Category: Book Report

This completes my recent reading of three great novels set in Paris (the others: The Three Musketeers and Hunchback of Notre Dame). This book, number 148 of about 260 featuring Killmaster Nick Carter, offers everything a growing boy needs. The action and the story are tied together. The story moves. The cover’s not as lurid as one would hope from a paperback original, but one can learn to accept.

Plot Summary / Spoiler Alert!

Nick Carter is ambushed, saves damsel, sleeps with damsel; Nick Carter is ambushed, kills a couple ambushers, one escapes; Nick interviews model who might be an expert assassin, sleeps with her; Nick is in building that explodes; Nick sleeps with woman he saved; Nick ambushes model, kills level bosses, discovers model is only a junkie; Nick finds another model, dead, declines to sleep with her; Nick drives Ferrari fast; Deus ex maquina encounter as Nick discovers big boss and kills him; Nick drives Ferrari fast, rescues his boss; book ends with more implied sleeping with damsel formerly in distress.

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

Now, I can read some quality junk fiction to clean some from my shelves.

Books mentioned in this review:

As you might have guessed, gentle reader, I’ve been on a French Lit kick for some reason lately; I guess it was because The Three Musketeers was good enough to warrant another look at a potboiler from France in the nineteenth century. Well, this book is not quite that fast of a read.

For starters, the first third to four ninths is mostly exposition. We’re introduced to some of the characters through a long and mostly meaningless scene depicting the titular cathedral during a festival of fools. Some extraneous ambassadors are in town, and Quasimodo, the bell ringer, is elected the king of fools. The poet/philosopher who wrote the main drama finds the audience’s attention continues to be diverted by all sorts of interruptions, comings, and goings, and ultimately he’s disappointed. Dejected, he wanders about Paris and ends up in the neighborhood frequented by the vagabonds, who’ll hang the intruder unless someone saves him by marrying him. Against all odds, the beautiful Esmeralda does.

Then, we get not one but two long essays on architecture and the way Paris looked in the time period in which the book was set. Remember, like The Three Musketeers, this novel was a historical novel when it was written, so the author must have felt the need to pad up 40 pages of exposition to educate his readers. But it really kills the pacing of the story.

To make a short story long, this book really collects a very brief number of scenes with a lot of words dedicated to them (much like other older books, I’ve noted). Ultimately, the author lavishes detail on characters that play minor roles in the action (although major roles in the story, I suppose; the action and the story being two different things here).

Spoiler alert!

So Esmeralda falls for a philandering captain of the guard; a repressed bishop fixates on Esmeralda; the poet/philosopher drops out of the book for a while as the bishop stabs the captain while he’s entertaining Esmeralda, framing the young pseudo-gypsy for the crime; as she’s sentenced to hang, the bishop offers to save her, which she rebuffs; the hunchback steals Esmeralda from the hangmen and takes her to Notre Dame, a sanctuary for criminals; the bishop meets the poet and gets him to foment a rebellion of the vagabonds so they–bishop and poet–can secret Esmeralda from Notre Dame; the bloody uprising occurs; the bishop and the poet steal Esmeralda and her trained goat from the church; when they reach the opposite shore of the Seine, the poet takes the goat instead of the alluring Esmeralda to whom he’s already wed by the laws of the vagabonds; the bishop again pleads for Esmeralda’s love, and she rebuffs him; and they all die, including the subplots, except for the captain of the guard, the poet, and presumably the goat.

I don’t know how you can turn that into a Disney film; I suppose it’s only American audiences’ lack of knowledge of the basics of the plot that allowed it to happen. I mean, Disney wouldn’t dare to try Hamlet. And the hunchback: not a nice guy.

So I’ve got one more French book to go and then I am thinking about knocking off some junk from my to-read shelves before the next book fair later this week.

Wish me luck.

Books mentioned in this review:

As you know, gentle reader, I like Bob Greene’s books well enough to spell his name correctly most of the time. This is the first I’ve read in two plus years (since Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War in March 2005 and Bob Greene’s America in May 2004).

It collects a number of his columns from Esquire and the Chicago Tribune again, so he’s back in his sweet spot of short narrative nonfiction with the occasional forays into "People and Things That Happened Because I Am A Columnist" or "Things I Made Happen Because I Know Michael Jordan" filler material. Of course, we cringe when he talks about calling a seventeen year old girl in 1988 and talking to her about her sexual arousal watching Dennis Quaid in The Big Easy and wonder is that the one?

