Category: Books

Well, in my book report for From the Corner of His Eye, I said:

I could have almost read Anna Karenina by the time I was done with this book.

As you might know, gentle reader, I have a special term that I use when reading long books to refer to that instant where you realize that you could have read a whole other book by now. That is the Anna Karenina moment. I coined the term after the first time I tried to read Anna Karenina, back in the late middle 1990s (1996? 1997?). I was working in a print shop at the time, operating a Didde-Glaser 175 two color offset web printing press. Every day, I had a 30 minute lunch break, and I brought in a book to read over those lunch breaks. I once brought in Anna Karenina and made it to about page 287 (still bookmarked, a decade later). There, I had my first Anna Karenina moment, and I put the book aside for shorter books.

Well, after making that crack about the Koontz book, I decided to pick up the Tolstoy again to see how it compared. Well, it was certainly longer than the Koontz, and it took me three weeks of almost nightly reading to complete it. But it was still time better spent than From the Corner of His Eye. Where Koontz drops in a chapter for nothing more than melodramatic foreshadowing, Tolstoy adds a theme. So it’s better than the Koontz book, not that anyone had any doubt.

And in case you’re wondering, pages 287-600 are a string of Anna Karenina moments, but I have more patience and discipline now.

For those of you who haven’t read it or its attendant summary documents, the story revolves around several threads in the Russian aristocracy circa 1870. Mr. Oblonsky has a dalliance with the help, and his wife Dolly is put off by it and wonders what she’ll do. Anna Karenina, Mr. Oblonsky’s sister, talks to her. Meanwhile, Mr. Oblonsky’s friend Levin, a country gentleman, has come to ask Dolly’s sister Kitty to marry him. She, though, is flirting with Vronsky, who’s a flirt and has no intent to marry her. But when he meets Anna Karenina, he’s smitten and leads her into an adulterous relationship that will last hundreds of pages.

The book follows two main story arcs: the illicit love of Anna and Vronsky and Levin’s search for happiness and faith. The subthemes, of course, deal with the relationships of the aristocrats to each other and to the peasants and their children. There’s something for everyone, someone to whom everyone can relate, and plenty of heft in case you need the hardback for self-defense.

An interesting bit about the translation: It was translated by an English person who often threw in British coinage to make the denominations more relevant to the English reader. So when you’re talking whole bills, you hear about roubles, but when it switches to kopecks, suddenly you’re talking about shillings or farthings. Which is really weird to an American reader. Or even an English reader some years from now when they’re using Euros or Rials in Britain.

It’s a book that provokes some thought because it’s classical literature, and it makes me want to write a paper on it. Does Levin really become a Christian? How would I match these heroes up to The Fountainhead characters? That sort of thing.

But, although I own War and Peace, I’m not diving right into it. I have a pile of books to read, and knocking down to a 17 per year pace won’t clear my to-read shelves.

Books mentioned in this review:

Perhaps this was a funnier play in 1976 in London. Maybe it was written specifically to get Luan Peters into lingerie onstage. But it’s about dalliances of Members of Parliament that are threatening to diminish the public’s respect for them and a select committee designed to deal with it. Except all the members of the committee have dallied with the clerk who’s supposed to take notes for them.

There’s an interlude that’s called a second play (New-Found-Land) designed to shout out to a London theatre luminary at the time.

Overall, to British and sort of dated. Which is why I wouldn’t expect to see it as is onstage any time soon. But no doubt someone in America would be able to adapt the theme and ride Stoppard’s name for a production of it.

Books mentioned in this review:

I cannot believe I read the whole thing.

This book clocks in at almost 600 pages, overwritten the whole time as though Dean Koontz single handedly has to support a struggling simile factory in southern Georgia. He layers his similes like an onion; even when you peel away all the layers of the metaphor, it’s still an onion. To Stephen King’s Shakespeare, Dean Koontz is not even Ben Jonson; he’s that other guy they don’t even offer survey courses for.

Let’s see here, there’s a plot: a guy murders his wife for no reason (no, it’s because he’s a psychopath trying to broaden himself by killing the woman he loves); he becomes obsessed with the name Bartholemew. Also, he raped this one underage girl, who has a baby girl. A woman who’s pregnant has an auto accident on the way to the hospital that kills her husband; his last request is that she name the boy Bartholemew. The underage girl dies giving birth, so an aunt raises the girl. The children are prodigies who can also go other places. The boy goes blind. A cop chasing the psychopath gets left for dead by said psychopath instigates psychological warfare against the psycho. And the psycho kills people.

Meanwhile, Koontz dedicates many pages to similes, many paragraphs to minor characters with only roles as extras, and we navigate through several plot lines ultimately related but whose relationships are not too compelling. Then, after 500 pages, we get a three page sudden climax, and then we can roll over and go to sleep for the 40 page denouement that is supposed to tell the rest of the story about the kids and their powers. But come on. I could have almost read Anna Karenina by the time I was done with this book.

