed McBain, a chance for McBain to mention once again that he really hates George Bush. Pathetic.
• “The Things They Left Behind” by Stephen King. After the attacks of September 11, a man who called in sick that day must deal with some remainders and reminders from his coworkers who died in the attacks. The introduction mentions The Tommyknockers by name. Consider that foreshadowing.
• “The Ransome Women” by John Farris. A reclusive artist chooses an art dealer’s assistant to be his next subject, and her police detective fiance thinks there’s something amiss since the former subjects are all reclusive.
• “Forever” by Jeffrey Deaver. A police statistician thinks that an abnormal number of suicides might mean murder. A bit of a fish-out-of-water tale that was very pleasing.
• “Keller’s Adjustment” by Lawrence Block. A murderer-for-hire has a change of heart after the September 11 attacks and has to work it out while on the job. Plenty readable.

On the whole, it was a pretty good book, although I didn’t enjoy a couple of the novellas very much. Sadly, that includes the McBain piece.

It weighs in at nearly 780 pages, so it’s quite an endeavour to read it. But the novellas move along and you can read each in one or two nights, so it might expose you to some writer whom you’d enjoy in longer form.

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This is an early book in Scott Adams’s collections, one of those whose cartoons are reprinted in Seven Years of Highly Defective People. So I got some deja vu.

As always, the cartoons are amusing. I’m sure I relate to them because not long after this book was published, I left the world of retail and light industrial to make my livelihood in an office, and I didn’t know how to behave. Fortunately, it’s a lot like Dilbert, so eccentricity was okay.

By the way, if you’re keeping track at home, by the time this book was published, Wally was not yet Wally.

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I bought this book last week at a book fair and thought it would make a good break from the thick books that have been bogging me down this year. Indeed, it was not only a break, but a retread of sorts, since this book collects material from earlier Dilbert books and provides a bit of gloss or exegesis to the characters Adams created and what he was thinking of. This includes thoughts about the origins and evolution of Ratbert and Dogbert as well as the character who would become Wally but who was called by many names over the first couple of years.

Considering that this book came out in 1997, that means Dilbert is coming up on its 20th anniversary. It seems like it’s younger than that, but probably only because I think I’m younger than it would make me. Additionally, one has to reflect that Dilbert really caught on because it was partially established when the Internet rolled around and geek/engineering culture ascended. Adams really was in the right place at the right time.

So this book shouldn’t be the first of the collections you get; you can get the same cartoons elsewhere, and Adams’s commentary is interesting if you’re really into Dilbert. Or if you’re an Adams drone who will buy any book he publishes, like me.

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This book, unlike the previous books in the series I’ve looked over, doesn’t deal with a state in which I’ve lived, only one I’ve visited (and have read a large number of books about). So the book didn’t make me homesick, but it did give me a sense of wonder and a desire to visit the state and maybe even live in it a bit (as Mary Schmich said, “Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.”).

The book also has a brief summary essay about Florida history that made me realize one thing: The United States must be the only country in the history of the world that has named so many places for its sworn, and defeated, enemies. For example, Osceola. Why don’t they teach that in the colleges instead of the usual drivel?

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Well, this is a collection of watercolors, religious figures and whatnot, accompanied by some verse presumably by Ms. Lasky.

Not as good as some of the other art books I’ve reviewed recently. But it didn’t take long to look at or to review.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book collects two previous volumes’ worth of one liners and insults, meaning it’s 416 pages of quips and acid tongue baths. Most of the stuff is dated and not very good, but the book has enough amusing clips and whatnot that it rivals an Ogden Nash volume in the number of potential IM statuses and tweets you could use to sound clever.

If you wanted to republish this book, you could retitle it as the Giant Book of Tweets. If you’re hankering for reading a big book of that sort thing, this is is your bag.

Of course, everyone who knows me will now have to doubt the originality of my zingers. Because I had no comic sense before, and now I’m even parts H.L. Mencken and Dorothy Parker.

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This book is a collection of lighthearted verses about the business world. It falls somewhere between an Ogden Nash volume and The Complete Geek (An Owner’s Manual).

The verses are light-hearted but sometimes pointed, and unfortunately they’re not very poetic. I mean, Ogden Nash isn’t the most poetic of authors, but he can turn a phrase that you’ll want to tweet. But LaConte’s pieces are too earnest and common to warrant that.

It’s not that long in reading, as it contains only 30 poems, and maybe you’ll find something in it you recognize if you worked in a traditionalesque corporate office environment 15 years ago.

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This book focuses on Michigan, unlike Great Lakes: A Photographic Journey. It doesn’t contain any text aside from photo captions, either, but it does share some of the images from the other book. As such, I didn’t like it as much as I would have. Also, it includes Detroit, romanticizing a city which probably shouldn’t be romanticized any more.

But the imagery made me homesick for the upper North Midwest again.

Books mentioned in this review:

I tried to read this book, a monograph published around the turn of the 20th century. However, as I read the biography of Gainsborough, I found that some of the pages were not cut correctly, which means that I could not open some of the pages. Fine, I thought when I got to the first one, I’ll skip this pages and keep going. As I continued, there were several such pages which rendered reading of the biography pretty tough.

