Book Report: From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming (1957, 1964)

You know, the book struck me as slightly familiar, and a trip to my library database software confirmed it: I’ve read this book recently. Well, sort of recently. Between 2000 and 2004: that is, between moving into my house in Casinoport and starting the book report things here on the blog. Oddly, I didn’t remember too much about the plot, but certain setups, scenes, and turns of phrase resonated.

SMERSH, a Soviet organization tasked with killing spies, decides to kill Bond. They set up an elaborate trap for him, using an attractive young Soviet for bait, and put into motion the plan to not only kill Bond but to also embarrass British intelligence.

The Bond books are straightforward, without the winking and smirking that characterizes the movies. At the same time, they’re very pro-Western and anti-bad guys, so red-blooded American readers can enjoy them and hearken back to a time where the West, at least in fiction, hung together.

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Book Report: Murder Spins The Wheel by Brett Halliday (1966)

This is a Mike Shayne mystery without the Castro boosterism. Written in the middle 1960s, it’s a throwback to the old style of hardboiled mystery combined with the contemporary laxity in moral values. In it, an underworld associate of Shayne’s gets set up. A fixed football game, a horserace gone bad, and a set-up stick-up lead the associate to New York, where he’s ultimately set up for a narcotics bust. Shayne has to delve into the complex set of grifters and whatnot to find justice.

It’s a good bit of paperback hardboiled mystery. I’ve read a number of the Shayne series in the past decades, and I’ll pick up others I’ll find. That’s a pretty rousing endorsement from me, except I suppose that I pick up pretty much anything if it’s under a buck at a book fair.

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Book Report: Murder at the ABA by Isaac Asimov (1976)

Isaac Asimov not only wrote science fiction, not only wrote science fact, but also wrote mysteries. This particular bit is one such, and it’s one that includes Isaac Asimov as a character. The first person POV focuses on Darius Just, a literary author whose protege is murdered at the American Booksellers Association conference in New York. Just finds the body and determines that, although staged to look like an accident, his tempermental and sexually deviant, uh, protege (I already called him that, but other nouns are not forthcoming) was murdered. Just has, uh, only four days to find the murder. And if he does, he’ll let Isaac Asimov write the book.

Asimov has fun with the book and with using himself, going so far as to have footnote back-and-forth with Darius Just. Along the way, it’s a whodunit sort of mystery where you could figure it out, sort of, if you looked in the right places. Me, I don’t puzzle the book out that way, so it’s not ordinarily my cup of tea. But I enjoyed it.

As a side note, I’m actually re-reading this book. I first read it in high school, lo those many years ago. I liked it enough to pick it up for a buck, and all I remembered was the gimmick of having Asimov in it.

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Book Report: The Frumious Bandersnatch by Ed McBain (2004)

This book is one of the last of the series, and quite frankly, it’s not of McBain’s best. I mean, you’ve got the 87th Precinct guys looking into a kidnapping, working around the FBI who would use Carella, their liason, as a gopher. Actually, that’s it. One crime from multiple points of view. Still, I figured it out awfully early and hoped for a twist that never came. Also, sometime this century, McBain started knocking president by name (Bush). I’ve mentioned that before, but he brings it out here again as a couple of asides. I could understand a sort of disgust with the Powers That Be in some of his previous books, but now that he’s naming names for especial vituperation, I’m saddened and slightly put off.

Also, he probably works to hard to get the title thing working.

Even with those knocks, the book doesn’t fall to below the Fair or Slightly Good rating. Better than any Pearson or Randisi novel I’ve read.

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Book Report: The April Robin Murders by Craig Rice and Ed McBain (1958)

This book comes from early in McBain’s career, and it’s not even really a McBain book. Instead, it’s McBain finishing a book started by another author. However, unlike Robert B. Parker taking over a Raymond Chandler novel, McBain’s mannerisms and stock characterizations don’t appear. Maybe it’s too early in his career and he didn’t develop the stock. That said, this is a Craig Rice book that Ed McBain worked on.

It’s a little pulpy bit about two New York street photographers (who have had other capers in previous books) who decide to move to Hollywood to get rich and famous. Bingo, the brains of the outfit, almost thinks he has control of the situations and is atop things, but he’s not. Handsome, the athletic and good-looking part of the duo, seems to follow Bingo’s every word, but he has a tendency to go above and beyond his instructions in a beneficial way. Ergo, the characters have a sort of double-effect to them. On one hand, they seem buffoonish, but might only seem buffoonish on the surface.

