Category: Books

Last month, I read Back to the Future, so I was surprised and pleased to find I actually had this book in paperback hidden behind the trim in one of my book cases. As you know, gentle reader, the Sauder bookshelves have decorative trim that turns inward on the book cases; if you’re a double-stacker, like me, you know to put paperbacks behind the trim and then full size hardbacks when it ends. So if you want a paperback, look behind the trim. I was looking for a paperback, and I found this one.

Unlike its predecessor, this book follows the shooting script of the film pretty well. That is, I only found one particular deviation (“Mom! You’re so….big!”). I suppose that marks a good adaptation, ultimately, as it recreates the enjoyment I had of the film (since I saw the film first, and most recently about 4 years ago when my wife got me the trilogy for Christmas). I don’t know what it would do for you if you didn’t see the film, but it’s a good enough romp.

Assuming, of course, you had seen the first film or read the first book. The middle part of a trilogy is hard to enjoy on its own.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I have the third novelization of the movie (although I do have the trilogy of movies, which this book encourages me to watch). And I want it.

Oh, you want the plot? Marty goes to the future, saves his kid from a mistake, and then finds a mistake of his own in that future has altered the present, so he has to go back to the past again to save today and tomorrow. His, anyway. Ultimately, he ends up stuck in the past until he gets a message from further in the past and has to turn to Doc Brown of the past to help him into the past. Even spilling the plot makes me want to get the third book from Ebay or something.

So I’m a fan, and I have a pre-vote-for-your-paycheck-going-to-embryonic-stem-cell-research era poster of Michael J. Fox on my wall, okay?

I like Royko; I liked some of his other books (Dr. Kookie, You’re Right and Like I Was Sayin’, for instance). This book, however, isn’t the best of the lot, although it’s supposed to be The Best of Mike Royko.

The book contains columns from across the decades and papers for which Royko wrote, so it’s really got the historical summary course thing going on. Worse, the selection of the pieces probably reflects as much the decisions of the compilers and the times in which they lived rather than Royko; after all, these selections don’t tend to overlap the columns in the books he compiled. As a result, Royko comes across a little more straight ahead Democratic pundit than he probably was, although his views did skew that way. His columns, though, have more humanity and sticking up for the little guy against the big guys than the collection’s selection ultimately identifies.

Of course, I’m not a true Royko scholar; that’s just what I get from his books.

This is a novelization of a sequel to a movie based on a video game. The only way it could be more geeky were if there was a comic book in its lineage somewhere (yes, I know the game series has a comic book based on it, but that’s not directly in this book’s pedigree, so it doesn’t count).

The book follows the movie, wherein Lara Croft seeks vengeance on the murderers of a couple of childhood friends and to prevent a scientist who’s into selling bio-weapons from acquiring Pandora’s Box and all that it holds. It’s a pretty quick bit of reading and really did make me want to watch the film, its predecessor, and a raft of other titles from King Solomon’s Mines/Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, Romancing the Stone/Jewel of the Nile, Firewalker, and the host of other Indiana Jones knockoffs.

Unfortunately, though, the book does do some in-filling of character development, and it might overdevelop a character and make him to sympathetic for his ultimate fate. Much of that doesn’t serve the actual story well as it makes the end a bit shocking.

But a nice bit of filler between the heady novels in my queue.

This book, the last in the Travis McGee series, represents the most existentially maudlin entry in the series. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; I rather like the wistful tone taken in some of the books, but this one hammers it pretty hard.

It’s a pretty pedestrian plot as far as McGee novels go. Hired by a rich man to find his stolen yacht, McGee finds it with the bodies of two American teenagers and a daughter of a Peruvian diplomat/drug trafficker aboard. Suddenly, people connected with the case begin dying, and McGee has to survive long enough to figure out if it’s to cover up for the crime or as revenge for the crime that he’s being targeted.

I’ve read this book before, and as I purchased this latest copy of it, I misremembered which one this was. I thought it was the one where his wife died, but that’s earlier in the set and probably not as melancholy.

This book collects a handful of Sartre’s stories, including “The Wall”, “The Room”, “Erostratus”, “Intimacy”, and “The Childhood of the Leader”. If you have read a Sartre short story, you have read “The Wall”. It’s the best of this anthology, and in an odd turn of events, the whole thing starts well and progressively gets worse. “The Wall” is a good story, but “The Childhood of the Leader” is a sixty page exercise in Sartrean pontification and excess.

Let’s face it; Sartre is not a writer whose philosophy dribbles out of his writing. His writing exists to prop up his philosophy, kind of like Ayn Rand’s fiction really lays out Objectivism. Ayn Rand had better plots, though. Sartre’s plots are very literary, and the tone of each story is self-consciously literary. Maybe that’s a factor of the translation undertaken by a student or something.

As such, Sartre deals with revolutionaries sentenced to death; a man gone mad and his wife; a man who just decides to kill someone; a wife who married an impotent man but cheats on him; and a guy who grows into an anti-Semitic leader. So these aren’t people I can necessarily relate to, which makes reading a chore. However, in some literary and high-brow fiction threads, that lack of identification and even repugnance throws me out of my bourgeous sentimentality or something. It also make reading Sartre for pure enjoyment impossible.

As I said, the books first two stories are the best. “The Wall”, about condemned insurgents spending their last night together in their cell and facing the Wall tomorrow, is oddly enough the most approachable. The narrator is forced to dwell on dying and dying well in a limited amount of time. It’s almost Hemingwayesque, but with a distinctly Existential twist at the end. “The Room”, on the other hand, is sort of two parts: It starts with the mother of the wife, confined to her room, as she gets a visit from her husband, a very practical man who’s off to go to tell his daughter what he thinks of her tending to her psychotic husband. He then goes and tells her. In the second part, the woman deals with the aftermath of her father’s visit and how she feels about the husband whom she loved. She wonders what his insanity is really like, experientially, and wonders if she’s going a bit mad herself. It’s a very complex tale, where one wonders about whether the father telling her to send her husband off to an institution is completely consistent, since he himself tends to the woman’s mother.

After that, it’s rather basic Existentialist hokum wrapped in stories about unsympathetic people. Worst of the lot, “The Childhood of the Leader” relies on the main character becoming the narrator of Nausea at three years of age, questioning his existence and the existence of things outside himself, before growing up, having an abortive homosexual relationship, and then turning anti-semitic for really no reason other than to wrap up the story.

Interesting if you’re a student of philosophy, but you can get more enjoyable life lessons out of classic English literature or hard-boiled detective novels.

I think I need to read some Camus to rinse this out of my head.

Well, it’s a Spenser book. A fair plot, although at the beginning of it, I was afraid it was going to recast the plot of one of the Paradise novels. Spenser’s hired as a bodyguard of sorts for a secluded wedding (40 minutes by boat from the coast of Massachussetts, I think he said), a job he doesn’t quite understand, since the rich people have a full security detail. But then The Gray Man recurs, shoots a couple people, and kidnaps the daughter. Someone tries to kill Spenser because he won’t stop investigating. Spenser gets information from recurring characters (Rita Fiore, Ives). Then he makes a deal with the Gray Man, and the book ends. Man, I remember when these sorts of books ended with some sort of justice. Now they end with deals with the bad guys.

At least Parker didn’t call out the Spenser Superfriends team (Bernie Fortunato, Teddy Sapp, Bobby Horse, Chollo, you know, the diverse cast of people like Spenser). Hawk appears, but I don’t count him as part of the SSF because he preceded them. Although, let’s face it, his days of menace are gone. Nobody is afraid of Hawk any more but the stock civilian characters who appear to show fear of Hawk. The police tolerate him, Susan Silverman makes kissy talk with him, and so on.

You know, I cannot think of a Spenser novel I liked beyond 1990. I guess that’s really showing now in these reviews. This one, I got from the BOMC because I had to get something. The next one, I’ll probably get from a book fair.

In a stunning turn of events, this is the second book I’ve read with this title this year. The first, Ed McBain’s Heat, I read in January. The two are not too similar, even though Lupica dabbles in some crime fiction. Because, in a stunning turn of events, this is the second Young Adult novel I’ve read in a couple weeks. Crikey, I must be into my second childhood. What’s with adult authors trying to jump into the YA market? It makes for some confusing times at the book fairs. Is this Hiaasen an adult book, or a green-preaching YA novel? Is this Lupica book one of his adult plots turned into simpler sentences and shrunken to 12-year-olds? What, pray tell, does Robert B. Parker write for young adult fiction–embrace an arbitrary “code” of relativistic, touchy-feely ethics and bone your neighbor’s wife which is okay if it feels good and you don’t feel guilty?

At any rate, this book deals with a 12-year-old Little League superstar pitcher from Cuba whose father has died, but whose 17-year-old brother is working two jobs as they keep the death quiet so they don’t get turned over to family services and split up. Additionally, the kid’s eligibilty is challenged since his birth certificate didn’t make the boat ride from Cuba. It’s a very complicated story, and it works out with an almost deus ex maquina thing, but it’s all right.

For a kid’s book.

I bought this book because I thought it might be a saucy sort of male equivalent of Sex in the City or something. Without a dustjacket, I flipped it open and landed on the first person narrator’s self-description, and that was enough since I had a wallet full of money and a box half full of books at the book fair. I missed the part where it identified him as a high school kid.

So it’s a young adult novel, set in high school. The main character isn’t so good with the girls, so his friends post an online ad for him seeking a prom date, and it gets a lot of response. So he agrees to evaluate 24 girls for in the week before the prom and then to select one for his date. It takes on a little of a reality show feel, and he deals with the unreality and with the reality of his life.

Oh, and he grows and learns something about himself at the end.

Well, then. I frankly missed the YA thing. I went from Hardy Boys in elementary school to hard boiled detective fiction in middle school. I suspect I didn’t miss much, and I used my reading to prepare myself for the grim real world, not the goofy high school world. I’d go on a spurious tangent about how YA books have trained kids to be adolescents in their adulthoods, but frankly, I don’t think enough kids read to have that impact.

When I bought this book, I expected a book in the line of Tom Braden’s Eight is Enough: a collection of anecdotes and incidents about raising a large family, set in a familiar location and with a historical relevance.

Instead, this book is really just a brain dump of parental advice on topics from buying insurance to handling kids’ drug problems. Not what I was looking for at all, really, but it made the book–dare I say it?–very skimmable.

One bit of historical trivia: The book has a whole chapter on 16 in Webster Groves, a documentary about growing up in suburban America that CBS shot in Webster Groves. In true reality television style, the network apparently cut the film to portray its story that suburban American children were being brainwashed into the bourgeoisie. Webster residents at the time were upset with it. So much so that the authors include it and spend a chapter railing against it 23 years later.

I’d tell you where the book is for sale, but you don’t find it anywhere on the Internet. Its existence is proven electronically only that it appears in a photo in this Flickrstream. Given that this book was printed as a limited edition, the photographer is either a Dahlin, a Pepple, or a nearby resident of Webster Groves.

This book collects a number of questions covered in Slate’s “The Explainer” column and groups them by some sort of similarity. It’s better than The Best of Slate as far as collections go, but it’s not “The Straight Dope”.

Worth a buck, I suppose. If you will have any to spare in the upcoming Obama/Pelosi/Reid Bush depression (overtime).

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Back in 1984, the powers that be wanted to widen Elm Avenue, a north-south road that cuts through the middle of Webster Groves, to make it an artery of sorts to handle traffic from Clayton areas to South County. The residents of Elm Avenue banded together to fight it and had a street party to show off their homes which would be lost or have yards cut drastically as part of the plan. This slender volume is a catalog of the homes on Elm Avenue along with the history of each. Not quite Webster Park, but its aim was much lower.

Last year, as part of preparations for the Highway 40 closing, powers that be floated the idea of widening Elm again, 23 years after this book was published. They got a stop light where only stop signs had existed before and a no-left-turn thing instead, fortunately for the big old houses along Elm.

Sorry, no Amazon link for this book; I cannot find any reference of it on the Internet, either, which means I must be making it up.

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.