Greene trends more mawkish than Andy Rooney, so he falls beneath the old curmudgeon in my estimation, but he did make a career at it whereas I’m only making a blog of writing my insights. So I respect the man and enjoy his work enough to pick up a collection of columns from time to time, but I’m not exactly plunging into the first edition copy of All Summer Long, one of two first edition copies that have passed through my hands and have remained on my to-read shelf.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

 

This book collects a number of Andy Rooney’s newspaper work from the late 1980s and early 1990s. As they’re not based on current events, they’re aging well, although a couple of his cast-off ideas have come to pass (a news scanner? Hello, RSS). As you know, I am a fan of the author (see also Years of Minutes and Word for Word).

So I like the author, I read his books, and I get, more and more as I age, where he’s coming from.

Unfortunately, the book finishes with a couple of eulogies that Rooney wrote for some long time friends and co-workers, which is a real downer of a way to end a book; coupled with the fact that Tangled Vines ended with eulogies, and suddenly old Brian is feeling a bit of end-of-life melancholy.

Books mentioned in this review:

I got this book as a selection in the Readers’ Digest World’s Best Reading (remember them?) back when I thought having a number of books in handsome hardback editions was a good way to expend that gratuitous money I was making. As I got random books from old college syllabi, I eventually determined that book fairs would provide easier access to the great literature I wanted. Still, I’d seen the movies (The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers), so I thought I’d give the book a try.

It’s a pretty good book; I read it faster than Anna Karenina, and I liked it better. It’s a swashbuckler; instead of The Russian Question, we get court intrigue. Oddly, both books started out as serials, but The Three Musketeers strikes me as more engaging and entertaining.

I guess watching the films first helped me to get context, much like reading a Cliff Notes will give you an idea of how things will go so you’re engaged in getting there.

So I liked the book enough that I’m more impressed with the form, that is, serialized novels that have made their way into our literary canon. Which is a good thing since I have so many Charles Dickens books lying about.

In a stunning turn of events, this book marks the fourth and final book from this list that I had on my to-read shelf that I hadn’t yet read. I’ve read them all this year.

Maybe I need another hobby. Nah.

Books mentioned in this review:

Ross MacDonald was writing Raymond Chandler novels into my lifetime. How odd.

This book tracks Lew Archer as he looks for a missing woman whom he’d given a ride. He finds a twisted set of intertwined well-to-do families still living under the shadow of crimes committed during the World War II years.

So the reader comes along, sometimes picking up insights because it’s a twisted hard-boiled detective mystery that put him ahead of Archer, but the book and the crimes are labyrinth enough that you still won’t figure it completely out until the end.

I enjoyed it. I’ve probably read it before, and might read it again if it’s in one of the Archer omnibuses still on my to-read shelves. Hopefully, though, I’ll wise up and not buy another copy, but when I’m in a book fair berserker frenzy, I cannot be sure.

Books mentioned in this review:

Ladies and gentlemen, I guess I have become a cat person after all.

It didn’t start to be this way. In the old days, I was a normal guy, favoring dogs over cats as pets. Of course, for a very long time, we didn’t have pets except for Oscar, the snake my mother wussified by watching soap operas while petting it on her lap, and a stream of soon to be dead goldfish. But I related more to my aunt’s dogs than her cats in her menagerie. Then, when we ended up outside of an apartment in the projects (Berryland, in Milwaukee, thank you), we got a dog. And then a couple more.

At that time, I appreciated some anti-cat humor.

But then, I moved into my own apartment and got one of those maintenance-free pets (the cat), and she grew on me. Suddenly, we had many in our house by the time we had a house. And the transitory dog, but we got him from the recycling facility unhealthy, and he didn’t make it long.

So I seem to have run out of poetry books of short works to read at the boy, so I picked up All I Need To Know I Learned From My Cat since its little bon chats would be easy to put down and pick back up when the boy wandered into and out of the room (or vice versa; when chasing him, I don’t know whether I’m coming or going). Well, its simple prose took about 10 minutes to read, and then I was done. I own a cat, so I sympathize with the sentiments. Since I ran out of things to read aloud, I grabbed 101 Uses for a Dead Cat on the next pass of the to-read shelves.

I bought it at the St. Charles Book Fair this year towards the end of the trip, as I wearied from carrying my books and as the boy began to fuss. I grabbed it because I thought it was an early, cheap paperback edition. I later realized its actual paperback cover was missing. How disappointing.

I remember the hubbub in the early 1980s about this book. Animal lovers’ organizations (this was before animal rights organizations supplanted them) thought it cruel. I remember my mother owned a yellow shirt no doubt depicting one of the uses from the book or its successors, so Simon Bond had quite a cottage industry going for a time.

However, I didn’t find the book funny. I didn’t read it at my son, so don’t worry about its warping him. It only depicts in cartoons, wordlessly, cat corpses used in a variety of ways. Cruel? I don’t know, the books does not indicate how the cats died. So it might just represent judicious uses of an available resource–cats who died naturally. However, the book isn’t, you know, funny. It must have been a dark time for humor, coming out of the 1970s.

So I related to the first book and didn’t care much for the second book. But I think it took me about 20 minutes total to clear two books from my to-read shelves, so it was time well spent.

But I’ll pass on the other books in the Uses for a Dead Cat series, including the Complete and the Omnibus editions which came out in this century.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

Wow, you know, I never thought to myself, “Why isn’t there any Objectivist pulp fiction?” Even if I had asked that or thought perhaps maybe I should write some, I probably would not equal the achievement of Andrew Sugar’s THE ENFORCER series.

I mean, imagine Atlas Shrugged if, instead of a cipher for Ayn Rand’s fantasies of the perfect man, John Galt was an author who died somehow and was now living in a series of cloned bodies that deteriorate in 90 days while he works for the John Anryn Institute using his wits, his special power over his own life force (ki), and judo to take on all the Tooheys of the world (sorry, wrong book). But it’s pulp fiction with a definite Objectivist theme.

In between bursts of violent action, we have Penthouse letters sex scenes, the most graphic I’ve seen depicted in any paperbacks I assume were sold at drug stores. I mean, in some pulp, you get the “they’re going to have sex” paragraph, “they’re having sex” paragraph, and then the “it was good” paragraph. In this book, you get the he did that and she did this to his that and it was good thing. It starts graphic to the N-degree and then goes into the metaphorical several paragraphs later. Conforming with Ayn Rand’s theory of sex, I reckon.

Also, we get the speechifying, but in small doses, where the protagonist and his Institute compatriots go on about the power mongers who would rule over men. Nothing comparable to Galt’s Speech, though, so the narrative is not impaired too badly.

It’s cheap, it’s tawdry, and it’s definitely a suspense/science fiction pot boiler worthy of its tawdry cover. However, the Objectivist slant adds a touch of camp to it. Maybe real Objectivists wouldn’t think so, but they have no sense of humor.

I might have to go find the rest of the series.

Books mentioned in this review:

In 2004, I read Buck Rogers: A Life in the Future, a Buck Rogers recasting that hyped TSR’s new roleplaying game of that name. It reprinted the first part of the two short stories that led to the Buck Rogers comic strip, which led to the film serials, which led to the Gil Gerard television series, and so on, and so on.

This book collects the first two short stories that led to the whole shebang in their almost pure 1928/1929 glory (Spider Robinson “updated” this edition, which explains why characters written before the Great Depression talk directly about nuclear weapons and television). As such, World War I veteran Anthony (not William or “Buck” in the stories themselves) Rogers falls into a cavern with suspension gases in them, and he’s awakened in 2419, when the wars involving Europe and America have left them spent and let the Asians, particularly the Mongolian Chinese known as the Han, take over the planet and send the natives running for cover. Five hundred years later, about the time Rogers wakes up, the Americans are rising up in clan-like units to stand up to the evil Hans, as they are known in this book.

Americans live in the woods, close to the land, and have communal property. The Hans rule the skies and use technologies to keep the natives scattered, but are decadent and cushy. So you could really read into it different sorts of characterizations and messages depending upon whether you think America works best when America says, “Communism, yes!” or whatnot.

Regardless, the book is a simple romp typical of magazine-based pulp fiction of the era and perhaps even of today. A quick read that was fun. Probably better than Buck Rogers: A Life in the Future.

Also, those Hans? Not really Chinese. Instead, an epilogue informs us that they were actually aliens who landed in China and adapted themselves to look like the Chinese. I have to wonder if this is more of Spider Robinson’s “updating,” since in 1928 it was still cool to publicly fear and malign the Other.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

Okay, it’s a gimmick book; the first half is written by Evan Hunter in a more literary, explore the character style, and the second half is a police procedural in the Ed McBain style. That’s the most notable thing about this book’s universe; the second most notable thing is that the book is set in New York in late July, 1999 (the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr., places the dates exactly), so the book makes no reference to the events of two years later (and books set since make reference surely). Thirdly, the book is told in the present tense, a bit of a departure. There, the gimmicks and unusual things are noted duly early.