In a series of events, they’re sold a mansion by a con man whose receipt carries the actual signature of the presumed murdered former owner. Then, the housekeeper and caretaker is actually killed in the house. As the duo run through their cash reserves hiring attorneys and whatnot, while trying to figure out who killed the previous owner, who killed the housekeeper, and whatever happened to April Robin, the starlet who first owned the house.

An amusing little book. I enjoyed it and wouldn’t mind reading the straight-up Craig Rice books in the series.

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Book Report: The Case of the Mischievous Doll by Erle Stanley Gardner (1963)

This is a Perry Mason novel. It clocks in at like 140 pages. I understand Gardner dictated two of these a month or something. As such, you should expect it’s a formulaic read, albeit one that’s pleasing.

This one details a plot where an heiress’s double approaches Mason to make sure she’s not getting chosen to be a patsy in something. She’s got an odd story to tell, and when a man appears dead in her apartment during her apparent kidnapping, Mason has to determine if his client is in on it.

On a side note, the 1960s technology that doesn’t appear so dated for this novel: the speaker phone. When Della hooks it up, it reads just like the speaker phone in the conference room where I used to work. 45 years later, it doesn’t read like they’re playing eight track tapes.

And an odd note about the edition I have: it’s a Walter J. Black edition, but mine has a dustjacket. This is the first of the Walter J. Black editions I have of anything that has a dustjacket. Did someone slip a dustjacket for the same title over this one, or what?

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Book Report: The Careless Corpse by Brett Halliday (1961)

Funny how the periods overlap; this book, written within a year of The End of the Night, is definitely a throwback to earlier detective fiction and the MacDonald book foreruns the more modern mystery (as does all of MacDonald’s work). Sure, this book is one in a series with a two-fisted action hero whose name graced a mystery magazine (Michael Shayne), but MacDonald covered that series thing with Travis McGee, and the latter more closely resembles the work of the other MacDonald (Ross) than the hardboiled school (Chandler, Hammett, et cetera).

This book details with the theft of an emerald necklace from a rich man with a boozing, thrill seeking wife; after time, he gets a letter blackmailing him about his fraudulently placing an insurance claim on a replica necklace. Shayne comes in to wreck many plans, including some to arm counterrevolutionaries in Cuba.

The last bit is the most amusing of all: written right after the revolution, the two-fisted American PI is pro-Castro and some tough speechifying defends the revolution and says that Castro’s not necessarily a communist. Of course, a year later, this book would be proven wrong. However, the political framework doesn’t take away from the two-fisted action, so it was forgiveable. And amusing.

I don’t know if I’ve read a Michael Shayne novel since high school; it seems to me I might have, and I really ought to get more. The problem with these books is that the early 1960s cheap paperbacks are deteriorating for the most part in the wild; this one had several pages loose from the spine, including one that the previous owner had put back in backwards (so I read the even page before I read the odd page–it made more sense when I flipped them to the proper position). It would be nice if someone were to bring out reprints or collections, but I suppose Shayne is too old school for that. So I’ll continue to be very careful, only opening the book 25 degrees, and keeping cats off the lap while reading.

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Book Report: Nobody’s Safe by Richard Steinberg (2000)

When I picked up this book, I figured it was going to be a go-go-go suspense thriller like something Heller or Ludlum would write. An uncommonly good cat burglar with a past in shadowy government service knocks over a luxury penthouse and is surprised by the occupant returning. And more surprised when the occupant is hit by shadowy government types. The cat burglar finds the goods that the bad guys wanted, but they’re onto him, and he’s on the run trying to figure out what they want and whatnot.

But he opens the contents of the safe, and it’s the Majic-12 papers. Maybe some readers won’t know what they are, but brothers and sisters, I got the papers off of the BBSes before the Internet existed and read them. Back in my youth, I was more speculative, and the thought of aliens coming to get you in the middle of the night was kinda spooky (this is before I became more realistic and focused on the government coming to get you in the middle of the night, which is not so much spooky as frightening since it’s a possibility). So when I found that, I knew this was an X-Files sort of thriller, not a realistic thriller. It’s speculative fiction or fantasy, not suspense. So I was disappointed and knocked right into reinvoking my disbelief.

I hung with it, though, and made it through the cat burglary of Area 51, the rescue of the aliens (Joe and Max Gray–Hah! I snorted when I read their cover names!), the flashback of dubious merit except that it would please Majic-12 believers, the dubious deal to set everything right, and then the discovery that the deal won’t hold and the sequel is on.

It wasn’t a bad book, but that didn’t make it a good book. Maybe I would have been more tolerant if the book had been packaged as what it is instead of a straightforward suspense book.

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Book Report: End of the Night by John D. MacDonald (1960)

This is probably the darkest John D. MacDonald book I’ve ever read.

The story details, sort of, a cross-country crime spree by four drugged-out kids in the late 1950s. The action focuses really on their last murder (of 4, I think) in a small town and the events that lead up to their capture as well as bits from the trial. MacDonald does not go into a straight narrative, instead starting out with a letter from one of their executioners to a former employee at the prison where the bad guys died. MacDonald then weaves in an out of the in-over-his-head defense attorney’s blustery memos during the trial, the death row diary of the college-kid-gone-bad in the quarter, some “live” actions of the final victim, her fiance, and law enforcement on the trail of the criminals. It’s a bit jumbled, but you get a decent picture.

In most of MacDonald’s book, we get a protagonist of sorts, in some cases a shopworn hero and in others a pretty ruthless, efficient sort of character, but in this book, the protagonist ultimately is circumstances and dogged law enforcement that leads to their arrest. You get a couple scenes with the functionaries in law enforcement, not one guy doggedly stepping forward. Just the professional grouping and how they come together to catch crooks hell-bent on being caught.

MacDonald spends a lot of time on the college-kid-gone-wrong, a kid from a good home who one day decides he’s done with common life, so he walks out in the last semester of college and gets into a tawdry adventure and then falls into the group of drug-addled ne’er-do-wells. He has some conscience, sort of, and serves as a reminder that but for the grace of God go we.

The final scene of the book occurs after the fiance of the last victim, an architect, sells the property where he was going to build their dream house along with the plans he’d drawn up for them. As he drives away, he suddenly swerves to hit a dog but misses and then feels bad for the attempt and relief that he missed. This is the message of the book: one small swerve, maybe even only on whim, can lead one to great evil.

MacDonald’s characterization talents are up to snuff, but overall the book isn’t among his best because of the choppy pacing and lack of a protagonist. Also, did I mention its bleak outlook?

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Book Report: The Private Dining Room by Ogden Nash (1953)

It took me some time to read this book, because I’m reading poetry volumes aloud these days and although one child cannot flee from the poetry, the other one can, so it has been slow going. Still, they like Ogden Nash. Or perhaps I like reading Ogden Nash to them.

Nash’s silly verses are laden with classical education allusions amid the crazy goofing with the language to get a rhyme. Also, a number of the verses are essentially 18 line setups for a pun Nash needed to work in. Still, some of the lines and quips bear repeating and sometimes get it, although most people who quote Nash probably don’t know it.

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Book Report: Love Sonnets selected by Louis Untermeyer (1964)

This is a small collection of sonnet’s greatest hits, sort of. About 25 of them, from Browning to Shakespeare and Petrarch.

Unfortunately, the poems appear in a handwritten font (calligraphy, the credits call it) and they have “illustrations” on the left page of each. The font hurt my eyes, and I ignored the illustrations totally.

Still, I enjoyed some of the poems (again, in many cases, as the major ones are anthologized everywhere else). A couple points:

  • Translated poems, especially those in tight forms like sonnets, probably come through very garbled from the original.
  • Based on these sonnets, I might have been one of the best sonneteers of the late 20th century before I retired. If I could get my two year old to illustrate the book, I could probably match this volume.

Overall, the volume probably isn’t worth your time unless you really dig eye-crossing simulated handwriting.

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Book Report: Shadows Over Baker Street edited by Michael Reeves and John Pelan (2003)

This book will cost you 1d6 SAN. You have Sherlock Holmes and related characters, the poster children for reason, thrust into the world of Lovecraft, where irrationality and things beyond reason rule. You really cannot reconcile the two; the things that go bump in the cosmos win, and it’s ultimately not comforting.

As a collection of short stories written by different authors using the same characters, the different treatments are jarring. In one, Holmes and Watson are action heroes, for crying out loud, having a shootout in the London sewers with a bad guy carrying an unmounted Gatling gun. That would have been kinda heavy, don’t you think?