I liked Odd Thomas well enough, tolerated Mr. Murder passingly, and just read Forever Odd. However, this book really has me dreading reading any of the other Koontz volumes on my shelves, and that’s not a good kind of dread for a horror/thriller writer. It spills over to the unread John Saul books who are painted by being too close to the Koontz books.

Don’t bother with this book. Let me be a lesson to you.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

 

 

Of course, this work was originally entitled De Commodis litterarum atque incommodis before Renée Neu Watkins translated it for us. I picked this book up over a year ago at the Carondolet YMCA Book Fair for fifty cents. Even though it’s only 54 pages, it has taken me this long to power through it.

Apparently (the introduction tells us), Alberti wrote this tract early in his Renaissance career as a scholar because his wealthy family was begging for him to produce something to justify his existence as a freeloading scholar. This is his defense of freeloading: in it, he outlines that someone dedicated to books should seek only the higher knowledge and truth within and should not expect to get chicks, money, power, or reknown. Let’s face it, a real scholar hits the books for 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, in ill-heated Renaissance apartments wearing rags–because all of the scholars meager moneys go into books.

The book reads as though it was written by any stereotypical scribe from a fantasy novel, but it was written by a young man romanticizing the hair shirt he’d chosen for his wardrobe and trying to lower his family’s expectations. The prose is flowery and meandering, even where the text continues to say that the author is glossing over many things and is getting back to the point.

Still, the rhetoric comes from a different time, where arguments are advanced by reason without the intrusion of actual data points (although Alberti offers anecdotes, often at hearsay distance, to illustrate) or invective (which is the contemporary practice).

The book did not give me any advice on how to wean myself from book abuse, and it was my 50th book completed this year. I obviously need help.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book is another Joe Pike book (like L.A. Reqiuem, I think). As you know, gentle reader, I have read and reported upon all of Robert Crais’s work on this blog. I started out liking him with his early stuff, but later got a little bored with the “World’s Greatest Detective” schtick of Elvis Cole. Crais must have, too, since he’s veered off series, mostly, with some of his other books, but many of them set in LA return to Cole and Pike.

This book centers on a bodyguard gig that Joe Pike, the Hawk to Cole’s Spenser, gets. He brings Elvis Cole into it, of course, but most of the book is from Pike’s point of view, with flashbacks interspersed and other characters getting their chapters to show their emotional evolution.

Pike has to guard a Paris Hilton knock off who’s in danger of getting knocked off after accidentally hitting a Mercedes on an after-club drive. The Mercedes contained two local real estate developers and a gopher for a South American cartel. The girl goes into protection, but someone inside is tipping off the bad guys, so a consultant goes way outside and gets Pike. Pike determines the best way to prevent anyone from harming the girl is to kill those persons first.

As a matter of course, lies are told to the protagonists and are investigated. The layers of the onion are peeled back, resulting in a climax that explains why I keep getting Google hits for robert crais republican.

A decent book, but Crais relies on a certain familiarity with Cole and Pike and might just play too much with shifting point of view.

Books mentioned in this review:

I must have bought this paperback more than a decade ago, probably during college or immediately thereafter. It’s been hanging around, and I’ve even tried to start it once or twice before, but I stalled out before passing through the narrative frame (introduction of Marlow relating the story while on a boat in the Thames). This time, though, it was the time to read it, and I made it through both the novelette (“Heart of Darkness”), the short story (“The Secret Sharer”), and the introduction/critical materials (and in that order).

“Heart of Darkness” is only 120 pages, but it’s dense Victorian English. As some of you know, the movie Apocalypse Now was based on this work, and the three or four nights I spent reading it seem shorter than watching the movie. The plot varies in that Marlow is going to meet Kurtz, and Martin Sheen is going to kill Marlon Brando. So one almost wants to comment on the differences in the plot and how, thematically, the producers of the two works were talking differently and speculate as to why. But I have a real job, almost, so I won’t waste too much time on it. I did get some of the thematic points of man versus himself at the same time as man versus nature and man versus primitive man. More than half the story spends its time getting up river, and the appearance, retrieval, and death of Kurtz happen very quickly, so if I find a hardback copy of Conrad’s work, I would welcome an excuse to read it again.

“The Secret Sharer” is shorter and more straight forward, although the first pages set the scene and don’t jump right into the action. However, I kind of got the point here, too.

Then I read the critical essays and the introduction to learn a little more about Conrad and such. Wow, I hearkened back to my university days with the critical essays, which were people saying in nonfiction what the author meant in his fiction. The essays confirmed some of my takes on the stories, but my goodness. Somewhere in the world, people make a living explaining largely underread literature to each other and to their students. I am glad I didn’t stick in the academy.

Books mentioned in this review:

As you know, I bought Tarnsman of Gor and this book so that I would have read the first pentagor of the John Norman fantasy series before I lit into the last half of the first 10. Here, I read #2, the Gor book for 1967 (although my copy is a later reprint with cover by Boris Vallejo).

In this, Tarl Cabot returns to Gor after seven years on Earth to find his home city of Ko-ro-ba destroyed and its citizens scattered–including his father and his love Talena. He also finds himself in unheralded armor, meaning he’s an outlaw. He ends up going to Tharna, a city where women rule, and leading an uprising.

The book is the weakest of the first five, clearly a setup for the longer story lines that took place after the first one succeeded. Still, it’s short and it’s still a neat piece of fantasy. I articulated to my wife that good fantasy is very different from suspense/crime/mystery fiction in that when you want to find out what’s coming next, you really don’t have any idea. These books are like that; they contain enough detail into the world that you know Norman isn’t making it up as he goes, but as you go, you’re learning something about the setting and the laws that govern it. You really can have a sense of wonder you don’t get from other kinds of fiction.

So I’m ready for the sixth book in the series one of these days.

Books mentioned in this review:

Well, that’s what I get for having too many books on my shelves. I read the sequel to this book in February, completely unaware that I could have read them in order were I more organized.

This is the book that introduces the elite assassin Clara Rinker into Lucas Davenport’s life. An attorney hires her through an intermediary to kill the wife of the man she wants. When the intermediary tries to blackmail the high-powered attorney, she calls the assassin back. They develop a friendship based on being sociopaths who happen to be women, and that’s all spoiled when Davenport investigates the growing number of dead bodies.

The book is paced better than some Davenport novels, since it moves quickly throughout instead of a leisurely pace and then a hyperkinetic last hundred pages. However, the story does hinge on some coincidences and leaps of faith that made me go, hmmm. And contrary to what I said in previous book reports, there is a “hum” spelled out in this book, so the introduction of the aside utterances began and evolved gradually, I guess.

Still, a good enough read.

Books mentioned in this review:

Of all the Neil Simon plays I’ve read (I Ought To Be In Pictures and Biloxi Blues recently), I like this one the best. It details two middle-aged (in 1974, this was 42 and 32) people coming out of their first marriages. The man is a widower still grieving for his wife, the woman a divorcée. Their friends are trying to set them up with people, and a chance meeting in a restaurant puts these two on a collision course of love. When the man dials her accidentally, it starts a whirlwind romance and marriage that aren’t as rosy as they could be, as the man still wants to hold onto his self-pity in losing his wife.

Unlike Biloxi Blues, there’s a unifying and identifiable theme here: the way middle-aged (in 1974) people deal with long-term relationships and the loss of the same. It’s billed as a comic play, but it’s definitely more serious than straight-ahead comedy. Also, I like the set designed by the playwright, which requires no scene changes even though it shows two scenes–the apartments of his and hers–and allows interaction via telephone. Smooth.

Side note: the original production used Judd Hirsch as the man character; I just read a complete episode guide for Judd Hirsch’s comedy television series (Taxi). Isn’t it funny how the mind imposes order on disorder (that is, my reading list and my wandering journey through the same)?

Books mentioned in this review:

I bought this book for a dollar at a book fair this year because I liked Alex Karras as Mongo, and as Webster’s father, and in all his television and film roles; I wasn’t born when he played football (but man, they all became movie stars from that era, didn’t they? Alex Karras, Bubba Smith, Merlin Olsen). Still, I bought the book because it was written by Alex Karras with Douglas Graham. And I think it was mostly Alex Karras.

What an absurd little book it is. It reads like a polished high school creative writing piece, like something I would have written in the tenth grade. Seriously, it reminds me of something my creative writing class group came up with when we were doing the “stories in the round” schtick, where every row of students working as a group would write a scene into a short story and pass it to the next group for them to write a scene, and we would get a story from another group and write a scene. We created an absurd character and inserted him into all of the stories.

In this book, the character is the happy-go-lucky or lucky-go-happy son if immigrants named Lazlo. He’s eventually going to be on Tuesday Night Football, the also-ran behind ABC’s Monday Night Football. But the first half of the book deals with the youth of the precocious Lazlo, who became an accordion prodigy, lived through a slightly cracked but within the bounds of normalcy family, and ended up as the Jingle King. From an early age, he has always connected to commercials and loved jingles because the people depicted within commercials are all happy, and Lazlo associates that with happiness. He’s never anything bad to say about anybody and looks on the bright side of life.

A network executive catches him in his act in a Holiday Inn and decides to bring him to Chicago to be the third man in the booth with the play by play man, a veiled rendition of Howard Cosell, and an extremely randy color man. Thus, the second half of the book deals with the middle-aged young Lazlo coming to the big city, seeing what happens behind the scenes, learning the meaning of the University of Michigan fight song to Lance Allgood, and thwart the middle level executive and the professionals who think Lazlo will sink the sunken show.

But in the end, when Haywood’s ex-wife incapacitates him with drug-laced cookies, Lazlo has to step in and briefly save the day. And he does, at which point the authors realize they’ve reached novel length and end.

The prose wasn’t bad, the characters were obvious caricatures, and the plots outlandish. The book is billed as a comic novel, and while some of it is very, very mildly amusing, it doesn’t reach the level of Hiaasen or Barry. It was designed and packaged with the football fan who reads in mind, as the cover depicts not Lazlo, but Alex Karras sitting in a cartoon chair in a cartoon living room watching football.

But I had a good time reading it.

Books mentioned in this review: