Category: Books

I bought this book for $5.98 at Barnes and Noble because it looked interesting and because I had a gift card to blow.

It’s a collection of aphorisms and “laws” coined by columnist, commentators, and humorists covering the workplace, and to be honest, covering working for the government in a lot of cases. It’s a quick read, and a lot of the axioms and maxims provide crystallizations of core truths in a handy fashion that allow you to quip them. For example, I’m going to use It’s easier to defend consistency than correctness as soon as possible.

Also, it was a quick read while I work on the longer fiction books that I’m reading. And to let you, gentle readers, that I am still literate.

I inherited this book from my aunt, whose legacy filled my to-read shelves with horror and mystery novels. I’m growing to enjoy Stephen King and Dean Koontz, so their presence in my library is welcome. Stephen King is an American master, truly, whose books will be read hundreds of years in the future assuming 1) people still read books, and 2) all American texts have not been burned.

First of all, this book is a book without antecedent. Not precedent, but antecedent. When I tried talking about it with my beautiful wife during our evening rambles around the subdivisions in our neighborhood, she couldn’t always understand what I was talking about when I referred to It. So I had to say Stephen King’s It, like I was titling the miniseries and hoping the name Stephen King would draw viewers which the title alone would not.

The book is not without its flaws. This comes from King’s Epic period, which spawned The Stand and the beginning of the mercifully-split Dark Tower series. This book weighs in at over 1100 pages, and I hit the AKM (Anna Karenina Moment, wherein the reader realizes he’s read enough to have completed one long novel and realizes that he’s got the equivalent of one or more novels to go–and is tempted to read one or more complete novels instead). The quality of the writing doesn’t suffer, really, but the quantity tends to overwhelm it.

The book deals with seven youths who confront an eldritch, foetid horror in Derry, Maine, in 1958, and when the eldritch, foetid, other-worldly horror resurfaces in 1985, the middle-aged children of Derry return to confront it again without the imagination of youth to protect them from unreality.

I survived the AKM and pressed on. King weaves a lot of detail into the setting, and even the minor characters take on three and sometimes three-and-a-half dimensions. Still, this adds bulk that wouldn’t be afforded to a first-time novelist; agents and editors would bounce this proposal back from anyone but Stephen King. The main characters get their own sections and chapters and great detail. However, I’m not a first time King reader, so I was reading along trying to guess who wouldn’t make it. Life, and King, are cruel that way; just when you get to liking someone, a monster rises from the depths and rips off his or her head.

Still, somewhere after page five hundred pages, the pace picks up and rushes toward a hundred page climax and forty page dénouement. Overall, I’m pleased with the book and even have the strange desire to see the 1990 television movie equivalent which features Tim Curry as Pennywise the Clown–that man has actorial chutzpah.

Still, one has to wonder what Stephen King was thinking when he concocted the plot. Did he say to himself, what this book really needs to drive its theme home is group sex in the sewers among eleven and twelve year olds? Because I could have entirely left that little bit out without really corrupting the story.

All right, so I read this book; I even bought it, although I couldn’t tell you if I bought it at a garage sale or very cheaply at a used bookstore. I bought it, though, because I’ve done needlepoint on plastic mesh before and will do so again before they stop me. Besides, once purchased, it was on my to-read shelves and represented an easy browse to removal. So I flipped through it enough to satisfy my interia criteria for having read a book, and now I’m reporting on it.

The book includes a number of projects one can do with needlepoint taking advantage of the new plastic mesh canvas which apparently came on the marketplace at about that time; the book lists several suppliers and brand names. Now, I walk into Walmart and just buy whatever cheap sheets my Walton cousins stock. But back in the day, undoubtedly this was the hot new technology, like .NET for crafters. The introduction chapter talks about the transition from fabric canvas, and I laughed out loud when I realized that I took for granted a two-step stitch–once down through the canvas and once up–to which fabric crafters, who were used to folding the canvas for a single-step stitch, would have to adjust.

Undoubtedly, Lileks could do a number on the patterns in this book, but I won’t; I will, however, comment that my mother was a Creative Circle representative, and she used to hold Tupperware-style parties to sell patterns, yarns, kits, and whatnot to housewives. This was almost thirty years ago, in the early 1980s, and I remember a certain number of craftesque gifts exchanged and some crafty things around the house and the houses of people whom I visited. Is it just me, or is the number of home-crafted things in decline? I don’t know many of my generation/peerage who sew or do crafts. Acourse, we’re all geeks who spin yarns called computer programs and the assorted effluvia of the IT industry, so perhaps my perspective is skewed.

So what did this book gain me? I have a listing of other stitches I can use on plastic canvases. I don’t think I’ll use the patterns within it, nor did they particularly fire my imagination for projects. I did, however, finish book #31 for the year, and I still have the collection of Dick Tracy cartoons in reserve for if I fall behind my desired pace.

As some of you know, I recently bought this book on Amazon for like full price because its description indicated the book echoed themes I’ve raised before on this blog. And so it does.

Some people get a chill from horror novels. I’m working on Stephen King’s It, and a killer clown in the sewers bothers me less than The Three Billy Goats Gruff did back in the day. When I want to self-impose fear, I pick up a book like this.

The book runs 150 pages, which includes extensive end notes. It comprises an introduction and six essays. The essays do tend to focus on crimes that companies or more powerful people could commit–environmental crimes, medical crimes, violations of business laws. Of course, these sorts of crimes would certainly interest the contributors to the CATO Institute, who put this book together. Although I’m not planning to do any industrial dumping, the implications of these new classes of crimes frightened me enough when I realized that charges for these crimes can apply to the individual as well as the corporation if a prosecutor or law enforcement official wants them to do so. Black magick.

Two other essays in the book deal with:

• Project Exile, which allowed for federal enforcement of gun law violations; although I started the essay disagreeing with the premise that Project Exile was bad (hey, how could it be bad to keep guns from felons?), the essay convinced me. The government’s goal is worthy, but its tactics are frightening. Spending federal money to hire federal prosecutors to prosecute essentially local crimes and do nothing else leads to creative, aggressive pursuit of the goal. High conviction rates don’t necessarily mean success; they could mean creative application of the process and law in pursuit of the goal.
• Federal Sentencing Guidelines, the Byzantine set of documentation that dictates how federal judges must impose sentences based on complex computations established by an unelected commission. The essay explains how this came about and its effects, including creative fact-bargaining and prosecutors holding back evidence from the trial to present during sentencing to increase the perpetrator’s time.

The book didn’t touch too much on layering–the prosecution of the same crime at many levels of government–although it did mention it. Also, it didn’t touch on nonsense measures that outlaw things that offend vocal minorities, hate crimes, or the criminalization of non-criminal acts that criminals sometimes perform as precursor or part of another crime. Perhaps it’s just as well this book didn’t take on those topics; I’m having enough trouble sleeping as it is.

Tone of the book is reasoned essay, unlike stream-of-consciousness screeds you get out of popular broadcast journalists who write political books. These essays build cases and take their time to get to the conclusion. Many of them are actually condensed from longer pieces. So it’s not a quick read, but it’s a thoughtful book, and since it’s only 150 pages, it’s a good week of reading.

Now I’ve read the book, I just need to be an influential about the ideas presented.

I inherited this book from my Aunt Dale; I don’t know if this was her personal copy or if she bought it to sell on eBay, but I do know that she liked Ed McBain, or at least owned one or more of his books; I remember in particular that I read her copy of Lightning when I was young and impressionable.

This collection includes, oddly enough, three of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels: Fuzz (1968), Jigsaw (1970), and Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here (1971). That’s right, McBain (or Hunter, if you prefer) has been writing these books for fifty years now, and to a certain demographic, the books haven’t aged too badly.

I mean, of course, to people from Generation X and before, these books have aged well. We remember computers coming into the fore in our lifetimes; before that, typewriters. Criminey, I wrote my first couple of college papers on an old Smith Corona before I could spring the thousands of dollars (with a loan, no less) for the 286-10 running MS-DOS 5.0 and LotusWorks that would last the rest of my college career). So these stories, which feature cops handwriting forms and typing on typewriters, remain relevant and undated to me. I pity writers now (myself included) whose crime fiction will seemingly be ever dated from this point on–what, he was typing on a computer and not just intuiting through the Gibsonterface?

These three novels are short; the whole book runs under 500 pages. But that’s something else I remember: novels running under 200 pages each. Now, the publishers think you’ll wilt if you spend $30 on fewer than 350 pages. Come to think of it, I would, too. Perhaps hardback publishers are pricing themselves out of the entertainment marketplace by keeping their book prices in line with that of video games.

But I digress.

These three novels represent not only McBain’s deftness, but the power of the third person narrator. Because these books don’t rely on a single character’s viewpoint, McBain has more latitude to try different things than, say, a first person narrator writer like Robert Crais.

The novels appear in this book in reverse chronological order (hence, pardon me while I discuss them in the opposite order in which they appear in the book). Fuzz depicts a series of assassinations in the city perpetrated by the Deaf Man, who will become the 87th Precinct’s nemesis over the years. This is his second appearance (I believe, and textual evidence supports it). Jigsaw features a couple of detectives from the 87th Precinct, supported by others of course, investigating a particular crime. Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here depicts a 24-hour period in the 87th Precinct, with two shifts of detectives dealing with the crimes that occur on their shift. The third person narrator allows a lot of latitude of who the author can include and exclude and even who can die during the course of the book. Authors who use the first person narrator shortcut its immediacy by including third person sections (see also Robert Crais and, I daresay, Robert B. Parker). McBain p0wns you.

The novels within the book do present an interesting artifact, though, as they depict life in The City (a proxy for New York) in the 1960s and 1970s. Wow, it did seem like a dangerous place to live….until this fellow named Giuliani showed up. McBain found something to write about afterwards, as his books don’t stop with Giuliani’s election, but I cannot help but read them in that context.

So would I recommend the book? Unabashedly. Although my wonderful and well-read mother-in-law has, on occasion, condemned Ed McBain as smut, I still laud the poetry interspersed with the gritty. Also, she was a high school teacher who had the public’s morals to protect. Me? I am a poor boy from the ghetto who wanted to escape with his writing. I cannot think of a better example of the third person narrator in crime fiction series than Ed McBain. Any of them, or any three of them in one volume.

I bought this book for fourteen bucks in paperback at Borders (well, I used a gift card for part of it) because I like Bob Greene’s work. As some of you might recall, I read Bob Greene’s America last year. He’s much better at columns and essays than at full length novels, it would appear based on this single sample.

This book chronicles the aftermath Bob Greene’s father’s death. Greene explores his relationship to his father and seeks a better understanding of the World War II generation as he interviews Paul Tibbets, the man who not only flew the Enola Gay but commanded the military force responsible for putting together the mission. So Greene weaves together the individually compelling stories in what, ultimately, proves to be a less than satisfying mishmash.

Greene wanders between his memories of his father’s last days, his interviews with Tibbets, and the audiotapes that his father made to tell his children his WWII experiences as an infantryman in Italy in the war. Throughout, we get Greene’s earnest voice, sometime plaintive and sometimes naive, discussing the events as they unfold. I’ve complimented Greene’s columns and his collection of columns for their concision and transparent eyeballness, but he cannot sustain it in this longer work. And at the end, Greene gets to meet the two other surviving members of the Enola Gay crew as the three reunite in Branson, Missouri. We get to see they’re older and that most people don’t know who they are, and at the end of the weekend, the book pretty much ends. It doesn’t build to a strong insight or conclusion of any real meat, and although a column doesn’t have to, a book should.

So I’m ultimately disappointed. I look forward to more collections of his columns, if any exist, but have some trepidation regarding his other long works and his novel. But I’ll try at least one, since it’s on my too-read shelves.

Okay I read another of these. I bought 5-10 for 33 cents each at Hooked on Books in Springfield, and they’re well worth it. Star Trek 6, like the others in the series, gathers together some of the episodes from the original Star Trek series and does them in a short story format. They’re quick reads as they run about 130 pages each and, as paperbacks, they fit in one’s pocket.

A couple of things strike me as I read them:

• Wow, you mean there are episodes of the original series I haven’t seen? I guess they made, what, 80 of them over three years; I just assumed that through the years of syndication, I had seen them all. I haven’t. Which means there’s probably a TOS DVD box set in my future.
• Man, do you remember when paperback books had order forms right in the back? Have you ever encountered a paperback book that had its order form clipped out? Me either. Do they still do that? I remember the old paperback versions of Ayn Rand’s writing actually had a card glued into the middle for information about the ARI, but I haven’t seen a paperback with the order form in years. Of course, I haven’t bought a new paperback book in years….

I actually ordered Cold Service from Amazon, so I’m a week late in reading it. But I read it in a single night, as is my wont. It helps that the books are thick, but the print is large and the most of the book is dialogue.

The plot basically recycles Small Vices and Pale Kings and Princes in that Hawk gets shot, almost dies, and when he recuperates, he and Spenser will pit the various organized crime elements against each other to get revenge on the gang who shot Hawk and the people whom he was protecting (some bodyguard–sorry, that’s A Savage Place).

The same knocks I make on Crais novels I can make on Parker in the last couple of years. The plot centers on a favor for a friend instead of a case, it features a problem and not a mystery, and it features an ethnic gang of the month (Ukrainians). Still, I was partly raised by Robert B. Parker since I read the best of the Spenser novels in my fatherless formative years, so I give him a little more leeway for the books he phones in.

Still, I enjoyed the book well enough, but I’d prefer to see Spenser work on some cases, not some guerilla campaigns against organized crime.

I saw this book last winter at the 80% off book store before I saw its predecessor The Probability Broach; however, I found the first one and read it first and finally, five months later, got to this book.

This book is a short story stuffed with Libertarian policy. A couple of crimes occur, and the heroes interview a number of authoritarian straw men and shout them down with Libertarian reason. Then, on page 250, a member of the villains committing the crimes comes forward and explains to them what’s going on in the plot and how to reach the climactic shootout where the bad guys die, the good guys are only injured, and an unexpected cavalry arrives.

I guess if you eagerly bought the book, this is kinda what you hoped would happen. However, I found the book tiresome to read without a plot, although the writing was simple and easygoing enough. But it’s hard to overtly root for an ideology as the antagonist.

You damn kids want to know what old skool geeks did before DVDs, before VHS, and even before BetaMax? In the dark, dark days of the early 1970s, after the original Star Trek series disappeared from the airwaves and the animated series offered the only respite (the movie which revived the franchise was 8 years off in 1972, Star Wars the sci fi savior was 5 years off, and the next Star Trek Series a whopping fourteen years off). James Blish, a sci fi writer/hack took the episodes from the original series and published them in a series of books. That’s right, you damn kids. Before they had DVDs, they had books, and geeks read. Not just books on development, but science fiction. In books.

I was first exposed to this series in high school, right before Star Trek: The Next Generation came out. So when I found a number of these books (starting with this one) at Hooked on Books priced at three for a dollar, I bought a season’s worth of Star Trek for a buck sixty-seven. You can’t beat that at garage sales for old videocassettes, werd.

This book runs 135 pages, roughly, and features seven stories. I remember many of the episodes, so I’m really drawn along. One hour episodes, condensed into 15 page stories, translates into some quick and easy science fiction reading. Granted, if you’re not familiar with the original series and its characters, perhaps the book won’t hold the same appeal for you. But you’re a damn kid anyway, and I want you off of my lawn!

This book represents another picture book I inherited from my aunt, and if the used price on Amazon is any guide, it might have been her biggest eBay score. But she lacked a certain follow through on the whole online auction thing. So I’ve got it now, and I thumbed through it, looking at the historical photos of business in St. Louis and reading the flattering paragraphs accompanying the photos. The book was, as a matter of fact, underwritten by one of the enterprises whose start is depicted in the book. Of course that company and all others in St. Louis are praised. Lavishly.

So the book provides interesting photographs, and some trivia and insights, including:

• The smile was invented in 1948.
• It’s a wonder turn of the century families were so large considering how ugly the women were.
• The years since 1994 have been harsh for St. Louis business, since most of the grand corporations lauded in the book–Edison Brothers, May Company, McDonnell Douglas, Pet, Inc., Sherwood Medical, and so on have been bought out or have otherwise left the area.
• Those who have the juice now in the city of St. Louis have always had the juice in St. Louis.

Still, an enjoyable experience, once again a short one since it was mostly photos, and something I’ll share with the more historical members of my family. And, dear readers, if you offer me what they’re asking for it on Amazon, I’ll share it with you, too.

My beautiful wife bought me this book, whose full title is Treachery : How America’s Friends and Foes Are Secretly Arming Our Enemies, for Christmas, because the message of the season is Peace on Earth and this book details, in part, why that ain’t happening.

Gertz compiles the evidence that other countries, including Germany, France, Russia, and China, are arming rogue countries. I don’t know that I would have ever called these nations our friends, contrary to what Tom Clancy would have had us believe, so I’m not plussed by this information. It’s all pretty damning, and it’s the stuff I get daily on the blogs I tend to read. But to the uninitiated, and to those who don’t get their daily dose of human nature writ large on the international scale on the Internet, I’m sure the book was an eye-opener.

Gertz is a good, methodical writer and has a lot of access to insights and insiders to tease out information about national security and to present compelling calls to action with that information. So if you’ve got a hot and sexy wife who buys you things, I cannot emphasize enough that this is a good book to receive.

This book is the latest in the Elvis Cole novels by Robert Crais; he released it just last month. As a later Elvis Cole novel, it features all the hallmarks of the Cole novels:

• A woman character who falls madly in love with Cole, who is oblivious because
• Cole is pining for Lucy Chenier, and that’s going badly, meanwhile
• He takes a case for personal interest instead of for, you know, pay, because this time it’s personal! which leads to
• A major character getting shot and dying, and another surviving but weakened by the aftermath.

So the book covers all of those bases. It’s readable, and one can overlook certain consistencies with plot amongst the novels and certain, um, non sequitors with the plot of this book. Crais does dial back his use of the third person narrator so that more than half of the book uses the first person voice of Elvis Cole.

When a strange, tattooed man is murdered, his dying words claim that Elvis Cole is his son. Cole, who never knew father, wonders if this is the man and if not, why the dying man would make the claim. So Cole investigates, dredges up some long fallow crimes, and pines for Lucy Chenier.

I am finally done with the series, which is a blessing and a curse; now I have to stand before my bookshelves when I finish a book and pick another one from the hundreds of volumes on my to-read shelves. It was so easy to just resignedly pick up the next Crais novel, and now I am stuck with my indecision.

I would have better enjoyed this book, like the others later in the Elvis Cole series, had I not read the first ones in the series. That is, if I had not immediately read the books and thought I’d find a series in the tradition of Chandler/MacDonald/Parker. Instead, the books have petered into a rather mainstreamish detective series with writing ticks designed not so much to be true to the character, but to ratchet up the suspense with devices.

The devices, again: Multiple points of view in a book that features a first person narrator. That way, you see, we get into the heads of the character. The same stop-and-restart changing of the timeline that Crais used in Hostage. The personal-as-plot-filler with the relationship with Lucy Chenier and their continuing breakdown. Geez, some Spenser fans have wanted Susan dead for 20 years, but she’s a foil for introversion with Spenser. Chenier? Nothing but a foil for Cole’s fear of losing her, which is how he’s spent the last couple of books.

At least none of the characters, if memory serves, says “There you go.” Instead, Cole says Panic kills, which is what the Rangers taught him and what the LA SWAT taught Talley in Hostage. Crais blends these sayings and verbal tics across multiple characters, which I think is sloppy. I don’t like when Parker does it, either.

The plot: Lucy’s son Ben is kidnapped while Cole’s watching him by people who claim to want revenge for something he did in the War in Viet shnucking Nam, man. Point of order, Mr. Chairman. The entire duration of the Elvis Cole novel cycle seems to be a couple of years from The Monkey’s Raincoat to the latest novel, but Crais has written the books over the course of almost twenty years now. Cole’s not aging, though. Perhaps Crais should have just done the McBain thing and had Cole as a veteran of the war which seems to occur every decade or so (or every two years in George W. Bush’s term), because although a young and vital man would have been a veteran of Vietnam, by 2005 those fellows are getting into their fifties and are running unsuccessfully for President.

But by page 74, I had figured out what was going on–mainly because of the multiple points of view. Although the writing style’s quick and enjoyable to read, the macro writing things–the devices enumerated numerous times on this blog and in this very book report–keep me from giving an unreserved endorsement of the series. I’ve got one until I’m caught up with Crais, and after I am done with it, I probably won’t seek out others–although I might just be stuck reading them if my beautiful wife keeps giving them to me and putting them on my to-read shelves.