Still, the book is worth a couple of bucks for the concept and the better stories, but ultimately, it’s not good Holmes and it’s not good Lovecraft.

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Book Report: Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes, and the Fall of Old Mexico by Hugh Thomas (1993)

Porch Girl posted a This Day In History bit about La noche triste, a night where the Aztecs almost wiped out Cortes and his crew. Huh, I though, that’s not something I’m familiar with, and it’s definitely something begging a historical essay, so I ran right out and grabbed this 600 page academic tome about the conquest of the Mexica.

This is an excellent book on the subject. I mean, the author’s completely in the bag for the Aztecs (he saves his most poetic language for describing the glories of the human sacrifice, what he calls the “astonishing, often splendid, and sometimes beautiful barbarities” on p24) and he’s as pink as farm raised salmon (his previous books are The Spanish Civil War and The History of the Cuban Revolution, he makes a point of saying that winning wars without fighting are notable goals of Clausewitz and Lenin–but no mention of that Sun Tzu guy, and he muses that the conquistadores must have called each other comrade). But he merely weights things that support his idea; he includes a lot of detail and does not omit things which would counter his bias, so someone not like him–like me–could make other inferences from the data.

Now, onto the story.

Most history books mostly gloss over the conquest of Mexico, turning it into a very simple tale of Spain pillaging the New World again, this time swapping the name Cortes for Columbus or Pizarro. Still, the story is much more than a morality play where the Western power is bad and the natives are blissful.

The Mexica, as Thomas calls them, were a nation built on winning at wars and getting tribute from conquered tribes. They had conquered everything within a reasonable march from their capital excepting those pesky Tarascans who used metal in their weapons (the Aztecs used stone knives and spearpoints). Each leader, elected from a pool of aristocrats, got a bit more lavish with the lifestyle, and by the time Montezuma rolled in, the city of Tenochtitlan was huge and sprawling and, did I mention, totally dependent upon tribute from conquered tribes around them for its lifestyle. I’ll be frank, the picture Thomas paints shows me an empire on the edge of collapse, Spanish arrival or not. I think the Aztecs ended up being remembered, instead of the Olmecs or the Chichimecs or the Totonacs, because they got conquered by the Spanish.

And let’s not forget the human sacrifices. By the 1520s, the priests were killing ever-increasing number of war captives and people sent to the city as tribute. Maybe the gods were building up a tolerance or something. Thomas tries to tell us how the natives could think of no greater destiny than to die atop a pyramid and to have their bodies cast down the steps and how the subjects of the sacrifices ultimately weren’t in pain because they were whacked out on pulque or peyote.

Thomas, of course, points out that the Aztecs didn’t own slaves as such, and that all the tribesmen who carried the tribute hundreds of miles over mountains and through deserts were volunteers who just wanted to see Tenochtitlan. And maybe be sacrificed.

So that’s the situation when the Spanish show up. Which wasn’t sudden, mind you. Ships appeared off of the coast for years and even landed a couple times. By the time Cortes lands, a couple previous expeditions had visited Yucatan and even Aztec areas and had fought battles with the natives. But Montezuma didn’t prepare. When Cortes lands, Montezuma, the great Aztec leader, behaves like Hamlet, consulting astrologers, not acting, consulting priests, not acting, weeping because he’s doomed, sending gifts to the Spaniards but asking them to stay away from the capital, claiming he cannot meet with Cortes because he’s sick, and doing everything but planning to handle the Spanish expedition precisely.

On the other hand, the Spanish are a developed society with conscience decrying the treatment of the natives and legal mechanisms for control. Also, they work the iron. Thomas tries to place the two civilizations on equal footing (as do many historians, I wager). However, featherwork, a good calendar, and pretty colors painted on humans whose hearts are going to be ripped out are not really a match for the wheel and iron.

Contrary to the short shrift Cortes gets in more summary and cursory historical textbooks, the outcome of the expedition was potentially in doubt throughout. Cortes landed with only 300 men, after all, and not only had to contend with millions of natives, but also with courtly politics and the governor of Cuba who wanted to thwart Cortes. Cortes wanted to capture/dominate the city of Tenochtitlan without a battle and without destruction, perhaps introducing the Venice of the West to Christianity and certainly to exploit its riches. However, the initial plan doesn’t work, culminating in the death of Montezuma, la noche triste, and the assault on Tenochtitlan. Even then Cortes wanted to capture it intact and only ended up burning much of it as a last resort.

