Category: Book Report

I bought this book at a garage sale in my old eBay days. When cleaning out the backstock of those old books, I decided to add it to my personal library since I’ve never seen the movie, but I was kind of familiar with the plot. So I read it.

What do you want? It’s the novelization of a romantic comedy about Baby Boomers being New Wave in the middle 1980s. Man, they actually used to novelize those things. Now, that tradition is only upheld for books that geeks and fanboys will buy.

Roberta, an aging (26!) and disenchanted suburban housewife, lives vicariously through the personal ads, particularly a series of ads wherein a man desperately seeks Susan. When she follows the directions to one of Susan’s rendezvous, Roberta becomes more immersed in Susan’s life than in her own.

I took two things away from this book:

• If Madonna had been born 20 years later, she would have been one of the first stars with a sex tape accidentally leaked to the Internet.
• I find it unintentionally amusing when I read books where characters in their mid twenties think they’re old. You don’t really get old until your middle thirties, anyone in his or her middle thirties will tell you.

Now I’ll have to get the commemorative twentieth anniversary two-DVD retrospective that’s due any day now.

I inherited this book from my aunt, which explains why I’ve read a chickthrilla. That in itself lends itself to some interesting contrasts with the crime fiction I tend to read, where every protagonist has a shot in an equal fight with amateur bad guys. Here, the protagonist is a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter than commone adversaries. Weird.

This book revolves around a true crime writer who has put to bed a book on a south Florida crime of passion. A minister who has argued against the death penalty has been convicted of killing his wife to cover up an affair or to be with his lover. Coincidentally, he’s now on death row in the next cell from the inmate whose cause the minister championed. But as she sends the book off, the narrator has some niggling doubts about the crimes, and she investigates a little more.

The book intersperses chapters of the fictional true crime book with current thoughts of the true crime author/sleuth, Marie Lightfoot. It struck me as odd that the chapters of the book are all in third person past tense, but the current investigations are in the first person present. I mean, that’s just weird. I’m sure the author (Pickard, the real author) used the conceit to differentiate the fictional book from the real fictional book, er, story. It’s more jarring than it needs to be, though, and I could have done without it.

Overall, it’s a serviceable book with an interesting plot but with an ending and whodunit resolution that seems sudden, but part of that’s the function of the first part of the book including a higher portion of fictional chapters from the true crime book, which presents the story as it’s thought to be, and the last part of the book includes a higher portion of contemporary investigation of the fictional author. I don’t regret reading it, unlike some books with which I have burdened myself of late, but I won’t actively seek out other works in Pickard’s Marie Lightfoot or Jenny McCain series on the basis of this exposure.

The Publishers Weekly blurb that appears on the Amazon page for this book begins, “Timeliness adds considerable juice to Rosenberg’s frenzied political thriller, set a couple of years in the future.” Riiiiiight. The book is set in 2010. Saddam Hussein is behind a plot to assasinate the president who wants to bring peace the Israel, finally, by talking to Chairman Arafat and with the deus ex discovery of oil off the shore of Israel and the Gaza Strip. Or something.

I bought this book for $5.98 off of the discount rack at Barnes and Noble, using gift cards, natch. I picked it because I thought Joel C. Rosenberg was Joel Rosenberg. I started reading it last week because I heard Rush Limbaugh talking about Joel C. Rosenberg. Friends, don’t be fooled. Although Joel C. Rosenberg gleefully blurs the distinction to draw suckers like me in (why else is is Web site JoelRosenberg.com when he’s diligent about putting his middle initial on his book covers, hmmm?), he’s not Joel Rosenberg. He’s not even a decent fiction writer.

All right, so I’ve already mentioned the gripping premise of the book, whose shelf life expired by the end of 2002. Now, I will break down the book’s composition for you:

• 60% meetings
  of the cabinet and president or the president and someone or someone and staff. Includes 4 pages spent on a “tension-breaking” anecdote about flatulence and its counter tension-breaking 3-page story of misunderstaken lesbianism. The characters loved these particular stories, breaking up in laughter I, the reader, didn’t share. Most of the rest of these meetings involve various cabinet members debating the stakes of the plot.

• 12% character sketches
  thrown in simply because the author went through the trouble of creating them. The life story of the minor character of the Chief of Staff? Hey, we’ve got the material, throw it in!