So I looked at the pictures. English portraiture. Pretty boring stuff. I did come away with the fact that England didn’t really produce a lot of known painters and that they liked portraits.

I also learned that my sainted mother did a report on Gainsborough in the third grade, ca. 1957, and remembered one of his paintings. Ah, the strange, meandering pathways to knowledge.

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This book collects some of Nash’s work in an around the World War II era, complete with mocking tones about Mussolini and Germany. However, it includes some gems of zingers and whatnot and amusing enough poetry to read aloud to a couple of children who don’t get the point but like to chant when they hear words they recognize.

I liked the book, and I hope some day I get to use “Who was Ogden Nash?” as a Jeopardy! question.

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This book is a monograph, I think, which means it’s a short autobiography along with photographs of selected work by the artist. This particular volume is special in that it contains not only a clipping of the artist’s obituary from a 1966 New York Times, but it is signed by the artist.

He led an interesting life, born in Lithuania in the nineteenth century and moving to America at age 4. He lived in poverty and quit school at 13, but he had a talent for art and worked in lithography until he saved enough for a trip to Europe. There in France prior to World War I, he painted, hung out, and met his wife. They came back to America and managed to support themselves on art fairly well.

His work is modernist, where the lines of statuary blurs to sculpture. His figures, mostly nudes or busts, blur the lines and don’t strive for absolute anatomical correctness but do resemble the human form. I liked it well enough.

I inherited this book from my aunt, and she searched and searched to find more information on the artist and the monograph. Four years later, with wikipedia and better online book listings, I found enough to know the book isn’t worth the amount she’d hoped it was worth. Back in the day, I got her and another friend of mine into going to garage and estate sales looking for things to sell on ebay. Me, I had a couple hundred bucks a month positive cash flow–not including the neat stuff I got myself out of the proceeds–but neither of my women companions really ever managed to list much on ebay. As a result, Pixie’s house is littered with stuff she bought (oh, and how we would fill her station wagon up, stop and unload it, and then fill it up again on a Saturday), and my aunt accummulated a large number of books and some ceramics that scattered to the family when she passed.

There’s a metaphor for or lesson of art in that perhaps. But I am too lazy to find it.

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This is an early Tom Clancy book, and you can really tell if you read it soon after one of his later books. For starters, it’s under 400 pages. This comes at the expense of some of the elaborate cast of characters you get in later books, where Clancy fleshes out even minor characters with a page or two of their own. Instead, only the major characters–and eventual recurring characters–get the treatment, which is odd, because later books don’t go into as much depth. I guess Clancy expects you’ll remember who Jonesy is (he’s the one possessed by the alien Mr. Gray, isn’t he?).

At any rate, a Russian sub wanders off the reservation, and the whole of the Russian navy chases it to the edge of American waters. Jack Ryan suspects the Russian captain is trying to defect and needs to come up with a plan to establish contact and to somehow get the sub and its new propulsion system into American hands. You know, like in the movie.

Clancy’s not at his peak building tension here, either. The final climactic sub battle seems almost tacked onto the story and relies on quick scene switching, and I mean after a paragraph in many cases, to artificially attempt to create tension. It’s not as effective in that short of bursts; Clancy gets better at it and at continually building tension to a resolution as he matures as a writer.

Still, a good book. You know when they study literature after the next Dark Age, they’ll read Clancy and King from our era.

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I admit it, I bought this book (finally) because Ron McLarty was Sgt. Belson in the television series Spenser: For Hire.

It got some critical note and some commercial success (I hope), because it’s ultimately a pretty good book. An obese Quality Control inspector in an action figure factory spends his lonely nights in an alcoholic haze. After a week at the cottage with his folks, they die from an automobile accident just as the father finds the crazy disappeared sister. This quite frankly breaks the fellow from his moorings and from his current life.

He sort of stumbles on a cross-country bike ride to claim his sister’s body, and the narrative splits between flashbacks that tell the story of the happy suburban life’s disintegration as the daughter goes crazy and the man on his meandering voyage of self-discovery.

This is the second of the crazy sister books I’ve read recently (the other being The Moment She Was Gone which I read in December), and I’m pleased that this book didn’t resort to a cheap gimmick to twist it. I figured out the exact moment where the narrator would have died if we were going for an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge twist, but that didn’t erupt. Instead, we get a measured (but slightly fantastic) story about a man’s reawakening when everything he knew goes.

I recommend it.

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I bought this book because it was $1 at St. Michael’s and because our family and I have recently become fixated on this show. We watch it every night, and I took the online contestant test recently.

That said, the book is a little underwhelming. It was published in 1990, when the new show was 4 years old, so it’s a very high level gloss over the show. A bit about Alex, a bit about contestants, something about how it’s taped, and then lots of trivia answers, mostly laid out like game boards so fewer questions would win more space.

I guess there are some other books out there about the show that give a real insider’s view of the process, including a couple written by contestants. I should check those out.

So I guess it was an okay thing if you’re into the game show, but as I said, underwhelming.

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