Category: Books

Continuing what only appears to be 70s Week here in the MfBJN book review department: I bought this book at the Kirkwood Book Fair for $2.00 because I recognized the name from the 1981 Burt Reynolds movie and thought that, since it was only $2.00 for a stated second printing, it might be worth something Of course, since I seem to be falling into collecting books that are the sources of movies (more to come from the Kirkwood Book Fair where I fell), I guess it is worth that to me, even though I’m not making a killing on these books. Perhaps it’s just my way of reading the pop culture that everyone talked about some years ago.

At any rate, this book depicts a narc cop (Sharky) who gets put on vice detail when one of his narc stakeouts takes a deadly turn. Once in vice, he gets a case to run, complete with supporting personnel (the “machine” of the title). A simple investigation into a prostitution/blackmail stakeout leads to a presidential candidate looking to unseat President Ford bankrolled by stolen World War II gold.

The book starts out Ludlumesque, but about 300 pages into its 370 page length, the book goes Hollywood. You can almost hear the pens of the Hollywood people signing the option while Diehl was still writing. Nevertheless, the book represents some interesting, accessibly 70s pseudo-pulp. The book relies on a third person limited omniscient narrator, but cuts back and forth betwene characters and even begins with the 1944 theft of gold to engage the middle-aged reader of its day. Equal parts MacLean, Ludlum, and 70s film detective fiction, this book satisfied me. For a couple bucks, who could go wrong?

Of course, you cannot expect to get a stated Second Printing for a couple bucks like I did, gentle reader. You should expect to pay $30 or $150 or something so as to inflate my perceived value of my own collection. If you’re not buying the stuff off of Amazon courtesy the handy links below, it’s the least you could do.

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book at the Belleville Book Fair last weekend for a couple pennies because frankly I needed something to fill the $2.00 bag I’d already bought. Besides, it sounded interesting. The cover freatures the title in a very seventies script and offers this teaser: The powerful true story of one woman’s confrontation with every woman’s nightmare. Granted, that was 30 years ago, and some women have different nightmares by now, but a spouse’s affair remains a nightmare for some subset of the population.

The first section is entitled Ending, the second Midway: The Second Year, and the third Beginning. So the book right away carries with it the progression of some sort of self-help mental health journey.

Ending does capture the pseudonymbous author’s discovery of her husband’s affair as they return from a trip. His mistress just cannot help herself and writes him a letter delivered to the hotel, and the husband proceeds to read it on the plane in front of his wife. The woman then has to question their marriage, their life together, and everything she’s known for 25 years. I thought perhaps the book would serve, if nothing else, as a fable of how marriages crumble under time and hopefully could serve as a reminder to not let the dwindling communication and elusive intimacy affect your marriage.

However, somewhere towards the end of the ending, it became clear that Jo Fleming was going to overcome the affair by becoming some sort of whackerdoodle post-Sexual Revolution open marriage proponent, and that at the climax of the book, she would overcome her Victorian upbringing and have an affair of her own as she went beyond fidelity.

Ergo, the book develops a series of diary entries chronicling her growth with her husband into some 1970s era Greatest Generation Geriatric emotional swingers. It’s rife with dream recreations and interpretations, dialogues between her and her husband, her and her therapist, her and her husband’s therapist, and her and herself. The writing’s somewhat adolescent and repetitive, easily skimmable–a quality I learned to appreciate by the end of the second year.

Essentially, it’s a twisted rendition of The Total Woman; to build a better, more loving marriage, instead of working inside that marriage, this book advocates going outside the marriage to fulfill your emotional and sexual needs. Now, while that might play on Manhattan, where the narrator of this book resides among the so-cosmopolitan set, here in the middle of the country, that sort of thing sometimes gets a person dead.

Oddly enough, even though it’s purportedly a true story by a diarist who wants to be a writer, I thought the book might be a clumsy novel. I mean, most spouses don’t frequently sit down and share weepy moments while exalting in their spiritual growth and moral nihilism immediately before encouraging each other to keep growing, where "growing" is a euphemism for going all the way with the handsome fellow in the office. Therefore, I felt perhaps someone had packaged up a rough draft of How To Save Your Own Life without Erica Jong’s Jongness, or whatever made that particular novel worth its weight in wood pulp.

Perhaps I’m being unduly harsh on this book. Perhaps I’m reeling from the offense at being blindered, as the author says:

Some people, reading this diary, might disapprove of the freedom we have tried to introduce into our marriage; they will be the ones who grew up when I did and have somehow managed to keep their blinders on. (p 160)

Well, lovey, perhaps some of us aren’t so ready to sacrifice our morals and our standards for to serve a tawdry narrative, even if that narrative happens to be a life.

So I spent a handful of pennies on it, and I personally wouldn’t spend it again on this book, but I did get my money’s worth on personal outrage and words for the blog, ainna?

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This book represents an acquisition from the Belleville Book Fair last weekend, where I got books for an amortized $.09 each ($2.00 a bag, I bought a bag and a half since Heather didn’t fill half of her bag, I got to fill that, too, so the 24+ books cost me less than a dime each). It’s a book club edition, so the real collectors will make fun of me on the playground, but I’m an accumulator more than a true collector.

This book features Pronzini’s nameless detective, a middle-aged collector of pulp fiction who is facing his own mortality as he frets during the course of the book about the results of a biopsy on a lesion in his lung. To distract himself, he heeds the call of his old friend Harry who has a tense situation at a remote fishing and hunting camp. A jealous husband, a potentially wandering hot young wife (red haired, natch), and a number of available fellows grind against each other mentally and physically. Nameless and Harry see a van containing a stolen Oriental rug smuggler crash into the lake, but they discover the man was dead before he hit the water. A couple other bodies pile up, and Nameless needs to find out who’s doing it and survive the detection.

It’s a thin book, and obviously a series book, but it’s contained fairly well for a single book. That is, we’re not lost without background details from the previous books. It’s short and serviceable as a piece of genre fiction, a quick read and a solution that’s obvious once you realize to whom Pronzini pays homage. Definitely worth a dime. Even if it’s only a book club edition.

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I bought this book for $4.50 at Hooked on Books in Springfield at the same time as I bought Warmly Inscribed and Slightly Chipped. I found myself in the books about books section and went nuts. What can I say? I already had a couuple books in hand, and once you crack that vast barrier between having nothing and buying something, you’re done for.

Unlike the Goldstone books, which are personal narrative essays about collecting, this slender volume is a FAQ. It clocks in at a little more than seventy pages with a couple of appendices and an index. The body of the book is a series of questions about book collecting and answers provided by a book dealer. It delves lightly into why you would collect, how to collect, and what the collector terms mean. So if you’re new to collecting or need some refreshing, the book’s a nice little pocket book. A For Dummies book from before the time when their yellow bindings dominated the introductory scene.

Also, given the age of the book (1993), the book does not include the prevalence of the Internet in this hobby, but its not too out of date in spite of it, because we book collectors still like to visit the second hand shops and book fairs and whatnot.

To slip into collector mode, this edition is a nice piece of work. Although a trade paperback published by a small Kansas press, its pages are resume-quality paper. I liked it. Worth $4.50, even in a good to very good first edition? Eh, you can almost do better on the Internet before shipping and handling.

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I liked Full Court Press. I liked Wild Pitch. So of course, I was on the lookout for this, Mike Lupica’s football book. A ne’er-do-well son inherits a football team from his father, the prodigal son hopes for some measure of redemption in achieving his father’s dream….a trip to the Super Bowl. Other owners and the league, however, aren’t sure they want the new blood injecting sense into a gentleman’s sport, ownership, and the man must deal with two hostile co-owners–his siblings.

I thought I’d outgrown sports books sometime in elementary school. I’m not a sports fanatic, contrary to what my widow says. I don’t watch non-sporting events on ESPN, for example. But I like Lupica’s books because they’re well-written. Engaging and often humorous, I enjoy these books, also engaging and humorous, even though they mostly lack dead bodies, space ships, or swords. I was very glad when Heather spotted this book at the Greater St. Louis Book Fair last week for $3.00. There’s my endorsement. I’ll buy the books for more than $.33, and I’ll read them soon after getting them. Unlike the 40 other books I’ve bought in the last two weeks at these damn book fairs.

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I bought this book for $1.00 off of the extreme remainder table at Barnes and Noble in Ladue while engaging in a gift-card-fueled orgy of new book buying at the beginning of the year. $1! For a trade paperback! With this profligate spending, it’s a wonder I could buy a new, larger house to contain all of my books.

This book, subtitled The Twelve Bastard Bosses of the Zodiac, appears as a sequel of sorts to a previous book entitled How to Spot a Bastard by His Star Sign. It does the normal office humor bit, identifying various poor management types as cardboard personalities and then associating them with a sign of the zodiac. It’s a conceit that could have carried a ninety or a hundred page book, tops. However, the schtick goes on twice as long as it needed to, and overall suffers as a result.

One of the authors must be British and the other American; the book uses a lot of British turns of phrase (bum, arse, and so on) but a large number of American pop cultural references. Perhaps those were dropped in for this, the first American Edition. It didn’t really impact the quality of the material, but it was noticeable.

Also, I’d like you to know, I don’t share many characteristics with the Pisces bastard boss identified in the book. That doesn’t mean I’m not a bastard boss, only that my bastardism is self-determined, free will-like, and not predetermined by the universe. Thank you, that is all.

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Sometimes, I take a long time to select which book to read next after I complete a book. I look at my bookshelves bulging with choices and, quite frankly, am overwhelmed with the possible selections. Sometimes, though, the books leap off of the shelf in a meaningful segue. Of course, immediately after reading The Case Against Hillary Clinton, I picked up The Stainless Steel Rat for President.

Like The Case Against Hillary Clinton, I bought this book from the red dot, three for a dollar shelves outside Hooked on Books, but I didn’t buy the two on the same visit.

I’ve tried to read The Stainless Steel Rat for President on at least one other occasion, but its tour-de-farce tone didn’t draw me in, and I moved onto other things.

This time, though, the over-the-top voice and the story of how the intergalactic criminal and undercover operative known as the Stainless Steel Rat ventures to a banana republic of a planet whose thriving tourism industry funds a repressive dictatorship. Penned in 1982, it offers a fable of a criminal fixing an election to free a backward, galactically latino people. If I wanted to, I guess I could dig out some sort of political posturing of the time and a backlash or support of Reagan, but wow, it would take some effort. I vaguely remember when one could read politically-based fiction without trying to determine whose side the author is on.

Regardless, it’s an entertaining read, clocking in at the old school under 200 page mark. An entry into a series, but not a chronological or particularly serialized series, so you can enjoy it if it’s your first Stainless Steel Rat book or if you haven’t read a Stainless Steel Rat book in a decade. In short, it’s good old school science fiction. Well worth my thirty-three and a third cents.

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I bought this book for $.33 at Hooked on Books in Springfield, Missouri, because I think I like Noonan (everyone else on the right side of the blogosphere does) and because it was on the three for a dollar rack. I expected a partisan book, and I got it.

Noonan wrote the book in 2000 to dissuade New Yorkers from voting Hillary Clinton into the Senate. We all know how that turned out, and it didn’t quite play out like Noonan feared it might–Hillary! never beat Giuliani, for example. Noonan spends a lot of the book bashing the Clintons for the crimes and malfeasance of the Clinton presidency, but I’ll be frank, I have sort of moved beyond my distaste for Clinton and that particular circus. So most of the book doesn’t work on me, particularly the parts where Noonan pads chapters with anecdotes about friends who are New York voters and who might be tempted to vote for Hillary or where Noonan pads the book with dream sequence chapters where Bobby didn’t die….I mean, where Hillary gives phantom speeches and takes Republicanish stands.

So I could almost walk away from the book without any particular additional dislike of Hillary, but for an chapter wherein Noonan accidentally provides actual evidence for why Hillary should scare us. It’s a chapter on Hillary’s views on the rights of children, wherein they should have the same rights as their parents in their upbringing, and where the state will further intrude on behalf of destroying actual families whenever the angelic little demons have temper tantrums. Scary stuff, reminding us that when it takes a villiage, HRC means it takes The State.

So I’ve made my commitment here. If the Democrats inadvertantly nominate Her Royal Clintoness to run for president, I will support and volunteer to elect anyone the Republicans nominate. Even, Heaven forfend, Mitt “RomneyCare Ain’t HillaryCare Because I Am A Republican, Sorta” Romney.

Very far afield from what Noonan intended, but in line for what she might have dreaded.

Interesting note about the particular book I bought: I think it was material for some course or another. A half sheet of paper contained a list of books in a political vein:

• The Declaration of Independence
• Letter from Birmingham Jail
• On the Beginning of Political Societies
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• The Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848
• The Fundamental Principle of a Republic
• Civil Disobedience [sic]
• Selected Poems from Song of Myself
• The Case of Hillary Clinton [sic]

Quite a reading list there. Previous owner left the half sheet about half way through the final chapter of the book. Now that, my friends, is going through the motions: not bothering to finish the book when you’ve only got a few pages left. Even in my college days, I’d finish the book or I’d leave it on my to-read shelf for decades until I did actually finish it (or I will, honest). Of course, this reading list misspells or mistitles a couple of the works upon it, so I have to wonder about the class. I mean, the founding Fathers, Thoreau, King, and Whitman? And Noonan? That must have been some interesting inculcation.

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I bought these books, stated first editions both, at Hooked on Books for $11.50 each. Surely, the authors can appreciate that in an aesthetic sense, even if they cannot appreciate it in a royalty sense.

Both deal with collecting books, which is what I like to say that I do. More likely, I just accumulate books, but that’s okay by me, too.

The first, Slightly Chipped, details some of their book shopping in the nearby towns around their home in Connecticut. As they shop, they dine well and they slip into asides about the history of Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury circle, the history of Bram Stoker and Dracula, or a British publishing house amid anecdotes and scenes that drew them into their asides. The pace is leisurely and loving as they dwell on the high-priced books and their pursuit thereof.

The second, Warmly Inscribed, collects a series of essays about book collecting. And although I could relate to parts of it–I’ve been in the Printer’s Row Book Shop in Chicago and wonder if I’ve been to the only decent used book store in West Palm Beach, Florida–more than I could traversing Connecticut and the northeast, I didn’t like the book as much. Perhaps I felt they were trying too hard or reporting more than simply revelling in the experience.

And although the authors are well-to-do northeastern former writers for those papers, I could easily shunt aside their soft liberal asides (did they really think the Chicago policeman at the Dearborn book fair wished for 1968 so he could club them for no reason?). Besides, although they’re talking about high priced books from authors I’m barely concerned about, I cannot get on my low horse kick and go all common-man to pooh-pooh the practice; although I get most of my books from the dollar table or by the three-dollar bagful, I’ve been known to pay top dollar for rare Robert B. Parkercana.

So if you’re into books and want to share in some experiences of serious collectors, you will probably enjoy these books. Let me repeat that so that I’m clear in my enjoyment of these books, as many of my book reports on books bought by the bagful knock said books. Coincidence, I’m sure.

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I inherited this book from my aunt, so it doesn’t count against my total accumulated book reading cost for the year (24 books costing $123.70 total, for a whopping average of $5.15 a book–oh, the humanity!). However, I’m not some poor, suffering fellow doing his familial duty by readint the heirloom; no, I like Stephen King, gentle reader.

This book represents an entry in the later Stephen King paradigm. In his early period, King dealt with large-scale evils such as demonic cars, apocalypse, or whatnot. Sometime after the middle 1990s, though, King began to stretch outside the simple horror genre and began to delve into character studies which examined what normal people would do within horrific situations–a girl lost in the woods, a woman chained to a bed in the woods, and so on. As a matter of fact, of the books I’ve reviewed recently, they fall into the two camps thusly:

Large Plot		Simple Situation
Title	Year	Title	Year
Firestarter	1980	Gerald’s Game	1992
Christine	1983	The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon	1999
Pet Sematary	1983	From a Buick 8	1999
It	1986
Dreamcatcher	2001

I definitely see a shift in the problems faced by the main characters within the books. Although the main characters of all novels have to face some existential evil, the later books hang from a simpler hook.

I’d known about this book for some time. At the time that Toad the Wet Sprocket was playing on the radio, a woman was chained to a fictional bed or something in a Stephen King book. I didn’t think it would be something I sought out, but I’ve grown to appreciate Stephen King and I got the book for free (at great cost, though).

I won’t spoil the story for you, but the setting for most of the book is when the woman is handcuffed to the bed. On that small stage, a 250+ page book rests. Of course, she has time to reminisce about a dark secret in her past and confront threats real and imagined.

King’s prose remains the most evocative of anything I read these days. Some of the details within the book actually turned my stomach, but I respect the author since he’s done what he wanted to do.

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I cannot even remember where I got this book. Was it part of one of my brother’s document dumps, wherein I got large quantities of comic books and fantasy paperbacks so he wouldn’t have to schlep them across the Pacific whenever he was reassigned? Did I buy it inexpensively because I thought I needed more fantasy reading in my diet? Gentle reader, yes, sometimes the origins of my books are lost to the swirling mists that are really dust coming from the to read shelves.

I read the first two books of the Icewind Dale trilogy sometime in the 1990s, so perhaps I have the major point of the super bad artifact upon which the book centers. The Crenishibon, the Crystal Shard. Of course, in the intervening years, perhaps the suspension of my disbelief or my tastes have changed; every time the book called the Shard by its formal name, I thought it sounded like some cross between Richard Crenna and Cinnabon. But that’s just me.

As I might have mentioned, I didn’t finish the Icewind Dale trilogy. Not because I lost interest, but because I received the first two books as part of a cumulative gift from my brother. He gave me sets of books which comprised individual books from trilogies to two books from trilogies, but never complete trilogies. I’ve not been into the whole trilogy nor series fantasy thing, so the only complete series I’ve read are the Dancing Gods series by Jack Chalker and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams. So I’m not the best target audience for this, which is the second of a trilogy and probably the only I will read in the three.

The plot: An assassin working with a renegade band drow (dark elves who normally live underground, don’t you know?) plots to separate the band’s leader and his companion from the sentient and manipulative Crystal Shard. For the most part, that’s it, although the book plays heavily upon the intrigue within the band and within the drow empire.

Unfortunately, the book doesn’t exceed the fantasy genre like John D. MacDonald or Ed McBain books surpass the crime fiction genre. Salvatore is a slave to the preceding books of the series in a way that McBain must have struggled with; the characters are points on a decades-long line and within individual books might become mere shorthand. Salvatore also must have struggled against the constraints of his paymasters, Wizards of the Coast; each character is very directly mapped to a class from Dungeons and Dragons. The main character’s a thief/assassin, there are clerics, monks, wizards, and pscionists. When I was the Dungeon Master (or Game Master when I betrayed TSR/Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro and followed E. Gary to Dangerous Journeys), I had the chutzpah to build our campaigns in such a fashion where the story took precedence over the rules. These books, however, always make it easy for the PR (Player Reader) to understand what’s happening mechanically. Personally, I’d say it tears one from the fantasy world of the author and drops one into the Second Edition rules (apostasy!). But then again, I’m an occasional fantasy writer without a publication and a former game master without a group.

Despite all this kvetching, I wouldn’t dodge a Salvatore novel thrown my way, nor would I shun another book in the series. Eventually, when I caught onto the action in the book and made do with the combination of exposition from previous books’ adventures and the shorthand for the subgenre, I enjoyed the book well enough. Which is just as well, since I found another Salvatore book from another trilogy on my to-read shelves.

And no matter what I say, Salvatore stands head and shoulders above hacks in the former TSR stable (Rose Estes’s Greyhawk Adventures? Yeah, I read four of them). Unfortunately, the constraints of his bread and butter leave him to standing only a halfling’s head and shoulders above the others in the TSR stable.

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I bought this book for $2.00 at Hooked on Books in Springfield late last month; it represents the second John D. MacDonald fiction book I’ve read in the last two weeks, and I need to pace myself. If I read too many of them close together, I find myself nitpicking them by comparing them to one another; if I read them interspersed with other fiction, their quality stands in stark contrast to most books.

This book details the story of Sam Brice, an insurance adjustor with a dark past who shelters for a night an escaped convict he knows. When the escaped convict calls upon Brice’s ex-flame for help in some plot, Brice wants to follow along, but a local deputy with a love of his own blackjack knocks Brice out just long enough for the plot to progress. Brice’s lover, Janice Gantry, disappears. And Brice wants to find her and to find out what made his associate into a convict and what that strange, brutal, reclusive couple in the large beachfront house have to hide.

The book contains the trademark MacDonald hero, the pulpesque-but-evolving heroine, brutal and disbelieving police, and the like. Unfortunately, it slides slightly into purple prose, kinda making it into the masculine equivalent of the romance novel, but it’s still worth a read. Looks like you can get this book more cheaply than I did if you click the link below. If so, more the power to you and more the loot to me. Mmmm, loot.

Books mentioned in this review:

My beautiful wife gave me this book for my birthday, and as such, it adds nothing to my annual total of book expenditures. Woo hoo! Additionally, it’s one of John Sandford’s Kidd novels. I’ve read only one more (The Devil’s Code), but they’re pretty good hacker thrillers.

This one details how Kidd and LuEllen deal with the death of a fellow haker and the disappearance of the hacker’s laptop. The laptop contains enough secrets to blackmail half of Washington and maybe all of the hacker community. Kidd and krew have to avoid the Feds and the murderous thief to retrieve the laptop and get what justice they can for their friend.

So why do I like the books? They’re quickly-paced and are less dated than more realistic hacker novels whose close mapping to current technologies actually apply a date and timestamp expiration date to them. Kidd’s hacktions are described plausibly, but broadly, so we can fill in the blanks with whatever current technologies might solve his problem. I wrote an essay about this once, and I like to see it in practice. They’re paced well, too, allowing you to move through the action and the chapters quickly–and when you’ve got hundreds of books to read, you need every advantage.

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I bought this book used from Half Price Books in Springfield. I got it for $2.00 from the small discount section, but when I bought five books, I got the sixth one free. This, however, was not the free book.

This book represents a quick hit from the 87th Precinct series. Unlike many of the books, it focuses on a single crime: the stabbing of a teenager on a rainy night in the city. Carella and Kling, for the most part, focus on the atypical family structure of the victim and the illicit love that percipitated the murder. McBain deftly offers the reader multiple suspects to think of as whodunit and keeps you guessing. Or maybe I am just easily led.

With so many Ed McBain books spaced throughout my reading career, I’m never sure if I’ve read a book before, but with the McBain books, it’s never dull to reread the books. However, I had read this before, and I knew it from the one thing I took away from this book when I read it twenty years ago: The commissioner’s memo about unsigned memos. If you’ve read the book, you’ll remember.

Weighing in at 175 pages, it’s a quick read or re-read, and you can’t do much better than McBain.

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I admit, I bought this book shortly after it came out in 2003 and am the last cool kid on the block to have finished it (As a matter of fact, Heather read my copy of this book in 2004 either soon before or soon after we met Virginia Postrel). As you all know, Ms. Postrel is the former editor of Reason magazine, the Libertarian bible, and blogs at The Dynamist in between donating portions of her very body to people.

That said, remember, gentle reader, I am studied in the mystical and uninspiring arts of philosophy. Ergo, I understand the differences between aesthetics, metaphysics, epistemology, and all those sorts of branches of philosophy. I’ll admit, too, that I’ve skipped over the branch of aesthetics except for The Romantic Manifesto by Ayn Rand. As a hard-bitten, realistic philosopher, I, too, have given aesthetics short shrift in my contemplations. However, as a hard-bitten, realistic software tester, I know that a difficult interface can render otherwise functional software as unusable. So I appreciate the importance of styling, but I also rankle at the elevation of aesthetics to a comparable value to actual function.

So forgive me my inherent bias here.

Postrel makes a good argument that people like pretty things and that visual and tactile pleasure offer a value comparable to other values, and that when consumers make choices, sometimes they’ll trade off other values to get visual and tactile pleasure. Also, given the march of progress, consumers get to pick sets of values (low price, functionality, AND beauty) or get to combine sets of values (low price AND beauty, functionality AND beauty) in ways they didn’t before, where they can trade something for beauty. So the world is becoming more custom and more pleasurable not strictly at the expense of other, more concrete values (but sometimes at that expense).

So I’ll call the book thought-provoking. Postrel makes her points and has done her research. I rankle when she puts beauty on par with functionality, and feel that she too easily discounts that beauty can still be artifice that hides low quality or poor functionality. She, of course, espouses a free market where rational customers buy from reasonable companies, but I’m a bit cynical and think that a lot of unscrupulous companies will try to deceive inattentive customers. In the aggregate, I suppose it will work out, but I’m not ready to elevate look and feel to the level of other things in the products I buy.

But I’m not letting the people I work with off the hook in products we build.

I’d like to take a moment to comment on the style of The Substance of Style. I didn’t actually care much for the prose of the book. The chapter titles were non-specific and the actual topics meandered. I found some of the references repetitve. The book seems more like a long essay stretched than a full book. But fortunately, you don’t read this book for the sound of its language but for the argument it makes.

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I bought this book for $2.00 from Hooked on Books in Springfield last weekend, and believe you me, they have the best selection of JDMcD’s paperback originals than any other store I’ve visited in the Midwest. They might have the best selection in the veritable United States (excluding Florida), but I would get ahead of myself with that pronouncement.

The Brass Cupcake represents the missing link between the Travis McGee novels and the pulps, although I’m not sure that such a link was ever missing. The writing style is grittier and punchier (not always a good thing) than I’m used to. Let’s face it, the Travis McGee books wax downright elegaic for Florida, but this book could have been set in Jersey for all the true local flavor it has.

The book details the story of an insurance company investigator named Cliff Bartells, a former police lieutenant who left the force because he wasn’t crooked enough to fit in and who now recovers stolen gems for a cut of their value (that sounds vaguely familiar…). When an old dowager with gems is bashed to death during a robbery, the dirty cops want to hang it on someone. Bartells, or someone to whom Bartells leads them, or some kid off the street. It won’t matter. Bartells finds himself between the syndicate and the corrupt cops and between the heiress and the possible accomplice. He’s got to set up a buy to get the gems back, without any additional lead accent pieces for himself.

Ultimately, the book disappointed me a little; as I mentioned, I found the two-fisted stylings a little choppy to read, and some characters blurred together when give only names and brief strokes. Also, the end didn’t hang right, like an ill-cut suitcoat draped over shoulders too thin to fill it. But it’s good to see the earliest works of MacDonald to watch him evolve.

Hey, since I’ve joined the Amazon Associates program, every time you order one of these books through my Web site, I get like a penny (for $3 shipping and handling). So if you’re intrigued, why not click through and get your own copy, since my copy is locked up until my estate sale:

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I bought this book for a dollar from Hooked on Books this weekend and sat down to mostly glance at its pictures. Of course, I’ve recently been considering family rooms, dens, and studios, not to mention some rathskellar basement bars, so I hoped to get some ideas from the book.

The book puts me in an odd place; although I remember rooms designed like this, I think it screams for James Lileks treatment on the rooms and color patterns and whatnot. The strangest bit, though, is the people. I can convince myself that some of these environments were warm and inviting and even “neat,” but not the haircuts and dress. Also, the remodeled rooms all feature neat places to hide your 19″ television and some of the more modern studies feature electric typewriters.

Wow.

I got this book as part of the “You Get This Many Books and the Writers Market for $20 (plus shipping and handling” deal from Writer’s Digest Books, and since I’ve lost the receipt, I cannot amortize for you the exact cost of this book, but it probably wasn’t worth it to me.

The cover and blurb say it’s The Wealthy Writer: How to Earn a Six-Figure Income As a Freelance Writer (No Kidding!), but it’s really more How to Run a Successful Business Whose Product Happens to Be Writing Services. Its chapters cover the business aspects of becoming a successful business writer, providing marketing copy for corporations. While that is indeed a mechanism for making a living as a writer (and a comfortable living), it’s not really writing in the artistic sense.

Because, face it, I made a living as a technical writer at one time, and it wasn’t ultimately satisfying in the creation sense of the word. I’d hoped for some silver bullet of a book that would make me a disciplined writer who could sell stories and essays to magazines and books to publishers. Instead, it’s the same hustle to make a buck, build a clientele, and whatnot that I’ve read dozens of times over in any small business owner book, but it’s recursive in nature because you’re doing the normal promotional pitching and marketing not only for yourself, but as someone who will do the same for clients.

So perhaps it’s a good primer if you’ve not read this sort of thing before, but I have. Truth be told, I read a book in high school with a title like How to Make $17,000 a Year as a Freelance Writer ultimately geared to my particular jones which inspired me and encouraged me more than this book. I should note, however, that neither have overcome my inertia and addiction to Sid Meier video games and simply reading to turn me into a writer who earns anything a year.

I bought this book for $5.98 at the Barnes and Noble in Ladue around the turn of the year. You know how it goes; you’ve got a $25 gift card, so you try to stretch it on the bargain books and end up with $53 in a dozen books on the to-read shelves.

I picked this book because its title implies a certain ruthlessness which, as a reputed grammarian, I should appreciate. However, it just enumerates 25 common, obvious, and high-risk grammar errors and how to avoid them. I read the lists, read the supplemental material, scanned the cartoons, and mostly ignored the grammar examples. The rules I break I do so on my own account, not because I don’t know what I’m doing.

It’s a thin little book, a read for one sitting much like Strunk and White, but it doesn’t have the depth of the masterwork. Also, it ends with an afterword that speaks of removing some of the rules of grammar, which sort of subverts the point of the book. I won’t disagree with the afterword, as I have my reasons as a writer for sometimes not putting in commas where they’re needed or sometimes leaving them outside of the quotation marks around the titles of short fiction and whatnot (see also my predilection for the European style here, as my beautiful grammarian wife has already noted).

Still, it’s a worthwhile read if you’re a mere mortal writer (like most of you) and even worthwhile as a reminder of your superiority (like some of us). Worth $6? Depends upon what sort of down payment you need upon your grammatical dominance.