The book was quite the eye-opener and really was well done. As I said, even though Thomas favors the Aztecs a bit, he provides the data that can lead to other interpretations (unlike, say, the Oxford History of Mexico, which devotes only a chapter to the conquest, discards contemporaneous Spanish sources as biased, and uses its authors’ own “logic” to suss out the way it really happened almost five hundred years ago). The book lags when it gets into the courtly politics involved and goes into elaborate genealogies of everyone involved. But I cannot but recommend it if you’re interested in this event at all.

Also, personally speaking, this book re-energized my cultural chauvinism. The closer cultures are to American culture, the better. I mean, how can you defend a culture that does this?

What was necessary, in the meantime, was a suitable appeasement of Tlaloc, the rain god. He had to be given food, precious objects, people, chlidren (small, like the little Tlalocs who were believed to wait on the chief god of that name), in a series of festivals. The children had to cry, in order to indicate to the god exactly what was required; and to achieve this, their nails were often drawn out and thrown into the lake monster Ahuitzol, who usually lived from the nails of drowned persons. (Thomas 332)

Brothers and sisters, that’s a culture that needs to be put down. Heather informs me that, in biblical times, tribes like this were completely obliterated instead of conquered, introduced to superior technologies, and Catholicized. Remember, according to some theories of moral calculus, if it saves one child, it’s worth any price! so the conquest of the new world by the old was good.

That being said, one final note: in addition to making me want to read other accounts, including Bernal Diaz de Castillos contemporaneous account, I had the urge to watch Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto; since I don’t have that handy, I’ll have to settle for Firewalker, which, as a man, I must own. Also, the book gave me the urge to play Civilization IV so I could take a turn pasting the Aztecs, which I did.

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Book Report: Phantom Prey by John Sandford (2008)

A bad John Sandford book is better than any Ridley Pearson book I’ve read. Of course, I’ve only read one Pearson book, and this isn’t a bad book, just not Sandford’s best. However, I got to deploy hyperbole, and that’s what matters to a Web log.

This book delves into Goth subculture, something mocked on Saturday Night Live when Will Ferrell was still on it, for crying out loud. When I founded a magazine in 1994, my art editor was a Goth. So he’s not exactly delving into a cutting edge subculture here. Now, death amongst the Disco Revivalist Cults, that would be cutting edge. So an old white dude delving into a subculture of whom I’ve known members sort of made me wonder if he knew what he was talking about in writing it. Then, of course, I thought maybe he knew more than I did since I only knew goths a long time ago.

Ah, well. I figured some of it out early, clued in by the fact that the person above suspicion and the suspect both had really good asses. Yes, that’s how they were described. This book struck me as more tawdry of Sandford’s work, wherein he enters Parkerian territory of the main character being irresistable to all attractive members of the opposite sex, he imagines it, and then he goes home to his significant other (wife in this case). But the discussion of sex and the bawdy talk sort of sticks out in this one.

So there looks like there’s going to be a plot twist, but ultimately it takes the Chandlerian plot turn into interconnected crimes of the rich and the insane, and the one saving twist I was expecting wasn’t there. Finally, we get to the end, where someone who could have gotten clear decides to kill Davenport, leading to the ultimate climax that also makes a major unrelated subplot relevant in that it explains how Davenport survives.

So it’s not the best of Sandford, but it’s good enough. It moves along and works in ways that Pearson does not, and sometimes an attempted writer (me) ought to see the good and the not good in stark relief like this.

And this book, since I got it from the book club, is fresh and it only cost me $.20 plus $30 shipping and handling, so it was a steal so long as I don’t do the math.

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Book Report: No Witnesses by Ridley Pearson (1994)

Ugh. Ultimately, I sort of dreaded reading a Pearson book because he lives part time in the next suburb over, so he’s the author I’m most likely to run into at the local coffeeshop or used bookstore and the one who could most easily show up on my front doorstep to taunt me that he’s a published and successful author and my blog isn’t even as well read as his book reviews.

Because, brother, this book sucked.

It sort of serves me right, I suppose, that I swore off classics because they take so long and then I start a 470 page mass market paperback that I have to endure over the course of two weeks or so. You know what? Maybe I’ll go back to the classics. Sometimes, they’re good enough that I enjoy them even if they’re slow reading.

This piece is the third, I guess, in a police detective series featuring a detective and a police psychologist. Perhaps its presence in the series explains a bit how the characters are sort of thin–I suppose they get that way in even the middle of McBain’s books or John Sandford’s books. But the descriptions are paragraph-long (or more) adjective dumps, and we get bunches of them even for minor characters. Then, they’re moved through a series of convoluted, contrived, and melodramatic chapter scenes where individual characters, mostly the female police detective, face artificial peril. Then we get to a semi-climax whose very setup relies on poor police procedure that imperils innocent children based on a prosecutor’s (wait, second prosecutor: first was eliminated in a contrived subplot) desire for better charges.

It was so bad that the night before I finished, I went into my wife’s office after reading it and banged my head into her wall just so I could sum up why I stuck with the book: the punchline “Because it feels so good when I stop.”

Maybe this is an outlier on the bottom end of Pearson’s books. I think I’ve got at least one more in English here somewhere to read (in addition to the one I have in a Scandinavian language that I cannot read), so perhaps eventually I’ll give him another shot. I won’t buy any more, though. I have enough else to read.

Special memo to Mr. Pearson when he Googles himself: Hey, no offense, and congratulations on making a living doing what I’d rather. I cannot even get agents to review the complete manuscript of my last novel.

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Book Report: The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (1953, 1986)

I last read this book, I think, about 14 years ago when I got the New American Library complete novels of Chandler set. I’ve seen the movie since, although it took me two years to get through it after hanging up on the extended dance remix argument about impotence between the Wades. The film version took certain, erm, liberties with the story, I could tell based on basic WWRCD instinct. Now that I’ve refreshed my reading, I’m ready to go back to try the film again to set in concrete the reasons why it’s inferior.

A later novel in the Philip Marlowe pantheon, this book deals with Marlowe striking up a friendship with a veteran. When the veteran flees after his wife is murdered, Marlowe helps him out and is drawn into the circle of his friend’s neighbors and their moneyed misdeeds. It’s a typical Chandler sort of plot, for what that’s worth: a little convoluted, perhaps, but at least all the corpses are accounted for this time around.

But the texture of the language. There’s something to it, of course, something that differentiates it from the other pulp writers and other purveyors of paperback sensibilities. MacDonald and McBain dabble in it, but Chandler mastered it. Parker touched it before writing for the talkies ruined him.

Reminds me why I wanted to write this sort of thing.

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Book Report: A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy (1873, 1986)

It took me three weeks to read this book, which means that it’s probably weaned me off of classical literature for the near future, at least until I can get back to reading a couple of hours each night.

That said, this is certainly my current favorite Hardy book, but all I’ve read is Tess of the D’Urbervilles when I was young (at the university) and Under a Greenwood Tree last year. Therefore, it’s currently one of three.

The book details the affairs of the daughter of a rector in West England, Elfride by name. When a young architect comes to draw up plans for the work on the rectory, she falls for him and he for her; he idealizes her and looks up to her after a fashion. They almost elope, as her father discovers that he is of low birth and refuses to approve the match. The young man goes to India to make his fortune. Meanwhile, his educated mentor meets the woman and she falls for him, too. He, on the other hand, does not look up to her, but celebrates her purity and the fact that he’s first in her heart. When her past attachment is uncovered, the scholar breaks off their engagement.

It’s a simple enough structure, but by presenting the two types of man and how she relates to them, the book delves into male-female relationships well. I thought the ending was a bit of a cop-out, though, but the book is still a heck of a read. The language slows one a bit, but not too much off of the pace you get with current dialogue-laden scripts-with-paragraphs.

The book I read was the Penguin classics edition, though, and it came with a horrid, long introductory essay that I was smart enough not to read before I read the book. I mean, it’s a discussion about the themes within the book and has no place ahead of the material it talks about. Also, the introduction did reassure me that I made the right decision in not pursuing a job in academia. It actually has the sentence, “The drama of the plot of A Pair of Blue Eyes is patriarchal,” and although it does not use the word phallic, it does use bourgeous. Oh, for Pete’s sake. It’s a good story with interesting dwellings on the human condition, and the academics sap that power from the narrative through their readings for their own chestnut points. I squirm when I realize these people have moved out of English programs and into government.

Get yourself a good Barnes and Noble edition or a Walter J. Black printing from somewhere and ignore the pretentious pontifications about it and enjoy the story. As Hardy would have wanted it.

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Book Report: Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1837, 1989)

You know, once might have been enough.

Fresh from reading The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Tales, I jumped right into this book by another American author to see if my thesis that I could read American vernacular with more pleasure than the British was true. Apparently, it’s not unflinchingly true, as Hawthorne’s stories are more allegorical, high-faluting, and educational rather than enjoyable.

I read it slowly. At the beginning, I thought the style was overwhelming. Then, I amused myself in snickering at double entendres that would have made Hawthorne blush if he’d known how they’d sound to 21st century ears, such as the first paragraph of “The Maypole of Merry Mount“:

BRIGHT WERE the days at Merry Mount, when the Maypole was the banner staff of that gay colony! They who reared it, should their banner be triumphant, were to pour sunshine over New England’s rugged hills, and scatter flower seeds throughout the soil. Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire. Midsummer eve had come, bringing deep verdure to the forest, and roses in her lap, of a more vivid hue than the tender buds of Spring. But May, or her mirthful spirit, dwelt all the year round at Merry Mount, sporting with the Summer months, and revelling with Autumn, and basking in the glow of Winter’s fireside. Through a world of toil and care she flitted with a dreamlike smile, and came hither to find a home among the lightsome hearts of Merry Mount.

However, I eventually got acclimated to the book and got more into the tales, but they’re not really the sorts of things one reads for pleasure unless one gets pleasure out of saying, “I read Twice-Told Tales by Hawthorne for fun.”

So I guess I got some secondary pleasure out of it.

Less fun than the aforementioned Irving though, and only a bit more enjoyable than the Stallone but at greater investment.

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Book Report: Clash of the Titans by Alan Dean Foster (1981)

You remember the movie with the L.A. Law guy? No? Damn kids. This is the novelization, essentially a recasting of the Perseus myth with a bit of modern (ca. 1981) costumery.

I like Alan Dean Foster, as you know, and he got a lot of this sort of work. He adds some allusions within the text not found in the movie, but some of the off-script scenes sound completely different, as though a couple pages of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead were accidentally grafted into Hamlet.

Still, it serves its purpose: reminding me I need to watch the DVD of the film I bought some years ago. Actually, I think the real point was to make me go buy something related to the film to add to its bottom line, but I don’t think the lunchboxes still add to MGM’s bottom line 30 years later.

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Book Report: Contrary Pleasure by John D. MacDonald (1954, ?)

This is a Fawcett reprint of the original book, so you’ll have to forgive the back cover’s references to patterns of violence and evil lurking beneath the surface. Instead of a crime novel, this book depicts a decadent family in a milltown in New York that has a week wherein their lives break out of the rut into which they’d fallen. It’s a character study of each and the events that change them.

The patriarch, 50 something Ben, runs the mill he and the others inherited, but his progenitors allowed it to run down, so he’s barely holding it together. A major financier comes along to buy the mill, and Ben has to determine what’s best for the family.

Ben’s son Brock has been expelled from school after falling in with a bad woman and stealing from another student to support her. He has to deal with his father’s sanction, but he meets another girl who draws his attention.

Ben’s daughter Ellen is dating an older boy and hangs with some older kids, college students now, but she thinks that they’ve changed or she has.

Ben’s half-brother Quinn, a vice president at the mill, is intimidated by his robust and energetic wife. He doesn’t work for his salary and keeps a woman on the side.

Ben’s half-sister Alice married a construction man and deals with frigidity.

The construction man used to build good homes, but now speculates with his construction, cutting corners and using cheap materials.

The youngest brother of the family marries a strong woman in Mexico City, where both work for the State Department, and they return.

Over the course of the week, Alice has a sexual awakening of sorts, which causes the construction man to reevaluate his life and goals and stop doing shoddy work. Ellen’s boyfriend stumbles through a rape attempt, and she grows up. Ben tells off Quinn, who must be the evil guy as he engages in the pattern of violence–beating his girlfriend to death (he thinks) and then killing himself. Brock regains his father’s trust as he helps the patriarch with the crises. And Ben decides not to sell, even though it might drive him to an early coronary, because he likes keeping the mill–and the family–together ultimately.

A decent character piece, a bit awash in characters though, more like MacDonald’s business books than his crime fiction. But a good read nevertheless.

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