Category: Books

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.

I bought this book at A Clean Well Lighted Place for books in San Francisco. It was on the discount table for $4.98, and I thought I would get enough mockery out of it to make it worth my fin. I was probably wrong.

The full title of the book is I Can’t Fight This Feeling: Timeless Poems for Lovers from the Pop Hits of the ’70s and ’80s. The book collects a bunch of lyrics from 1970s and 1980s pop fare, imposes arbitrary and dare I say “Random?” line breaks upon them, and calls them poetry. When coupled with music, some of these songs are enjoyable, potentially meaningful three minute vignettes into poetry that I laughed at in high school. Ah, high school, when I worked as editor of the school literary magazine, whose mockery would keep bad poets out of print; now that I am an adult, the only person’s poems that I can keep out of print are my own and I can only do that by submitting them to every poetry magazine from Poetry to Highlights for Children. What was I talking about?

Oh, yes, this book. The introduction is not from the editor, but from some obscure pilot, Fred Schnieder of the B-52s. He explains that these really are poems. The rest of the book refutes his assertion. Because, folks, let’s just face it: poems use images to evoke emotional response. Pop songs like Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” or “I Honestly Love You” or Orleans’ “Still the One” or Barry White’s “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe” or Bon Jovi’s “Bad Medicine” don’t rely on images so much as testimony from the poet-narrator. Actually, of all those I listed, “Bad Medicine” comes closest since its very conceit is a metaphor (your love is like bad medicine). Oddly enough, this would mean that Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” is one of the poetical highlights of the book.

The only song of the 35 that would stand alone as a poem–that is, it relies on imagery and has a good internal consistency in its dreamlike surrealism–is “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper. Perhaps “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” by Looking Glass would fall into the poem category, seeing as it’s a traditional ballad that tells a story and actually includes images (a braided chain made of finer silver from the north of Spain, etc., etc.). However, unlike other songs in the book I can hear within my head as performed by the original artist, “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” comes with a visual. A former co-worker, soon-to-be the head of the Technical Writing department, admitted that she had been a pom-pom girl in high school, and that after a couple of glasses of wine, she’d be likely to re-enact a routine based on the song. So, gentle reader, I must diss Looking Glass simply because the song can make me imagine a drunken Peggy smiling and kicking and waving imaginary or improvised poms. Although the imagery is the most vivid, I don’t think Looking Glass intended that particular image.

So, I would certainly not recommend this book for you, gentle reader, unless you can find it at a garage sale for a quarter and you can enjoy the absurdity of sharing these poems, read aloud with full Shatner-inflection, with your loved one (or ones, Utah readers). My beautiful wife has taste for poetry and distaste for cheese, so I don’t think I got a full verse of "poetry&quot out before she told me to stop under threat of bodily injury. I don’t the heart, or perhaps other masculine anatomical features, to tell her this was supposed to be her anniversary gift.

Bonus: The only laugh out loud line came from John Waite’s “Missing You”:

stop this heartbreak overload!

Come on, the line’s something best mumbled over when singing the song, which I adore; however, seeing it in print, with an exclamation point, sent me into near hysterics.

As with a number of my other John D. MacDonald books, such as Judge Me Not and On The Run, I fully acknowledge the jonesing with (or jonsing, if I need to drop the silent e) that drives me to pay $2.00 each for John D. MacDonald paperbacks. I am glad, glad, you hear?

I bought this book at Downtown Books in Milwaukee (the place to go in Milwaukee for used books, werd) for $1.95. John D. MacDonald’s other works, including the Travis McGee series, get reprinted ad infinitum so their prices are cheap. All of his works are worthwhile, though, no matter the cost. Please visit my eBay listings after I make this assertion to drive up the prices….wait–I’m not selling my copies, you damn chiselers.

This particular book represents another of MacDonald’s forays into Big Business. When a junk bond/leveraged buyout king swoops into a family-run business after the patriarch dies, a self-appointed self-made man (the first person narrator) invites himself onto a Bahamas retreat where high finance and human nature collide. The narrator, Sam Glidden, wants to keep the heirs of the owner from selling the company to a corporate raider. But on the holiday in the sane where the sun and the sex are easy, can he hold to his ideals?

Crikes, this book was written almost fifty years ago. With the easy sex and the high finance, I found it easy to forget–and to follow along.

Were I less loyal to my patron saints (Parker, Frost, and Billy Joel, amen), I would find John D. MacDonald’s miracles hard to discount. Each of his books, whether ignored in individual paperbacks or apotheosized in Travis McGee omnibus editions, contains the same ambiguous characters, the same lush descriptions of big business or maritime “salvage,” and the same lush descriptions.

If you stumble across this paperback through a “friendly” loan, steal it. If you find it at a garage sale held by an underfed woman and her dozens of underfed children, buy it. If you can inadvertently purchase it from a reputable used boook store, buy it.

When I grow up, I want to be John D. MacDonald. Although, with LASIK surgery, perhaps I could avoid the heavy plastic glasses frames.

I inherited The Dick Tracy Casebook Selected from my aunt, who undoubtedly bought it at a garage sale to sell on eBay. So I got it free, which explains why I got it, since I’m not a particular fan of the comic strip.

This book collects some representative story arcs from the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Each story arc begins with one of the contemporary (for 1990–who knows what they do now) producers of the comic strip. Each one elevates, to the point of comic apotheosis, the forthcoming collection of black and white panels. Chester Gould at his greatest, this period in Dick Tracy, that period in Dick Tracy. It was a cartoon serial, for crying out loud.

As a serial, each story contains a single plotline. Given the daily nature of the serial, though, a large number of the individual panels sum up the action so far; that is, of a day’s three or four panels, the panel deals with something that has already happened. Indeed, sometimes whole daily strips catch the reader up on the story so far. It gives the stories a particularly recursive feel.

The nature of the storylines also seemed, at times, a little as though Gould was trying to run the stories a little longer until he could maybe get his next idea. Two of the stories run 50 pages; at about the midpoint of the “Crewy Lou” story, the cops had Crewy Lou, but she escaped and a sudden brother decided to spend over a week trying to kill her for the dishonor to her family. And then she conks Tess Trueheart over the head and steals Dick Tracy’s car and spends a week or so driving it through mountains. And so on and on.

Perhaps I’m not the comic connoisseur, but I didn’t dwell over the panels. I didn’t contrast the styles nor depictions of Dick Tracy at times in his career. Nor did I study the character names to determine their underlying meanings. I just read for the story, much like the book’s selectors did when they first read Dick Tracy and quite unlike, so the introductions suggest, the book’s selectors do now that they’re doing it for a living and want to promote the comics as something more than drawings, exposition boxes, and dialog bubbles.

I enjoyed the book, but I won’t subscribe to the paper to receive it, and I won’t run out and collect all sorts of Dick Tracy comic books or collections. There you have it. Besides, I already have too many books on my to-read shelves as it is.

I wanted a good reading copy of The Fountainhead, so I cruised eBay for one. I mean, I have the first edition, but I don’t want to spill beer and danish toppings on it. I also have my first paperback copy from college, but I’m a hardback snob. So I cruised eBay and found a nice International Collector’s Library edition ca 1968, complete with heavy paper, leatheresque binding, and attached ribbon for book marking. Oh, yeah. And for such a low price (shipping and handling extra)!

So once I bought it, I put it on my to read shelf. And now I have read it for the fifth time.

What can I say? I like the book. I read it first, a library copy, before my freshman year of college. I’d been challenged by the startlingly-literate machinist next door to elevate my reading habits if I wanted to be an English major. So I remembered flyers for the ARI’s The Fountainhead essay contest scholarship and figured it was Literature. So I consumed it at the most formative time, that summer when a young man leaves his boyhood home and tries to become a man.

The book seemed very long back then when I was used to 175 page crime thrillers, but now that I have graduated to 1000 page Stephen King books, it seems almost like a quick read. I’m surprised every time how approachable the book is; the book avoids the speechifying that sank Atlas Shrugged. Rand also had a better hero in this book, Howard Roark, with whom the reader struggles throughout the years that pass in their epic sweep.

Howard Roark, architect. He’s thrown out of architecture school for being a nonconformist and has to strive through a series of setbacks to be the man he is and to be an active architect without compromising his ideals. He won’t, of course, because he’s a Randian hero, but it continues to inspire me each time I read the book. So I’ve read it again for the first time in five years, and I’ll read it again in another five years, when I need a reminder of the freshness and vitality I felt and feel about my ideals when I read this book.

It’s not much of a book review, but let the fact that I paid eBay shipping and handling for a copy of this book so I could read it a fifth time speak for me.