• 4% action,
  presented in riveting cut scenes of short length and of pointless peril. Whoa, the helicopter of SEALs almost got shot down by an Iraqi MiG! That was close. Considering that they don’t do a fallujin thing in the book, it’s wasted space.
• 8% miscellaneous exposition.

Hey! That doesn’t add up to 100%!

Neither does this ordeal of a book. Lord amighty, although I took some snickering amusement from the book (what was it with using rimming BlackBerries all the time, including the middle of a firefight between the Wall Street protagonists and the dreaded uberterrorists in the red shirts? Why do the bad guys send clandestine e-mails to each others’ AOL accounts?), I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone at any price.

It’s Clancy without the technology. Or suspense. Or any redeeming feature one finds in Clancy.

How many rules of fiction does it break? I just wrote an essay about things fiction writers should avoid, partially inspired by this book. I mean, when he wrote the book in 2001 or early 2002 (that long weekend this book took, three whole days, no doubt), its premise was believeable and compelling, but Rosenberg mistakes the personalities of the enemy (Hussein and Arafat) for systems (the Cold War Soviet Union of countless fiction writers or the WWII Nazis of Alistair MacLean and others). And then he projects their existence almost a decade into the future–probably because they existed for most of his adulthood. Three years later, both Hussein and Arafat are gone, and five years before this book’s setting, the world is a different place. Rosenberg also dips technologically into waters that will change by 2010. BlackBerries? Who’s going to have a BlackBerry in 2010? We could have chip implants by then. Telling us how careful the bad guys are to empty their deleted items folder in Microsoft Outlook? In 2010? Eight years before this book was published, Outlook was a twinkle in Bill Gates’ eye.

This book is the equivalent of a contemporary conservative book attacking Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. They’re designed for quick bucks and quick obscurity. This one, on the discount racks as late as 2005, won’t be on a publisher’s backlist because it’s irrelevant and dated before its action takes place.

(Note: Hi, MLI! You’re the only one who reads these things in their entireties, and I laud you for making it this far even though I told you in person how bad this book sucked even before Joel C. Rosenberg reached his word limit and destroyed Baghdad with a last minute Deus Ex Nuclea. I hope I’ve adequately ruined the ending so you never, ever, bother with this book.)

Maybe this C. Rosenberg guy got better after this, his first fiction book, but I’ll never know because from now on I shall be vigilant in avoiding the C. and in not taking Rush Limbaugh’s advice on fiction. I weep for the portion of my life I sacrificed for this book. I got nothing from it.

This book represents the third of the Lucas Davenport series that I inherited from my aunt. It’s the second book following Chosen Prey, so certain personal situations within Davenport’s life have resolved themselves. Not really to the detriment of this particular item in the series, as they really only provide characterization and background in this book instead of Important Life Decisions which the main character must face.

Lucas Davenport now works for the state of Minnesota (crap, I ruined it for the single reader who’s made it this far into the review). He’s got fewer of the previously-developed characters within the Minneapolis police department to prop him up, but a richer supporting cast of temporary (but perhaps recurring) characters to help him out.

The plot deals with a northwestern Minnesota car theft/drug dealing ring exposed when small-time members decide to kidnap and kill children for ransom. Well, they only kidnap for ransom and then kill, but the whole thing comes crashing down when a murderous Republican comes to town and inadvertently destroys the compassionate drug-reimportation smuggling ring run by some Catholics with conscience.

Aside from the laughable political aside and the other implications, the book makes a quick read. I like the Minnesota winter as a character slightly more than the millionaire political appointee detective main character, but Sandford makes the book compelling enough to read if it falls into your hands.

“Do you want to buy more in the series?” my beautiful wife asked. “Not for more than $1 a book,” I replied. So there you have it. A good set of stock novels set in the upper Midwest, but in a Democrat stronghold (which the books remind you).

This bookis the second of the three that I have inherited from my aunt and all three are well along in the series. I’m glad I read the preceding book, Easy Prey, since that book begins with some characterization of the main character and his relationship with his team.

Chosen Prey jumps right into the chaotic world of Lucas Davenport and his special Minneapolis police team. Well, no, it starts with a quick insight into the mind of the named criminal, a sex fiend academic (do I repeat myself?) named James Qatar who likes to do kinky things to artsy blondes and then kill them. We know this in the first chapter, because the semi-omniscient narrator follows Qatar to a tryst.

So the book is a race between Qatar and the police, who must track him down before he kills again. Or at least must stop him before he depopulates Minnesota and western Wisconsin.

The book’s pace captures the nature of the frantic team investigation captained by Davenport. His personal life interrupts, as his True Love and recently (Easy Prey) returned Weather wants to have a child and marry Lucas. The sub plotline would detract had I not read the preceding book and known who she was and why this was different or difficult for Davenport.

It’s an okay turn for a series book, but I’d hardly recommend it as the first in the series, as the author expects the reader to be familiar with the characters. Heck, I probably missed most of the inside humor. On his worst day, McBain does a better police procedural and characterizes the familiar so even the uninitiated can pick up on them. Sandford doesn’t, and he doesn’t seem to try. Of course, this isn’t much of a police procedural, either, since the main character is at a high level and although he does do some interrogation himself, he’s also a millionaire zipping around in a Porsche (when the weather’s good) and a deputy chief with all the resources of the police department at his disposal. So it’s not so much a police procedural as as a simple suspense page turner.

So Sandford’s no Ed McBain, but no one really can hold a candle to that. He’s no Randisi either, and he actually suffers from that particular comparison. Unless he really is Randisi in a different pseudonym.

This book collects a number of John Steinbeck short stories. They’re centered around the Salinas Valley in California, and I feel a little more connection with them and the topography that Steinbeck describes since we visited northern California this year. Suddenly, I understand mountains at the edge of the ocean.

Steinbeck’s writing is accessible enough for modern readers steeped in commercial fiction (like me) to grasp. James Joyce, Benjy Campson, and all the tangled verbiage artists have done more to drive readers away from any literary fiction than Steinbeck or Hemingway could hope to save.

I find Steinbeck’s style a little disengaging, although easy to read, and it can take me a while to get into a rhythm where I appreciate the characters and want to find out what happens next. In Steinbeck’s novels, this doesn’t pose difficulty other than the initial start-up costs of turning the first few dozen pages by discipline. However, with short stories, you have to start over with a new character or set of characters. So a number of stories just don’t work.

However, the last set of stories features the same set of characters, so I was able to plunge, enjoyably, through the last quarter of the book.

So I enjoyed the book, but not unabashedly. But this completes my hardback study of Steinbeck spurred by the purchase of a set of these hardback editions at an estate sale two years ago. Although I still have East of Eden in paperback, I don’t know how quickly I will get to it.

Man, I don’t know where I got this book, but all evidence seems to indicate that I paid $2.00 for it. Of course, since it’s P.J. O’Rourke, of course I would.

The book features trademark O’Rourke humor, but its from his early, Reagan and Bush era stuff, which means it’s not as hard-hitting and topical as the work he’s created after Clinton became president. Ergo, its subject matter and style more closely tracks the The Bachelor Home Companion (oddly enough, 1997 and not as early as I’d originally thought). The humor is more collegiate, but it has its flashes of O’Rourkean brilliance. But the nugget sized sections really don’t give O’Rourke enough room to work up a full head of rhetorical steam.

So it’s a good book, but not the best in the O’Rourke obra.

I bought this book for $4.95 on the discount rack at Barnes and Noble while spending the holiday gift cards. Of course, the trip turned from burning off the gift cards to an orgy of book purchasing, so we ended up with more than our $50.

This book represents a retro reprisal of hard-boiled detective novels. The main character, Ike Van Savage is a former soldier, former cop, drinks-too-much, womanized a bit too much, kind of private eye. In Rochester, New York, 1959, Van Savage gets a call from a mysterious hottie who thinks her husband wants to kill her. The husband’s the local syndicate kingpin whose two previous wives had accidents. Suddenly, Van Savage finds himself where every hardboiled private detective is: fending off willing chippies and dodging the accidental bullet-cushioning while over his head in crime and plots he can barely fathom.

A good book and a pleasant throwback to a readable genre that failed to teach us the life lessons about how being a man in society means something other than being tough and tenacious. Where it means something more womanly. Which is why some reviewers call the main character “cardboard” — They’re part of the drive that lead to more sensitive, bleeding, crying soft-boiled detective who are more frail than the middle-aged working schlubs who read the books. Once they stopped being comic books with heroes to whom readers could aspire, they stopped being good. But this book bucks the trend, fortunately.

You know, I found this book in the second rank of books on my to-read shelves, so I’m not sure where I got it. Did I inherit it from my aunt? Did I buy it at the 80% off store last autumn? I cannot remember. All I know is that I was disappointed that an Ed McBain book made it to the back of my bookshelves without getting read. So I rectified the error.

This book represents the 50th 87th Precinct novel. Ponder that, if you will, and revere it. Ed McBain has produced fifty of these novels over the course of the last half century or so; considering that this one is five years old and that they’re coming fewer than one a year now, it’s worth our awe. Like Perry Mason novels, these books hold up well enough for people of a certain age, who remember a life without the Internet. We remember the typewriter and can accept books with reproductions of typewritten reports within them to lend authenticity. Damn kids wouldn’t understand.

This book gets away from that and actually mentions the Internet and mentions Steve Carella’s age. He’s just turned 40, which means I’ve almost caught up with him. If Ed McBain lives another decade, I’ll call Steve Carella a damn kid, and he was 35 when I was 15. Talk about unfair.

The book deals with a number of murders surrounding a revival of a 1920s musical and features a nuanced and ultimately dual-tragic plot. If you stop to think about what the primary (first) murder means, you’ll understand. But the boys from the 87th and Fat Ollie Weeks (of the 88th) get their workouts covering the City looking for clues in the brutal winter (that offers relief, even if the characters don’t know it, from the brutal summer).

Of course, if you don’t know the characters, perhaps the book proves a little hard to follow. Over the last three decades especially, we’ve come to know Carella, Meyer, Hawes, Brown, Parker, Byrnes, Kling, and Generro (wait, he’s not here; don’t tell me if I missed the book where he got it). But this series is proving more resilient than a number of television series, for crying out loud, and proves to be an old friend to which one can turn again and again (since books take longer than an hour minus commercials on television or DVD).

Okay, enough late night blathering. I liked the book, not only because it’s a good enough book in the genre replete with McBain’s poetic touches but also because it’s a link to my youth, when I read adult books in my middle school and high school years.

As you know, I buy every Robert B. Parker book immediately, although in the recent years and with the recent novels, “immediately” has come to mean the week of release, sometimes the month of release instead of the day. So I got this book within a week of its hitting the shelves and the Amazon shipping room.

Like Phil Connors at the end of Groundhog Day, I have to admit to my perfect woman that something’s different, and anything different is good. The protagonist is not the biggest, baddest gun in town who happens to be co-dependent to a slut and a Korean War veteran. Instead, the first person narrator is the sidekick, and damned if that ain’t enough difference.

Virgil Cole, the toughest marshal-for-hire in the business, and his sidekick Everett “I” Cole come to Appaloosa at the behest of the local aldermen to handle the local band of rowdies who killed the last marshal. As they move into town and onto the badmen, a new woman shows up in town and draws the codependency of the formerly impervious Cole even though she’s a flighty Jewess woman. The tandem of Cole and “I” capture the leader of the murderous band and see him through to a conviction, but his lackeys hire the other baddest guns in the west to concoct an escape with the woman as a hostage and….

Well, I won’t get into detail since my beautiful wife has yet to read the book. However, the book really breaks out of the doldrums into which the Parker books have fallen, amongst the Jesse Stone, Sunny Randall, and Spenser novels. This book represents what Potshot and Gunman’s Rhapsody could have been. It’s The Searchers, Sherlock Holmes, and slightly the Spenser novels intermingled in a way that freshens the Parkerverse. It lacks a number of cookie-cut features of the Parkerverse, such as the Korean War service and the tough good gay guy; not that there’s anything wrong with those, but they’re too much a part of Parkers’ other works to really add to those other works. I admit that sometime in the midst of the novel, I didn’t know where it was going, and I was interested in being surprised. And felt the book was capable of it.

My only complaint with the book is that it ends rather abruptly. The last sixth of the book runs very quickly and the ending, although satisfying, provides the satisfaction of a Chinese meal. Sure, it’s good, but I am going to be hungry later.

Perhaps that’s the intention, as the further adventures remain available for Parker to write.

Also, gentle reader, note that this is the 50th book I have read and reported for you this year. I fully expect my store-bought-and-amateur-calligraphed-certificate and coupon for a free Dairy Queen Sundae from each of you. Considering my annual goal is 70 books this year, perhaps I could afford at this time to try Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury again. Fortunately, though, for both of us, my aunt left me more pressing suspense and horror novels.

Yes, this book is the novelization of the Dirty Harry movie of the same name. I know, you’re thinking that I am not a very serious reader of true literature and that I should have my English degree revoked for bothering with a mid 1970s movie tie in (as opposed to the high art represented by Harry Potter books in the twenty-first century). But I read a lot of things, and besides, this only cost me 95 cents at Downtown Books in Milwaukee, so I got it, and that’s the last we’ll hear of it.

So I read the book having watched the movie first, which follows the pattern of creation for the book. Unlike regular movies, where you watch them to see how they differ from the book from which the movie sprung (whoops, I need a helping verb there; I mean done sprung), these novelizations use the movie itself as source material, so the writers of these books either give or take away things from the movie rather than the screenwriters doing the opposite. In a lot of my youth, I’ve read novelizations before seeing the movie, so my comparative experience always favored the book anyway. This time, though, it’s different.

I’ve seen the series of movies and it’s through their prisms that I look at the book and say: eh, it wasn’t bad, but it certainly tried to soften up Harry. I will have to review the movie again, but I don’t remember Harry crying at any point, nor did I detect the facial expressions on Harry that the author puts there. Still, perhaps he had one of those new Videocassette Recorder things and was pausing while he typed the manuscript on his Smith-Corona, but most likely he was trying to add something to attract a wider audience, the subtly different audience who did not follow Dirty Harry in the movies nor Clint Eastwood and who wanted more characterization. Well, that’s a laudable goal. He didn’t really succeed.

Aside from the inner sentimentalism added to Harry, the additional characterization-through-a-paragraph-of-exposition trick doesn’t work. All minor characters get one or two paragraphs of explanation for their behavior, but that’s it. The author’s limitations included fidelity to the filmed scenes, and this author doesn’t seem to stray far-or any–from the scenes filmed. And he adds that paragraph to give depth to the characters. Ultimately, it doesn’t bring additional meaning to the source material. Perhaps he could have added scenes that did not run counter to the story or he could have added more interior dialogue to each character than the single paragraph, but hell, man, he was probably just banging it out for a paragraph.

I guess we can’t all be Tom Stoppard, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead isn’t exactly a direct novelization of Hamlet, but its techniques could serve those trying to write novelizations on movies. But that might double the actual writing time from four hours to eight or ten, which eats into the profit.

So would I recommend it? Sure, if you’re a collector, a voracious reader, or someone like me who dabbles in these things for the curiousities that lie outside of the actual text.

I inherited this book from my aunt along with a couple of the next books in the series. Amazon informs me this is the eleventh book in the series, so I’ve undoubtedly missed a lot of the references and asides within this book that allude to incidents which the long-time fans of the Lucas Davenport novels would recognize. Each time I hit one of these many references, I recognized it for what it was, but I let it go. I know what a Robert B. Parker fan who started with Hugger Mugger must feel.

The book starts, chapter 1, in the mind of the killer with a bunch of foreshadowing; the killer awakens and doesn’t know he’s going to kill someone later, but he does. Honestly, given the plot of the book, ultimately the cheap foreshadowing doesn’t hang right with the rest of the plot. But the frenetic nature of the action, with the multitude of police characters and considerations in handling a case, one can overlook them–or forget the first chapter by the time the bodies start to pile up.

Good points:

• Set in Minnesota, which is the upper Midwest. Although they worship the pagan Vikings and even refer to them once in the book, they’re of good Scandinaviagerman stock like my ancestors in Wisconsin.
• Frantic pace of novel, coupled with allusions to previous novels, intimates an incident in a line and a past to which the characters are privy even if you, fool who starts with book eleven, are not.
• Main character, in mid forties or so, is: rich due to his sale of a computer company; drives a Porsche due to his wealth; juggles attractive women of his own age with 20-something models; and serves as a deputy chief of police who bends the ear of the chief and the mayor.

  Face it, he’s the hardboiled fantasy from the 1940s or 1960s aged a couple decades.

Bad points:

• The intro, foreshadowing chapter is ultimately misleading.
• Multiple murderers throw the investigation off. Also, they confuse the reader.
• Multiple murderers mean that the bulk of the book spends time chasing red herrings.
• Book is split between whodunit and high level police procedural; the first chapter would indicate whodunit, but who does it doesn’t depend upon clues given but late breaking developments and insights and, frankly, who’s not dead among the suspect pool at the end.

Still, the pacing of the book and the engagement of the characters–or at least the condolence of the main character to the adolescent fantasies that carry over into adulthood–carried me along to the end. I have two other books in the series, and I look forward to reading them. They will determine whether I backfill the previous novels and buy more recent novels. Overall, I’m optimistic, which is the most I can say for any suspense series I’ve picked up in a while (barring the Robert Crais books which, gentle reader, you remember I started out optimistic and sort of soured).

I inherited this book from my aunt, and with her legacy I’ll read plenty of horror/suspense fiction in the next couple of years.

This book deals with a suspense writer whose family is stalked by his evil twin. I get it. It’s Stephen King’s The Dark Half, without the birds. I had a lot of time and extra thinking energy through the first 120 pages, which Koontz spent lavishly assuring us that the writer is a good family man and that the dark, er, copy is a bad man. I explained to Heather that I was turning the pages out of discipline and not desire. Face it, it’s no Odd Thomas.

After the first quarter of the book, the action picked up and the story began. I’d have enjoyed it better if the first 120 pages had been 30 pages and if the dark half–an inadvertent clone, as it turns out–hadn’t fallen to a caricature.

I note that one of the reviewers on Amazon couldn’t stand the PC tone of some of the books asides. Odd, for the political asides were not what one typically considers PC–pro gun ownership, pro independence and self reliance. They were more libertarian than anything else, affirming the family as the basic unit of society, and so on. I believe a lot of the stuff, so I could make it through them even though they were semipreaching in nature. I could have also lived without the author taking the assumed name of John Gault at the end of the book.

I probably inherited this book from my aunt, and I selected it because I’m a sucker for book of list sorts of things and other capsulated books where I can browse and pick up trivial knowledge. Like who Beethoven thought was the best composer ever, and so on. Of course, I’m not going to tell you the answer. If you want to know, you’ll just have to wait for the question to come my way in competition, and hope you’re snacking on pretzel rods at my table in trivia night and not sitting across the table from me, rubbing your unused pie pieces like Captain Queeg.

The book crosses into some gauche territory, with its descriptions of how to best butcher and prepare human flesh for consumption, and into some unintentionally tragic territory, such as awarding Worst Office Building Honors to the World Trade Center. But it’s a good bit of reading, amusing, and unfortunately not something to take as gospel. For its text describes the worst sport, which the Aztecs of Peru….. Well, never you mind, it still provides authoritative answers to unasked trivia questions which might prove true.

But not the Aztecs of Peru.

I bought this book last summer for $4.95 because I didn’t think I was getting enough science fiction in my diet and because I think Ringworld was one of the best science fiction novels I’ve read (and Lucifer’s Hammer/Footfall wasn’t a bad novel, either). So I felt safe buying a collection of Larry Niven short stories. So comfortable, I bought the follow-up collection, Playgrounds of the Mind, at the same time. At $10 for the pair, it was like a penny a page.

The book begins with an introduction by Tom Clancy, who was quite the hot writer at the time. The book collects not only short stories, but also: novel excerpts (which I skipped); introductions to the short stories that provided insight into the science fiction writer’s life of conventions, collabaration, and research; and nonfiction detritus including reminisces about colloquia and assorted musings. In short, it’s a book I’d like to collect someday.

Unfortunately, I found the collection long and daunting. The nonfiction bits really didn’t add much to the stories, and since I bought the book because I am a fan of Larry Niven’s writing and not Larry Niven, I thought they watered the pieces down quite a bit. Some of the stories run fairly long, too, so it wasn’t like a normal collection of stories which allow for quick bits of reading in short time frames. Granted, that flaw simply fits into what I was looking for and is not inherent within the book.

It’s a good enough collection, with evocative, imaginitive riffs with enough hard science to back them up. But I won’t read Playgrounds of the Mind immediately.

One interesting note about the colloquium I mentioned above: it took place in 1980-1981, and it involved a number of scientists, space-thinkers, and science fiction writers putting together a policy paper to submit to the Reagan administration. 1980. The Shuttle program was coming online, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Battlestar Galactica (okay, BSG1980, which never happened as far as I am concerned) were just going off the air, and man had walked on the moon less than ten years before. It pains me how little we’ve progressed since then, and if I could go back in time to tell them how little the space program and space exploration would progress in the next quarter century, they would probably think I was an agent of an increasingly desperate Soviet Union determined to sap their morale.

Where has that societal optimism gone?

When I saw this Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book at the library for a quarter, I knew I had to have it. I mean, sure, it’s a children’s book, but what child in 2005 reads anymore, and how can they understand what it meant to the previous generation? I mean, I’ve got the equivalent of the title character in my closet because it’s no longer powerful enough to run the latest operating systems.

No, you damn kids, you’ve always had computers and game consoles. I remember reading this particular volume as a boy in the housing projects. We couldn’t afford an Atari, much less the Tandys displayed in the Sunday paper color inserts. Granted, I had no exposure to real computers or even Ataris at that point, but I read lots of books, and computers seemed cool.

So in that world without video games, we had Choose Your Own Adventures. You get a page or two introductory text and a question of what you would do next. Each question had two or more answers with pointers to other pages, and you would flip to the page of your chosen action and continue with another page or so of action before coming to another decision. CYOA were the FPS of the first Reagan Administration, werd. Each book had numerous paths and 20 or so different endings, some happy and some not, and sometimes the action was recursive, but each book allowed you to read it a couple of different ways and a couple of different times. By the time all was said and done, really you only had a short story sized text, but it was an interesting means of passing time. Choose Your Own Adventures were the most popular line, but other publishers picked up the concept.

This particular adventure begins when you win a computer-programming (note the quaint hyphen!) contest and receive a Genecomp A1 32 sixth generation computer, serial number 2183 and answering to the name Conrad. Conrad’s no ordinary computer; his artificial intelligence can make you millions of dollars, make you happy for a brief moment, or help you communicate with the Soviet premier or bottle-nosed dolphons.

Yeah, I bought it, and I read through it a couple of times for old time’s sake. Of course, we don’t name our computers anymore (HAL, Edgar, Conrad, you were doomed by the 1990s), but these books inspired my imagination. When I finally got access to an old Apple II through school, 20 input "What would you like to do now?" closely followed 10 print "Hello, world!" (DRL! Maybe that’s Commodore 64’s BASIC 2.0 and not AppleBasic).

So is it worth the quarter? I reckon if you’re an old school geek. You might be able to sucker a kid into reading it, but he or she will find this particular book in the series more dated than others.

I bought this book at A Clean, Well Lighted Place for Books for $4.98 because, let’s face it, I was binging. But I’m better now, and I’ve almost finished all the books I bought there on Saturday, so it all balances out sort of.

This book was written by one of the guys behind the Worst Case Scenario Handbook, which is apparently a whole brand now. Since Borgenicht wrote it with his brother and the book’s title lacks “Worst Case Scenario,” I assume he didn’t retain control of the brand he helped create. Still, the book follows along the same format. Situation, and how you should solve it. For example, you want to spy proof your room, interrogate a suspect, rescue someone who’s hanging off of a cliff, or climb down the face of Mount Rushmore. You see, unlike the disasters in the WCS books, these doomsdays are man-made, and you’re the only one who can save the world.

Amusing and perhaps slightly informative, but sometimes outlandish and fictionesque, particularly the Paranormal section (How to Predict the Future, How to Fend Off A Ghost, and so on). Still, it’s a good read when spaced out over the course of a couple of days, with a couple of lessons per sitting. Like information gleaned from the WCS books, I’m glad to know some of these things are possible (How to Escape a Sinking Cruise Ship) so I’ll be a little more confident if I encounter the situation; of course, by then, I will have forgotten the details and the book will be on the bookshelf instead of in my pocket, so ultimately it won’t be helpful. Just entertaining.

I read this book mostly during a bus ride through Sonoma. Its familiarity–I’d seen most of these stories as episodes–, its dearth of character development, and its short story format continue to make it easy to read this book in short bursts.

The stories include:

• Who Mourns for Adonais?, the Apollo one.
• The Changeling

  The story with Nomad, the little probe that could destroy–whose plot was recycled as Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

• The Paradise Syndrome, where Kirk becomes a shaman named Kirok.
• Metamorphosis, which introduces Zefrim Cochrane of Alpha Centauri, who becomes Zefrim Cochrane of Earth in Star Trek: First Contact.
• The Deadly Years, where away team visitors get a radiation sickness that abnormally ages the away team, er, landing party. Sorry, I got confused, but this happened to Dr. Pulaski in Star Trek: The Next Generation, too.
• Elaan of Troyius, where the attractive barbarian woman with chemically-attractive tears doesn’t want to marry the prince on another planet to stop the bloody wars between the two, so she cries all over Kirk.

You see, you old school geeks, you’re nodding along because you know which episodes I’m talking about–some of you even know the episode numbers, the air dates, and their star dates.

It’s interesting to note, as I often do, about how much younger the protagonists were in the 50s and 60s. Rarely did they breach the dreaded thirty barrier. Now, any protagonist under thirty means you’re reading one of those angst-ridden 20 something sleep-around literary novels. In the genres, the characters are typically older and wiser.

I bought this book along with the other MacDonald paperbacks that I have been reading lately at Downtown Books in Milwaukee for $1.95. Good stuff.

It’s another business world kind of book, like A Man of Affairs. Gevan Dean hasn’t been home in a number of years, not since he walked away from the family business and the family after his brother steals his fiancee. The Florida playboy comes back home after someone murders his brother, and he finds the family business in shambles. When the local attorney comes forward too quickly with a proxy statement so Gevan can sign over control of the company, Gevan becomes suspicious and uncovers corruption and espionage whose discovery led to his brother’s death–and might lead to Gevan’s.

This book mixes crime fiction and the business maneuvering more than A Man of Affairs. It was a pleasant read and quick, good for an airline trip to San Francisco. Also, since it’s a paperback, it fits easily into the backpack.

A note about the dual dates in the title: this edition of the text is a revision of the original, and the revised text is copyright 1961. The particular printing comes from 1988. I don’t know that you care, but I do like to include it anyway. Because I am a bibliophile.

I know, I know. I’ve read a book based on the Darwin Awards, which is a Web phenomenon. I bought Philip Kaplan’s book, even though his site right there on the blogroll. I read a complete book of Urban Legends even though Snopes is on the blogroll, too. So it should not shock you, gentle reader, that I bought this book when I found it on the discount rack at A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco this weekend. Face it, I like reading the Internet when someone else prints and binds it for me.

The book Jump the Shark distills the Web site. The author picks a number of classic and recognized television shows and identifies a single moment where the show turned its corner and began its inevitable slide into mediocrity and from thence to DVD releases (although, when the site was created in 1997, who could have known how big those re-releases would be?).

The book devotes about 90 pages to television shows, so it selects from the Web site’s extensive catalog. Then the book begins applying the concept to music bands…. and celebrities…. sports teams…. politics….

So I give kudos to the book for going beyond the Web site. The reflections on when bands lost their edges was fun (and prompted my beautiful wife of six years to snatch it from my hands to read on a flight).

However, perhaps the extension of the metaphor to political personages and to political concepts was ill-advised. Communism jumped the shark with the fall of the Berlin Wall? So the purges, the famines, and the deaths of millions didn’t register, but the made-for-television images and the pageantry of what might be called the final episode of Soviet Influence did. Hmm, that seems ill-advised. Suddenly, we’ve tripped from light humor into places where this reader wants to sniff a slight political bias from the author who lives in New York with his wife and two kids. I didn’t buy this book to sniff for political biases, nor to consider politics at all within the confines of this book.

So did this book, well, leap the mako? Not really. The short vignettes and page-or-so treatments made it an easy read, perfect for travel time or for those moments you can snatch during the day. It distills the Web site’s often nebulous comments into succinct snark, but one should read the throwaway-trivia and asides with some skepticism. I found one blatant error in the book and a couple of asides that don’t jog with my memory. But overall, the experience is positive, worth the five dollars I spent so that I could clutch its covers with white-knuckled eagerness instead of the arms of the airplane seat.