Of course, I don’t have to explain the first gimmick to you, gentle reader, because you know that Evan Hunter and Ed McBain are the same fellow. Regardless of the authors’ photograph on the back that depicts the two fellows standing side by side.

The first half of the book depicts a rather randy architect in New York who’s scheduled to return to a drab, sexless life with his long-term wife in Los Angeles in the morning. On his last night in New York, the, hem, gentleman tries to call an architecture student with whom he’s dallied and has had phone sex, tries to pick up a woman (an attempted recovering rape victim) in the hotel bar, tries to call a phone sex line, and then tries to achieve satisfaction at a “massage parlor” to ill results. Brothers and sisters, although certain people (my mother-in-law particularly, whom I impressed upon first meeting by reciting Eliot and not McBain) have called this author “smutty,” but I’ve disagreed–but after reading the Evan Hunter part of the book, I felt like I needed a shower. The only other Evan Hunter book I’ve read is Last Summer, which had me feeling for the protagonist until such time as I said, “Ew.”

But then the second half of the book starts with detectives in NYC investigating the homicide of a hooker, and I hoped it wouldn’t be the sad sack from the first half of the book. The second half follows a trio of detectives from Homicide, Vice, and the Special Victims unit looking into the murder. The main character is a woman on the Special Victims unit (the Rape squad), and the section follows her one day crusade to find this perp while she handles her divorce and relates to her co-workers. McBain takes a leap in using a female point-of-view, but he does well as far as I can tell (after all, I’m a male).

An interesting exercise; of course, we all bought it because it’s McBain. And not a bad departure from his norm (like Another Part of the City). McBain is like John D. MacDonald on my pantheon of writers; regardless of what they wrote, I will read it, for I expect it to be good.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

 

Robert B. Parker phones in another Sunny Randall novel. I can’t say it any better, especially after this:

Quirk, Belson, my father, and I all looked slowly around the still-sealed-off park. Nobody said anything. Nothing presented itself. After a long moment, Quirk squatted on his haunches and studied the gun.

“Smith and Wesson,” he said, “revolver…” He bent over to look at the barrel opening. “Thirty-eight.”

He leaned forward onto his hands and straightened his legs and did a kind of pushup so he could smell the gun.

“Been fired recently.”

He eased out of the pushup and got his feet under him and resumed his squat.

“But not in this flower patch,” he said, “unless he bothered to clean up the brass.“

“I’d look over there,” Belson said, and nodded at the swan boat dock.

Quirk continued to sit on his haunches, looking at the flower bed.

“Stay with this, Frank,” Quirk said. “I’ll get some crime-scene techs over here, but I want you to be the only one touches the gun, okay?”

Belson nodded.

“You bag it, label it, take it to the lab, stay with it, wait for it.”

“Okay, Marty,” Belson said.

“Nobody but you and the lab guy touches it.”

“Okay, Marty.”

“I’ll get some divers to look in the water for the shell casing,” Quirk said.

Friends, that’s a very basic misrepresentation of the difference between a revolver and a semi-automatic pistol. I would expect by now Dr. Parker know the difference. That this very basic mistake makes it into print doesn’t bode well.

“It’s good,” my beautiful wife said after she read the book first because I was mired in Anna Karenina. “It’s focus is on the crime and not Sunny Randall’s life.”

Oh, but no. We have the extraneous chapters on Sunny meeting with Dr. Silverman, her therapist; chapters on Sunny reconciling with her ex-husband; chapters on Sunny interacting with her dysfunctional adult family and recognizing the dynamic about how it revolves around her father; and chapters on a sideplot about what a mess her friend Julie is.

Oh, and the crime. A serial killer returns after 20 years. Sunny knows immediately who it is and then has to prove it. The case turns on a discovery that, when thought about after the end of the book, is quite poorly handled as a means of moving the plot along, and we get the same sort of ending as in Shrink Rap: Sunny puts herself in danger with one of the father figures in the background ready to save her, but she saves herself in a redemption of you-go-girl violence.

Sadly, I’m reading the Sunny Randall series (and probably the Jessie Stone series) out of habit now. I look slightly more forward to the Spenser books and the Westerns, but.

But.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book as part of the “Everything you can fit into the bag is $1” sale at Christ the King church earlier this year. Since I only found five things I wanted, size of the bag be condemned, I paid $.20 for it. It’s signed by the author and inscribed, and it came with a flyer from a Lake Superior nursery (the plant kind) as a bookmark, so it’s quite a deal, especially since I liked the book.

The book collects a number of Jim Marshall’s columns from the Lake Superior Journal in the 1990s. The columns touch on the history of the lake and area quite a bit with a number of stories about friends and running his boat, the Skipper Sam II, on that inland sea. The book offered me a number of ideas for essays and whatnot about the region and a strong urge to visit. I mean, I’m from Wisconsin and all, but I’m from southern Wisconsin.

The book also reminded me that we don’t have white birch trees in Missouri. Might not have red squirrels, either. I swear, there are red squirrels in the northern part of Wisconsin and the Upper Penninsula of Michigan. Those previously forgotten and almost fantastic memories of my youth.

So pick it up if you’re interested in the region or if you just want to do a little exploring from your chair. I liked the book so much, I’m considering subscribing to Lake Superior Magazine, although Jim Marshall died last year, so I won’t enjoy more of his stories. It looks like there are another six or seven years of the column online, though.

What an excellent ambassador for the region. This book, too.

Books mentioned in this review:

Well, in my book report for From the Corner of His Eye, I said:

I could have almost read Anna Karenina by the time I was done with this book.

As you might know, gentle reader, I have a special term that I use when reading long books to refer to that instant where you realize that you could have read a whole other book by now. That is the Anna Karenina moment. I coined the term after the first time I tried to read Anna Karenina, back in the late middle 1990s (1996? 1997?). I was working in a print shop at the time, operating a Didde-Glaser 175 two color offset web printing press. Every day, I had a 30 minute lunch break, and I brought in a book to read over those lunch breaks. I once brought in Anna Karenina and made it to about page 287 (still bookmarked, a decade later). There, I had my first Anna Karenina moment, and I put the book aside for shorter books.

Well, after making that crack about the Koontz book, I decided to pick up the Tolstoy again to see how it compared. Well, it was certainly longer than the Koontz, and it took me three weeks of almost nightly reading to complete it. But it was still time better spent than From the Corner of His Eye. Where Koontz drops in a chapter for nothing more than melodramatic foreshadowing, Tolstoy adds a theme. So it’s better than the Koontz book, not that anyone had any doubt.

And in case you’re wondering, pages 287-600 are a string of Anna Karenina moments, but I have more patience and discipline now.

For those of you who haven’t read it or its attendant summary documents, the story revolves around several threads in the Russian aristocracy circa 1870. Mr. Oblonsky has a dalliance with the help, and his wife Dolly is put off by it and wonders what she’ll do. Anna Karenina, Mr. Oblonsky’s sister, talks to her. Meanwhile, Mr. Oblonsky’s friend Levin, a country gentleman, has come to ask Dolly’s sister Kitty to marry him. She, though, is flirting with Vronsky, who’s a flirt and has no intent to marry her. But when he meets Anna Karenina, he’s smitten and leads her into an adulterous relationship that will last hundreds of pages.

The book follows two main story arcs: the illicit love of Anna and Vronsky and Levin’s search for happiness and faith. The subthemes, of course, deal with the relationships of the aristocrats to each other and to the peasants and their children. There’s something for everyone, someone to whom everyone can relate, and plenty of heft in case you need the hardback for self-defense.

An interesting bit about the translation: It was translated by an English person who often threw in British coinage to make the denominations more relevant to the English reader. So when you’re talking whole bills, you hear about roubles, but when it switches to kopecks, suddenly you’re talking about shillings or farthings. Which is really weird to an American reader. Or even an English reader some years from now when they’re using Euros or Rials in Britain.

It’s a book that provokes some thought because it’s classical literature, and it makes me want to write a paper on it. Does Levin really become a Christian? How would I match these heroes up to The Fountainhead characters? That sort of thing.

But, although I own War and Peace, I’m not diving right into it. I have a pile of books to read, and knocking down to a 17 per year pace won’t clear my to-read shelves.

Books mentioned in this review:

Perhaps this was a funnier play in 1976 in London. Maybe it was written specifically to get Luan Peters into lingerie onstage. But it’s about dalliances of Members of Parliament that are threatening to diminish the public’s respect for them and a select committee designed to deal with it. Except all the members of the committee have dallied with the clerk who’s supposed to take notes for them.

There’s an interlude that’s called a second play (New-Found-Land) designed to shout out to a London theatre luminary at the time.

Overall, to British and sort of dated. Which is why I wouldn’t expect to see it as is onstage any time soon. But no doubt someone in America would be able to adapt the theme and ride Stoppard’s name for a production of it.

Books mentioned in this review: