Book Report: The Museum of Hoaxes by Alex Boese (2002)

I bought this book in a book story in San Francisco last May, or at least I think I did. It’s hard to remember what I did in San Francisco, although I do remember it was hilly. I don’t specifically remember buying this book, either, but its $4.98 price sticker reminds me of the others I bought there (Jump the Shark, The Action Hero’s Handbook, and so on).

This book collects a list of hoaxes throughout history. It started as a dissertation, but turned into an Internet phenonmenon of which I’d never heard. Still, the book is a quick enough glimpse into some of the more foolish things our forebearers have believed, if only briefly. The book offers a number of pointers to the Web site, which kinda irks me; I mean, I bought the damn book, albeit at a reduced price; why not just freaking tell me the story? Oh, because I’m not an ongoing revenue stream as a book purchaser, but as a piece of the ad-price-setting aggregate traffic, I’m worth the effort.

Although I found the book a treasure trove of trivia, I was kinda disappointed on a couple of fronts:

  • The author’s political views seep in subtly, but not too badly. Although you couldn’t really tell by the way the author excuses Janet Cooke’s invention of Jimmy, the eight-year-old heroin addict, whose saga in the Washington Post earned Cooke a Pulitzer by saying, “In a way the story of Jimmy did convey a truth about conditions that existed in many inner-city regions of America, even though it did not actually tell the truth,” or concludes the Tawana Brawley fiasco by saying, “More than anything else, the episode and its bitter aftermath displayed the deep racial divides that still haunted American society.” Say what you will, but those aren’t the conclusions I would make. Previously, the author had lauded some hoaxes from the Enlightenment era as rational men using hoaxes to educate. One could briefly sense he was hoping the Brawley case and the Cooke fictitiousness would enlighten the masses.
  • Also, as the hoax snippets tripped into the later quarter of the last century and beyond, I suddenly realized that the reach of the grand hoax of old has faded, as we’re slightly more skeptical. I mean, Bonsai Kitten? Only idiots believed that. So the hoax loses its allure with familiarity.

Still, it’s a fair enough read if you’ve got the time and can get it cheap. But like most non-fiction crossover material from another medium (whether talk radio or the Internet), ultimately it looks more like the shadows on a Platonic wall than a complete whole.

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Book Report: Johnny Mnemonic by Terry Bisson (1995)

I bought this book from a garage sale in my eBay days for a quarter. As you know, gentle reader, I don’t shy away from novelizations of movies (see also The Enforcer and Desperately Seeking Susan). So I read this book even though I haven’t yet seen the movie.

As you might know, it’s based on a screenplay by William Gibson based on a short story by William Gibson. Instapundit once repeated a question from Stuart Buck:

STUART BUCK on the novelization of the Narnia movie: “If you make a movie out of a classic and beloved children’s book that has sold millions of copies, why on earth would you want to have someone write a book based on the movie?”

Duh! Because if the original novel sold more copies, the movie studios wouldn’t get a cut. But with the synergy of rewriting the source material and releasing it as new, preferably by one of the parent company’s subsidiaries, you get an alternate source of revenue for the property. Heck’s pecs, I haven’t even been to Hollywood and I grok that.

But I digress. This book details the story of a courier with a flash drive (or the 1995 predicted equivalent) wired into his head. A pair of scientists hire the courier to carry a large secret to Newark, but as the upload completes, organized criminals burst in and put the courier on the run. Also, the courier has overextended himself; the scientists uploaded 320 gigabytes (not megabytes), so the overload is beginning to to impair him. He races to Newark looking for his contact, but the organized crime figures are on his tail, driving the courier underground with the Lotek gang and an enhanced but attractive young woman.

It’s a quick little cyberpunk book which preceded the mainstreamization of the cyberpunk genre. It’s also interesting to read about Johnny Mnemonic, portrayed by Keanu Reeves in the movie, as jacking into the matrix–several years before Reeves jacked into the film that revitalized his career. Many people see this story as a precursor for The Matrix, but that stretches reality a little bit–there’s no paranoia fiction aspect to it at all.

A quick read, worth the quarter.

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Book Report: Mine the Harvest by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1954)

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sister Norma published this book after Ms. Millay died, so its works contain a gamut of the good to the filler material selected from the poet’s incomplete or unpublished work. Oddly, the linked Amazon listing says that the first edition is 1949; however, the stated first edition I have has a 1954 copyright. Perhaps Norma was just planning ahead.

I paid $10 for this stated first edition at Hooked on Books in Springfield, and it’s a former library book. That said, perhaps it’s only worth ten bucks to me, but I’ve enjoyed Ms. Millay’s work since college. Actually, in college I read a great deal of her work and her biographies and whatnot. Early in our relationship, I gave Heather a collection of Millay’s sonnets. So let’s just establish that I am somewhat biased.

In this volume, Millay’s thoughts muse more on death than on love, partially accountable to her advancing age and partially accountable, I would expect, to her sister’s selection for poignancy. But Millay can still turn a phrase, and the poems within this volume which are not incisive nor insightful are tolerable, which puts her in an upper league on merely that account. A couple of memorable lines in decent poems scream for quotation, and I’ll reread the book in the future and will enjoy it then, too.

So it’s probably worth the ten dollars even though I never attended Albernathy High School nor used its library. It’s mine now.

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Book Reports: The Empty Trap by John D. MacDonald (1957)The Executioners by John D. MacDonald (1958)

I bought these books, paperbacks, from Hooked on Books for $2 and $3 respectively. So that’s a testament to how expensive books can be at Hooked on Books and also a testament to how much I like John D. MacDonald.

The Empty Trap details a revenge-based story told partially in flashback. A hotel manager finds himself working for a syndicate-connected hotel owner and discovers that he has no way out of the business. Unfortunately, the woman telling him this is the hard-but-soft songbird wife of said owner. The hotel manager figures the only way out is to absquatulate (meaning 1) with some of the mobster’s money and the mobster’s wife; the mobster thinks the hotel manager and the wife should indeed absquatulate (meaning 2). The goons leave the now-former hotel manager for dead in the Mexican desert, but in leaving him only mostly dead, they set the stage for revenge.

The Executioners reminded me a lot of the movie Cape Fear (or at least the promos I’d seen of the movie), and a quick glance at Amazon.com reveals why. The book was the source for the movie. Ah. As you might already know with that hint, a man and his family suffer the unwanted attention of a released felon against whom the father testified. The police and other locals provide little help, so the family goes on the run and finally has to make a stand.

Both books have plots that have become stock over the last fifty years, but I read them to see how John D. MacDonald did them. He did them well and rapidly; these books weigh in at fewer than 170 pages each and respresent the best of the immediately post-pulp era.

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2005: The Year’s Reading In Review

As some concede defeat in the Fifty Book Challenge, you, gentle reader, have suffered through no fewer than 96 book reviews this year (and one forthcoming). Here’s my list from 2005*:

* My personal annual goals list runs from December 25, 2004 through December 25, 2005; hence, the first items on the list have post dates in 2004. Also note that these reflect books I have finished in the time period and that I might have begun the books in college, I count them if I finish them.

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Book Report: Ruled Britannia by Harry Turtledove (2002)

I bought this book from the discount rack on the Barnes and Noble in New York at the end of September, and I read it in October, but I have yet to post a report on it as we gave it to my mother-in-law as a gift for Christmas. But here it is, gentle reader: my first foray into Turtledove’s alternate history, as best I can remember it.

The premise of the book: The Spanish Armada succeeded, and King Philip deposes Queen Elizabeth and locks her in the tower of London. A London-based playwright, William Shakespeare, becomes intangled in a plot to overthrow the Spanish and must compose a play designed to fire up the British at the same time as he’s commissioned to write an elegaic play for Philip.

The book’s language and research undoubtedly capture a lot of the time period; the English is modern, but the sentence construction tips its hat to the middle English of Shakespeare’s day. Unfortunately, the book slips into a bit of repetition that made me impatient for it to get on with the story. Also, as I was not a student of the detailed history of the era, some of the subtleties are lost on me.

Still, it’s an interesting question and perhaps one of Turtledove’s lesser efforts–after all, the blogosphere raves about his other work. I won’t totally pan it since I did give it as a gift (perhaps a passive-aggressive response for Deliver Us From Evil). However, if you’re speed-reading in an effort to make the Fifty Book Challenge, this book presents a speed bump.

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Book Report: Floodgate by Alistair MacLean (1983)

This book is the third MacLean novel I’ve read this year (see also Caravan to Vaccares, Partisans); ergo, you can assume that I like the author. Enough to pick up his books at the local library for a quarter when the local library needs to cycle out extra books for more space for Internet connections. I shouldn’t complain, as I get something for my buck (cheap thrillers remembered from my youth) while the library gets something (room, pennies on the dollar for books) and other users get something (free Internet connections, although I’m not sure how many people in Casinoport and its satellite communities need free Internet connections).

But I digress. This novel, one of MacLean’s later works, suffers from the excessive dialogishness one could ascribe to many of his works. A Dutch policeman must work against a terrorist organization that will bomb The Netherlands’ dikes if its demands go unmet.

There you have it. The policeman must infiltrate the group, and that’s it. No real plot twists, and perhaps a gaffe that one cannot explain. MacLean might have been radio telephoning it in as he transplanted his tales to the modern (1980s) era, but they still read quick and linear, drawing one along to the inevitable conclusion–and a short conclusion at that. So if you’re looking for something similar to Clive Cussler, but clocking in at only 200 pages, I’d recommend any MacLean. But if you’ve a high school or small community library ca 1986 with numerous volumes of MacLean, perhaps you ought to start with Where Eagles Dare.

On further review of that last sentence, I realize this might be my first exposure to this particular novel (unlike the others I’ve read this year, which I reocgnized by their covers). In my youthful (1986-1990) reading of MacLean, I probably didn’t encounter this novel, as it was so new. Weird reflection upon my library, and my reading: my library and my collection really begins at about 1990, when I went to college. All the Agatha Christie novels I borrowed from my high school library and all of the sundry novels I tore through at the rate of 1 per day in high school. If they’re not on the shelves, I have no record of their reading; hence, I must read them again! For all intents and purposes, my literary life began but 16 years ago. I pity you, gentle reader, who suffers through these book reports and only but now know what you’re in for.

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Book Report: A Specter Is Haunting Texas by Fritz Leiber (1968)

I bought this book as part of the much-vaunted by-and-sell-on-eBay thing I had going on in the early part of the century. I didn’t sell it, and I didn’t mark it a quarter in my own family yard sale; instead, I’ve read it. As you know, I’m on a neo-classic science fiction kick these last couple of weeks (see also my report on Man Plus by Frederik Pohl).

The book has the double-effect thing I enjoy so much. As a piece written in the late 1960s, it captures something of its time and the state of the science fiction of the era; however, its setting is hundreds of years hence. After colonizing the near solar system, the world fell into atomic warfare with which the colonists wanted nothing to do; as a result they evolved for life in free-fall. Meanwhile, the east and west coasts of America endure massive nuclear strikes which leave the fascist Texans safe to emerge as the rules who conquer the Americas and continue the struggle against the Chinese and the Russkies.

Oddly enough, although someone from the twenty-first century could look upon this and see blatant politicization-as a blogger, it’s my sacred duty–this book doesn’t contain any; the setting is simply the setting. Also, the author doesn’t have much to laud about the others in the book, whether the oppressed workers nor the Russian socialists. Instead, it’s all part of the setting, and it is what it is.

A thespian from the Sack–a free-fall colony near the moon–comes to Texas (as the whole Western hemisphere, give or take a couple hippie republics, is called) to stake a claim on an old family mine. As he’s unused to gravity, he wears an exoskeleton to function, and finds himself playing the role of the foretold leader of the revolution–or at least the figurehead as he plays the leader to earn his passage to his mining claim.

The voice fits the thespian from off the planet well, and the book is rather enjoyable. If you’re not too caught up on the latest science fiction, and if you can find a copy, it’s worth checking out.

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Book Report: Mommy Knows Worst by James Lileks (2005)

I bought this book at the local Borders at full price because I enjoyed Interior Desecrations, and I cannot handle a day I don’t start with a Bleat. Also, Lileks’ is the life I want to live, to the point that I am shaving myself a high forehead to go totally all Single White Female. Perhaps I’m revealing too much and strengthening the case for a restraining order.

But anyway.

If you read it on the Internet, it must be true; ergo, I came into this book with a different set of expectations than a casual readers, and Lileks, like a jeweller with a loupe in, took his little hammer and shattered my crystalline acceptance about my upcoming next twenty years. There’s so much upon which I had not already dwelt. Like teething. For crying out loud, that’s going to last forever, and like the teeth will burst forth all snaggled from sealed gums….Although history has proven that most have survived this ordeal, I’m not looking forward to it.

So instead of reading this book with a knowing humor, with the shared knowledge of travails past, I have to look at it as a set of future tribulations, knowing that many of the quaint solutions we will apply will one day be the subject of Gnat’s sequel to her father’s work.

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Book Report: Man Plus by Frederik Pohl (1976)

I bought this book as part of a sack of books for a buck on the last day of a library book fair in some rural southwestern Missouri county earlier this year. It’s a Stated First Edition, woo hoo! Unfortunately, it’s also a former library book, with all the stamps, scrawlings, and pockets, but a nice acetate cover anyway. Oddly enough, it’s a former Granite City library book, which means this book has been to Springfield and back in its limited lifetime.

But I digress. This book describes the progress of the Man Plus program, a program designed to modify a man to survive on the surface of Mars and to get that man to Mars. It’s a good old school science fiction piece, set in the near future for the time (the president in the book is the 42nd President, which we all know served in 1993-2001. It features an limited omniscient narrator who uses the third person the identify interested onservers who are not a part of the Man Plus project, but who direct it from behind the scenes. This compelling little mystery kept me turning the pages and offers some foreshadowing that keep the story moving.

Overall, a good book, the kind I ate up in my formative years to make me the lesser geek I am today.

And for those of you keeping score at home, this book marks my 94th read of the year. Unless I start hitting the coloring books, I won’t make 100 this year, but my goal was 70, so I did well. Of course, I haven’t met any of my other personal goals this year, and I likely won’t read this many next year with the impending lifestyle change upcoming, but I’m rather pleased with my bookishness this year.

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Book Report: Firestarter by Stephen King (1980)

I bought this book a long, long time ago when I was doing the eBay thing. Undoubtedly, I bought it for a buck or less and hoped to turn that into a quick three or four dollars, minus eBay’s cut of fifty cents plus twenty percent plus PayPal’s quarter plus twenty percent plus whatever shipping cost over what I charged plus the cost of packaging compounded with the cost of gas to the post office and my time in preparing and shipping the item. In retrospect, perhaps my bottom line is better off that I didn’t actually sell the book on eBay. Now that I’ve come to better appreciate Stephen King, my library is certainly better off.

As you probably already know, gentle reader, this book deals with a father and his daughter on the run from a clandestine government organization called the Shop. A participant in a small study while in college, Andy McGee (the father) found that he had special abilities beyond those of normal men. He married another participant, and together they begot the very special titular pyrokinetic daughter Charlene. The clandestine officials kill the mother and pursue the father and daughter so they can study them and perhaps use the child’s power on the Russkies. Hell, you know how it works out, sorta; you remember the Drew Barrymore movie, back when it was startling that the little girl from E.T. could be dangerous–back before the little girl who played the little girl from E.T. became actually dangerous.

The book moves along quickly and captures not only early King narrative, but also some of the zeitgeist of the time. Unfortunately, the book’s ending also reflects that zeitgeist, without any cathartic retribution or quiet return of the hero to normalcy; no, we get an indication that the child will tell her story to the one periodical that will stick it to the man, a periodical of some influence at the time, perhaps, but not any more. Of course, it wasn’t 2005 in 1980, so I couldn’t certainly expect Charlie McGee to start a blog, but come on.

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Book Report: Christine by Stephen King (1983)

I inherited the hardback edition of this book from my aunt, whose first anniversary of her death is coming up next week. As I continue reading these books, part of her remains with me, but fortunately it’s her taste in books and not her unrelenting fury in the form of possessed books. Because man, that would be creepy, and if my books rose up against me, I would be in trouble, as I’m outnumbered several thousand to one.

But onto Christine. As anyone alive through the 1980s knows, Christine is a possessed old car. Since I’d only seen a single scene from the movie version, that’s about all I knew. The story is more than a rehash of The Car, as it begins with a pair of friends who spot the car on the way home form work one day. As the more nerdesque of the two takes possession of the car, it takes possession of him, and it begins killing those who offended him.

It’s a Stephen King, so it moves quickly as his masterful foreshadowing pulls you along. The story combines growing up with terror as many of his books do, and it’s worth a read if you’re one of the other fifteen fourteen other readers alive in the eighties who has not yet read it.

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Geek Cred Compromised

From Overtaken By Events, we have a revelation that shakes the MfBJN Geek Cred to the core. Of the UK Guardian’s top 20 Geek books, here’s what I have read (books I’ve read in bold):

1. The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams 85% (102)
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell 79% (92)
3. Brave New World — Aldous Huxley 69% (77)
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Philip Dick 64% (67)
5. Neuromancer — William Gibson 59% (66)
6. Dune — Frank Herbert 53% (54)
7. I, Robot — Isaac Asimov 52% (54)
8. Foundation — Isaac Asimov 47% (47)
9. The Colour of Magic — Terry Pratchett 46% (46)
10. Microserfs — Douglas Coupland 43% (44)
11. Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson 37% (37)
12. Watchmen — Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons 38% (37)
13. Cryptonomicon — Neal Stephenson 36% (36)
14. Consider Phlebas — Iain M Banks 34% (35)
15. Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert Heinlein 33% (33)
16. The Man in the High Castle — Philip K Dick 34% (32)
17. American Gods — Neil Gaiman 31% (29)
18. The Diamond Age — Neal Stephenson 27% (27)
19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy — Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson 23% (21)
20. Trouble with Lichen – John Wyndham 21% (19)

Yikes. That’s 35%, although in my rather feeble defense, I have The Illuminatus Trilogy and Microserfs on my shelves to read. Take a moment, though, to reflect upon the recent nature of most of these books; my formative years and most intense teenage geekification took place before they were published.

Additional rationalization: I was an English major, so my directed learning and self-improvement impulses lead me to heavier works (although pound-for-pound, the Illuminatus Trilogy is up there).

Forget it; I am just making it worse.

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Book Report: Bag Limit by Steven F. Havill (2001)

I bought this book at the Seasonal 80% Publisher Price Store in Springfield. Suddenly, it occurs to me that it wasn’t last autumn….it was two years ago. Wow. I paid $4.00 for the book by the unknown-to-me author because I was in an orgy of spending.

Within the text, Sheriff Bill Gaston of Posados County, New Mexico, is enjoying the night air of his county when a car full of drunk teens strikes his parked car. The driver takes off across the scrub, but Gaston and his undersheriff–who’s standing for election the following week–know where the boy lives, as he’s the undersheriff’s cousin. But the boy tries to flee again when the sheriff apprehends him at home later, and the boy dies as he falls into the path of a truck while escaping. Gastner wonders why the boy is running so hard to get away from the police for an accident that hurt no one.

The book definitively takes a retrospective, somber tone, as Gastner’s planning to retire and this book might represent a conclusion to the Sheriff Bill Gastner series. I came late to it–this was the first I’ve read–and don’t know the characters that well, but that didn’t really hurt my experience. However, its meandering tone reflected a lot of time on the reminiscing and very little on the investigation of the crime. Perhaps the book is looking to be serious fiction with a crime in it, but it shouldn’t be a series mystery then.

But it wasn’t a bad book. It’s one of several I’ve read this year set in the southwest (Killing Raven, Cyber Way, Appaloosa, and so on), so I’m beginning to want to travel down there and see how the books have captured the flavor.

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Book Report: The Book of Lists #3 by Amy Wallace, David Wallechinsky, and Irving Wallace (1982)

Apparently, this book is only available in hardcover on Amazon for $55, but I bought my copy at the Carondolet YMCA bok fair for $1. So if I wanted to resell it, I could list it on Amazon for an exhorbitant amount, pay whatever monthly fees Amazon offers, and not sell it.

I read the first Book of Lists in high school, and I’ve always enjoyed the mixture of trivia and somewhat wry commentary; however, some decade after I read the Book of Lists 2 and The People’s Almanac, I’ve noticed more acutely the leftward lean of the authors. I mean, I know they did The People’s Almanac and its red cover in paperback should have been a tip-off, but I was a boy then and I’m a libertive now, so I’m probably more aware of it. Published in 1982, it’s chock full of Reagan-is-evilism, and one must recognize that the book was written when Reagan had been in office under two years and had spent part of that time recovering from a gunshot wound. The book includes lists for the first things the environmentalists would ban if they could, for crying out loud. Blech.

Still, it’s a good enough read as it contains enough trivia to help me keep ahead of the regular Trivial Pursuit adversaries and it allows for synthetic thought (Alcatraz closed in 1963? That’s only 13 years before The Enforcer, which means the memory of Alcatraz would have been fresher to contemporary movie viewers than grunge is to current pop culture….).

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Book Report: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King (1999)

I inherited this book from my aunt. She might have read it, she might not have. Almost a year after her death, I cannot remember whether she particularly liked Stephen King amongst her reading within the horror genre.

This book chronicles the story of a nine-year-old girl who gets lost in the Maine Woods and is stalked by something called the God of the Lost. She has only her wits–inflated through the magic of fiction–and Tom Gordon, her hallucinated rendition of the Boston Red Sox reliever.

Pretty much, that’s it. It’s a short story for King–a mere 210 pages–but it moves along quickly and draws the reader along with its simple Girl against Nature (and Girl against Supernatural, or maybe Girl against Herself) conflict and its long paragraph descriptions. King could probably write a shopping list and make it compelling and enjoyable reading. As it stands, his hike one day inspired a story that kept me preoccupied a couple of nights.

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Book Report: What’s It All About, Charlie Brown? by Jeffrey H. Loria (1968)

I bought this book at a garage sale some aeons ago, and it languished in my eleven boxes of eBayable books that I’d held in reserve in case I accidentally opened a book store. As I prepared to divest myself of these investments, I picked over the collection one final time for books I might want to read, and I settled upon this book and probably several dozen others. Because at my pace, I am scheduled to run out of reading material on my shelves sometime in 2009, and we can’t have that.

Whenever I go on vacation, I fill up the bag with quick read paperbacks. When we went to NYC last weekend, I packed this one, and it didn’t disappoint. Short chapters filled with Peanuts cartoons make for a quick but interesting read.

The book contrasts the Peanuts gang with the kids today–from 1968, remember–and finds the kids today lacking. The Peanuts kids respect their elders, go to church, recognize the value of education, and love their families; kids today just want to get high and paint their bodies in San Francisco parks. So I thought I was looking into a book describing the epistemology of Peanuts, and I end up with a pre-Hannity conservative tome. Not that I am complaining; it’s an interesting historical document for starters, and also an accessible book that relates art to philosophy in a non-scholarly way.

Perhaps the book proved more accessible to me than it would to someone of today’s generation; I had a Snoopy electric toothbrush and remember wwatching seasonal animated television specials featuring Charlie Brown. Have newspaper comics faded in the contemporary age? Dilbert remains popular, The Boondocks remains controversial (but popular? Hmm…), and Day by Day gets blog attention, but who even reads the comics in the newspapers today? Pardon me while I project.

Also, the book sharpened some dulling trivia about the Peanuts gang. I mean, I’d forgotten Violet, but she was an important foil to Charlie Brown. And I know the ages of the kids–five years old or thereabouts. Any book that provides useful trivia is a good book, especially when it costs a quarter or less and takes a little more than a three hour flight to read.

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Book Report: All These Condemned by John D. MacDonald (1954)

All These Condemned is very similar to A Man of Affairs; both deal with business affairs and backstabbing that go on in luxurious locations and someone ends up dead. In this case, it’s a wealthy cosmetic company diva who enjoys toying with and manipulating her friends and employees.

MacDonald did something a little different with this book, wherein each chapter comprises the action leading up to or following the murder as seen through the eyes of one of the people at the lake resort of Wilma Ferris. With no single voice and the recursive nature of the storytelling–as each person retells a portion of it–the book becomes a cipher, hard to get into and almost plodding in its slow build-up to the climax.

Still, it’s interesting to see MacDonald riffing with characters, timeline, and whatnot. But I don’t recommend the book highly.

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Book Report: The Night Spider by John Lutz (2003)

I inherited this book from my aunt; she paid fifty cents for it at a yard sale, probably to resell on eBay. She would have gotten a pretty good deal on a common thriller had she been inclined to read it. Hey, I liked it well enough. As some of you know, John Lutz is a St. Louis writer who sets his Thomas Horn novels in New York City. I thought it would be a fitting read for a St. Louis writer visiting New York City.

Thomas Horn has to come back to the force to investigate a serial killer who kills young, attractive, single women in high rise apartments by coming in through their windows. That’s the plot, and it’s a serviceable book. But I not only read this book for the enjoyment, but also the do nots I can apply to my own writing, and I picked up a big set from this book:

  • Do not spend a lot of time, or start the book, with an intimate profile of victims. Their problems and frustrations will ultimately prove meaningless as they’re killed imaginatively. Now, I have a lot of problems and frustrations, and I don’t need the perspective that they’re all meaningless because I might be killed imaginatively. Also, I think the trick wastes space and the reader’s time.
  • Avoid describing characters by saying they look like celebrities. That’s a cheap shortcut. Who cares if the problematic and frustrated by (allegedly) attractive young woman looks like Helen Hunt? In a couple of pages she’ll be deader than Helen Hunt’s career.
  • The psycho super Special Forces/black ops antagonist. Come on, that’s been low-hanging fruit since World War I or World War II and accelerated by Viet Nam. How about a couple psycho super special vegans for once?
  • Grafting on a Part II as an afterthought so to involve the rest of a special forces team who murder to cover for the psycho? Don’t do it.

Even with those lessons, it’s a decent enough book. If you’re into suspense or St. Louis authors, you could do worse.

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Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Book Report: The Columnist by Jeffrey Frank (2001)

I bought this book from the 80% off book store last autumn and found that it had migrated to the second rank of my to-read bookshelves, which means I buy too many books over the course of the year.

This book might have been written too early; it serves as the fictional memoir that tracks the rise of a William Safire/George Will syndicated newspaper columnist from his humble beginnings at a college newspaper in the late 1950s to the stagnation of his career and life in the 1980s. As it was written before the rise of the blogosphere, one can only speculate about how it would have played out if all the cool bloggers had read it.

I enjoyed the book, although not without qualification. Brandon Sladder is an oblivious user of people, obnoxious and socially climbing. He crosses women, he backstabs his employees, he alienates his “friends” and describes them in his memoir as too busy to confab with him. But we can laugh at his obliviousness and wonder if perhaps he does know but is putting a good face on it.

But as the book turns the final corner into the finish line, we discover that both of his wives have cheated on Sladder, who’s a clod but cloddishness doesn’t excuse adultery except to certain elements from amoral cosmpolitan areas. The final sex scandal, tacked on, seems too much, and the downfall of Brandon Sladder seems abrupt. Of course, given the voice of the book, it would have to be abrupt and inexplicable, but it shouldn’t actually seem that way to readers of the novel.

And although Brandon Sladder, at the end, almost achieves self-awareness, he does not, and Jeffrey Frank does not yield any sort of redemption. So at the end, Brandon Sladder is as self-absorbed and oblivious as at the beginning of the book. Ultimately, that strips the book of its humor, as all along we weren’t laughing with a character recounting his past flaws, but laughing at a lesser person. The end completely changes the tenor of all that came before it and ultimately made the book completely disappoint me.

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Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories