Category: Book Report

In case you’re wondering, I finished this book on November 3, a day before the election. I haven’t posted on it because I’ve had other things on my mind, such as the way the world will be to me going forward. Pardon me for the delay.

I was going to entitle this post, or at least sum it up, as encapsulating this book as 50 Horror Stories We, British Editors, Could Anthologize On The Cheap. Because for the first couple of nights wherein I read the book, that’s the sense I got. Fiction, poorly written in a British horror sense. We get a couple of ghost stories, and then a treatise on lycanthropy. Were the stories supposed to be spooky, or what?

After a couple glasses of cheap liquor, though, I got into it. Well, a couple of glasses of cheap liquor and a couple of nights of reading, perhaps interspersed with more compelling fiction. But these stories combine actual events with actual recountings of ghost stories, so if you’re an Angliophile, you can get into it for the flavor of the past told from the recountings. If the spirit, so to speak, moves you, you can wonder, “Did the authors present this as a piece of fiction, or are they recounting an actual event but providing spooky music?”

Thus, I ultimately enjoyed the book more than I thought I would. One has to leave behnd one’s expectation of horror stories, though, particularly if you’re an American reader used to a bit more spookiness in the proceedings.

Books mentioned in this review:

As you know, I read the sequel, of sorts, to this book earlier this year. So when I found the actual novel upon which the movie True Grit was based, I snapped it up. A two-fer of sorts; I like paperback movie tie-ins/source novels for some reason.

This book is exceptional. The book relies on a double-effect narrator, an elderly spinster recounting her trip into Choctaw country to find the man who shot down her father. At the time, she’s 14 and rather precocious, although let’s not forget that there was a time when 14 was an adult for all intents and purposes. She hires Deputy Marshal Rooster Cogburn (the John Wayne role) to lead her into the hostile territory to find the man. A Texas Ranger joins them, and together (reluctantly, it must be said–the men don’t want a little girl along) they encounter the bad men.

The voice of the book, through the double-effect narration (telling the story through first person, but with the passage of time), really makes it work. Throughout, the character displays primmishness and vulnerability; she’s not as tough as she’s putting on, but she’s tough enough. Additionally, there are a lot of educational asides and a couple suggestions for Bible reading, but it doesn’t get in the way of the action and the girl’s response to it. Well-played.

I need to read more Westerns, but this does represent the second I’ve read this autumn. As our world and country changes, I’d like to hearken back to a time where it wasn’t how it is now or will be in a couple years.

Books mentioned in this review:

Well, this book is an interesting piece, very throught-provoking. In it, Ben Smith, a WWII veteran and Japanese prison camp survivor, opts for cryonic (aka cyrogenic) preservation. The first third of the book describes his life until suspension, his philosophical discussions with his peers in the medical field, his friends, and his family. The middle part describes the immediate after-effects, including the lawsuit among his heirs to split up his trust and to unfreeze him to kill him, essentially, to get the money in his trust, and then the direction of society. The third part deals with his revival and nano-repair to the age of 25 and his dealings with his extended and eternally young family, including an infant cloned from his dead wife who will grow to be his wife again.

The book is strongest in the beginning, where the reader can focus on the main character. After that, it gets a little epic and sagaish for pure enjoyment. As it’s not actually cut into chapters, one cannot find a “one more chapter” stopping point and it’s hard to chunk into digestible bits. Additionally, it starts in 1998 and projects history from the top of the dot-com era, full of optimism of eternal growth and whatnot. So when it intercuts news summaries from a year to ground you–which it does with every scene, since sometimes we’re skipping ahead decades, it starts out with corporate news, such as June 15, 2042: Scientists at Eastman Kodak, Compaq’s stock rises, Sun Microsystems this, or 2084, Chrysler introduces. These are already punchlines, as are the invention of “backlinks” by Netscape in something like 2006. Seems to me the trackback made it before then.

Once we get into the future, we’re into LiberalTechnoTopia, where no one lies because everyone has a lie detector implant, where contraceptive implants are mandatory at birth (the United States was the last holdout-yay us!), and where the good Democrats want to offer free cryonics as a human right, but the Republicans want to have a two-strikes and you’re dead law (which they get, and it cleans up society nicely, but that’s mentioned as an aside). Every new development is handled by society in just the perfect way–no human would use it for evil, because humans are inherently good!

So the book, which could have been a very interesting philosophical tome questioning the nature of humanity, the meaning of identity, and a host of other things, ultimately turns into a blended composite of L. Neil Smith’s The Probability Broach (the Demotopia) with The Metaphysics of Star Trek with a heaping topping from cryonics brochures. The author, a coin dealer of some repute, definitely wants to popularize cryonics. As a matter of fact, he’s willing to let you download this book for free to get the word out.

I think I’ll hold out, since Congress will seize the assets of anyone in suspension come 2010.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

 

This book tops the scales at 388 pages, and, frankly, it made me miss the days of one hundred and fifty page pulp books. Because let’s face it, this book has more akin to those crime thrillers than to more sweeping classical literature that covers more of the human condition and clocks in at a hundred more pages or less.

It’s a disappointing entry in the Prey series. The main plot revolves around an old woman who gets killed and robbed of a few expensive antiques that won’t be missed. It’s a pair of antique dealers doing this, you see, carefully across different states and whatnot. But it unravels when a young black man recognizes that some pieces are missing. I didn’t hesitate to tell you who did it because Sandford tips it pretty early, too, and then you see, via the narrative equivalent of split screen, what the bad guys do while the good guys try to figure it out. Sometimes it works, but given the other evidence, it cumulatively just looks sloppy.

To pad it out, Sandford spends a lot of time on a subplot, a Republican politician who is accused of sleeping with an underage girl. This subplot doesn’t deal with solving the crime, but how, politically, to deal with it. The Prey books have always had an element of this, but the book really throws this in and then combines the two plots as the antiques dealers use this as a red herring to throw Davenport off. When that doesn’t work, many pages later, the subplot doesn’t get mentioned again.

In the review of Phantom Prey, I wondered if sometimes Sandford didn’t know what he was talking about. Another couple bits within this book often sound tinny, as though Sandford didn’t really get into the context of the subcultures he’s writing about. For example, the young black man (I mean, high school student) goes to a hip hop club’s under 18 night on the night of the murder. He’s there with a couple of friends. A hip hop club, you understand. He takes mass transit down, but:

At ten o’clock, the mother of one of the kids picked up the boys in her station wagon and hauled them all back to St. Paul.
“What kind of car?” Lucas asked.
“A Cadillac SUV–I don’t know exactly what they’re called,” Lash said. “It was a couple years old.”

Maybe I’m splitting hairs here, but the Cadillac SUV is the obscure Escalade which, as far as I know, a couple of people in the hip hop industry drive. Sure, Sandford intimates that it’s a station wagon, which could mean the vehicle he has in mind is the Cadillac SRX, but the narrator shouldn’t crop that up, and I really think the boy would relate to the Cadillac SUV as either the Escalade or not. Not “I don’t know exactly what they’re called.”

Sadly, I think the series is drooping. Sandford might be phoning these in, and talking for hours while doing so.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is another in the Matt Helm series, the fourth (I think).

In it, Helm travels to Mexico, gets some secret information, and then walks into a trap on purpose to get to an agent known as The Cowboy who might be sabotaging a nuclear test. When he gets caught, as planned, Helm turns the tables on his captors and on the woman who has double-crossed him–as planned–even as they’ve fallen in love.

It’s not very complicated, but it’s a 60s paperback adventure. You get a handful of scenes, a female love interest of potentially duplicitious motivation, and then you get a sudden climax with a big explosion. A hundred and fifty pages, and you’re done. Man, I love these paperbacks.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book takes on a number of media-promulgated myths and explains why most of them are false. As a reasonable, libertarian sort of fellow myself, I already knew most of them. The last chapter of myths covers parenting, and it’s the weakest one. Stossel is a consumer reporter, not necessarily a parenting reporter, so the book ends on a weak note.

Another book that goes along with what I believe, generally, so it didn’t challenge me much. Explaining common sense to someone with some common sense ain’t riveting reading. Sadly, like most political books, only people who agree with it will buy it/acquire it.

Speaking of which, since I just bought a hardback copy, I have a trade paperback to get rid of. Call it if you want it.

Books mentioned in this review:

So I picked this book up for a quick mad-on for those who would rule us (those in the other party, I mean). It takes on the likes of Michael Moore, Nancy Pelosi, Noam Chomsky, and so on and details how their personal lives don’t match their public rhetoric. You know, I found most of these people odious to begin with, and I get enough of this sort of material from the blogs daily, so the book didn’t do much for me. The best I can say is that now I’m conflicted about buying Ravenswood wines because Pelosi owns a stake in them.

I guess this book works best for readers who don’t traverse the blog circuit regularly and instead buy books from advertisements in National Review or the conservative book club.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is the second book I’ve read recently that was set soon after the Cuban revolution, and Fleming didn’t think it would last (to the contrary, Brett Haliday thought it might be a good idea.) These things strike me.

This book deals with a post-brainwashing, post-trying-to-assassinate-M Bond unbrainwashed and assigned to kill a Caribbean hitter who used a goldern Colt .45 revolver and custom gold-loaded bullets. Bond goes down there, infilitrates, and gets his man.

I can’t remember how the Roger Moore Bond film of the same name worked, but I would guess it differed greatly from the book. It’s a pretty good read, an artifact of the times and of the medium (pseudo-pulp spy fiction, the good stuff before the epic, moral-grey-area stuff came on).

Books mentioned in this review:

This book, like the other book I’ve read most recently from Agatha Christie (By The Pricking Of My Thumbs) comes from Agatha Christie’s later works (remember, gentle reader, she started in 1920; this book is from 52 years later and is the penultimate book she wrote). Maybe I’m crazy, but I like the earlier works better, back before the main characters got old.

This book features Hercule Poirot and Mrs. Oliver trying to suss out the story behind a murder/suicide fifteen years earlier. A rarely-seen goddaughter of Mrs. Oliver is set to marry, but the groom’s mother worries about the goddaughter’s parents’ deaths. The protagonists puzzle it out based on reminisces and rumors from people only tangentally involved with the story. As a matter of fact, a main part of the story turns on the goddaughter not knowing her own family or forgetting things that happened at age 14.

So it’s not a very satisfying book in Mrs. Christie’s canon, but reading the book, I’m reminded that she had her own book club as late as the 1980s; one could join the club and get a different Agatha Christie book every month for several years if one was inclined. Wow. I remember Stephen King had one, too, and he’s the only author of our generation that I can recall having such. These days, nobody reads enough to rope them into something like that. And I notice the BOMC offers to send out two books automatically each month unless you send back the card. Just so they can soak the negligent double until they cancel, I guess.

Books mentioned in this review:

Well, it’s a Parker Western. I picked it up because Appaloosa‘s movie version opened this weekend.

The moral bankruptness of the Parker universe progresses. In it, Cole, the marshal from Appaloosa, has left Appaloosa after his lover runs off with another man. Off-page, Cole hunts down the man and kills him simply for taking up with Cole’s interest. Then, when he joins Hitch in Resolution, the town of the title, Cole takes up with a married woman. Does he deserve to die for it? Apparently not, for some reason that might include he’s a gunman or the woman’s husband has beaten her (but she still loves him and returns to him at the end after the empowerment-through-adultery trope that Parker repeats lately).

Forget it. I’m not even wasting money on Book Club Editions of the new Parker books. I’ll pick them up at book fairs. Maybe.

Oh, for the plot of the book: Everett Hitch signs on as a lookout man at a saloon, and eventually Cole shows up and they navigate through a dispute amongst the homesteaders and their employer. The book meanders through a large number (70+) chapters-as-scenes with semi-unrelated fuguish subplots. Finally, when the word count is reached, Cole faces down the bad guys in a quick shootout. The bad man and his plot to build subdivisions (!) in the old West are thwarted.

Seriously. The man is running homesteaders off to build subdivisions.

On the plus side, unlike Ed McBain, Bush’s name isn’t invoked in his historical or contemporary works, not that I’ll know anymore until the election is way over. I’ve also avoided Parker’s new line of Young Adult novels, but part of me has a morbid curiosity to see how he injects adultery-as-affirmation thing into them.

And I now pose this question for debate, although none of you will debate it with me because you’re all wiser than I am and have avoided the collected works of Parker, but here it is: Which was more detrimental to Parker’s writing: whatever adultery occurred in the middle 1980s to make it the single biggest recurring theme in all of his subsequent work, or Parker’s work for the Spenser for Hire television show that subsequently turned all of his novels into chapters scenes with simple stage management but mostly dialog along with the reliance on recurring guest stars and formulaic endings?

Books mentioned in this review:

My beautiful wife read this book before I did, relying on a library copy to keep her up to date with the comings and goings of Cole and Pike. Me, I bought the book to complete my enrollment with the Book of the Month Club. She expressed some disappointment with it which, ultimately, I think was unwarranted.

In it, Cole and Pike go back to an earlier case of Cole’s: a fellow that Cole cleared of a murder charge dies from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound with a photo album of dead people in it. The photographs are taken moments after the deaths of the individuals, and the book includes the murder victim from the previous case. Cole is sure that the dead man didn’t kill the woman from his case, so he looks into the man’s death and finds a special police task force that might be protecting a political figure.

The book uses a couple of things common to Robert B. Parker’s writing: the tough narrator and the tougher sidekick and the return to previous stories. However, Crais’s writing still includes prose between the dialog, so Crais executes better than Parker anytime after, say, 1990.

The ending features a twist and a simple resolution that one could see a mile away, post-twist that is. Crais also incorporates some foreshadowing that’s obvious as foreshadowing, but the meaning of the foreshadowing only becomes clear with the twist.

A good book overall and one that keeps me interested in the series, which makes it one of two contemporary series I appreciate (Sandford’s Lucas Davenport being the other).

Books mentioned in this review:

This book brings back the memories. Memories of text-based games I started, but couldn’t actually get through. Or far into, for that matter. We bought a number of titles from Infocom for the Commodore 64 (Zork, Zork II, Zork III, Deadline, and Suspended), but I only completed Deadline because I got the hint book and it showed me the important pivot point required to get to the solution.

This book precedes the games and attempts to recreate the odd flavor of Zork. It doesn’t do so well. One can approach the book as a rather lightweight, lighthearted fantasy book and enjoy it a bit, though. Plus, it gives backstory for the Zork world, so if you’re an aficionado, you probably ought to read it.

Anyway, the plot: a farm boy banished from his village goes to Bophree to seek his fortune, only to find a tyrant newly in power. He’s impressed into the navy, survives a shipwreck, and returns with a sidekick and a sorceror to Bophree to find all the other magicians are missing. They’ve got to find the conjurors and overthrow the dictator.

The book starts out okay, with some nice backstory, but about halfway through its event-driven plot starts to run things, and then things happen, deus machinate, and coincidences occur to solve the problems. Then it ends.

Eh. It ain’t Tolkien, but it won’t take you a month to read.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book a couple years ago at the Kirkwood Book Fair because it was a book upon which a movie was based. Funny, I remember seeing the advertisements in 1984 for the film, but I’ve never seen the film. I’ll have to finagle a copy somewhere now so I can compare the two.

Because this book is pretty good. It’s a 70s Mob In New York sort of book. All of the characters, no matter how minor, are evil or are crass and ultimately are not good people, but within the Mob milieu, you start residing in an alternate universe where the most sympathetic bad guy is the protagonist you identify with. Mob/grifter books share this with vampire books, oddly enough. In this particular instance, Charlie is a smalltime grifter who, as his position as restaurant manager, cheats by skimming from the top of the vending machine receipts, guzzling free drinks all night, and sometimes keeping entrees off of the bill for a small gratuity. He needs a small score to get out from under hock and to pay for his divorce from a mobster’s daughter. His cousin Paulie comes up with a simple score, and they go for it. An off-duty cop dies, and then Paulie lets on it was a mobster’s money they stole.

The plot moves along well. There are enough interesting people working together or at cross purposes, and the author cuts between them effectively. However, the ending was a little letdown. Still, I liked the book.

Books mentioned in this review:

This is the book you wished your grandmother had written.

Part memoir, part musing, Clarissa Start talks about her youth and living on the South Side of St. Louis, and sometimes Florida, as her parents eked out an existence in the 1920s. Those years and her attendance at University of Missouri during the depression were made adventurous by a father with a predilection for the ponies. Then, Clarissa deals with her husband’s getting called up for World War II after they buy their first house (just down the road a piece from here; I went looking for it since there was a picture in the book). She details a bit about her job search and finally her placement with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The book then muses on aging a bit; her first husband dies, she moves out to the country (she lived in High Ridge while I was in House Springs, so we were almost neighbors). It has a wise, even tone to it.

Even retrospectively, Start doesn’t apply contemporary standards to history. She mentions internment in WW2 and explains it seemed like a good idea at the time. So that was noteable.

I liked the book enough that I bought another copy to send to my mother-in-law, another UMC graduate. On purpose. So, you know, I liked it.

Books mentioned in this review: