Category: Books

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

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

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

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

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

Books mentioned in this review:

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

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

Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My beautiful wife gave me this book for Christmas in 2004 because I’d admitted to not having read “The Metamorphosis”. Well, thanks to her intervention, I cannot claim that. I’ve also read 400+ pages of Kafka’s non-“Metamorphosis” work, and that’s no small price to pay for having missed a pivotal short story in the Czech canon.

As some of you might recall, I have some reservations about reading translations because I assume that I don’t get everything out of the language that the author put into it. For example, in the Kafka story “The Burrow”, I must doubt that the term for the smaller animals as “small fry” comes directly from the Czech.

Also, I’ll point out I’m not a fan of Eastern European literature or maybe any European literature from east of the English Channel. In addition to the language barrier, I don’t really groove on the bleak, bureaucracy-rules-all worldview that the books tend to embrace. Although, as a liberative, I think our society is trending in that direction, I don’t want to read about those things. I want to read a little about how life can be. Perhaps that’s too much the influence of Ayn Rand’s romanticism.

Some of the stories in the collection are engaging; “The Metamorphosis”, “In the Penal Colony”, “A Hunger Artist”, and maybe, to be charitable, “The Burrow”. However, with any roll-up volume, you get padding material, and most of the stuff in this volume seem like that. Many stories are five paragraphs or fewer, with no discernable character development or plotline. Slice of life material at best, but not really worth reading.
Of course, some of the stories really hammer home eurobleakism, so maybe they’re worthwhile to some people.

As I read this volume, I wondered if the twentieth century marked the point where high art became more and more inaccessible. I’ll be frank, some of the stories I had to muscle through (“Investigations of a Dog”) I had to muscle through, and I couldn’t even force myself through (“Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk”). Aside from the stories I read above, I didn’t really get into any of the stories and didn’t really get much out of them. I suspect I couldn’t enjoy the beauty of the stories in their original language, if that’s what makes these stories worthwhile, but the plots nor characters don’t draw the reader in, so the greatness of Kafka lies in….something. But academics have told us he’s great, and they’ve spent their time and energy explaining how great he is. Perhaps his greatness, to their eyes, lies in the fact that normal people cannot recognize his greatness and his academic acolytes must interpret his greatness for the common man. Or perhaps I’m just keen on dinging the people who took the easy way out with their English degrees.

So the book made me better in that I can claim now to have read the complete works, or at least the collected “stories” of Franz Kafka, but it took a long time and some effort to reach those bragging rights. All reading is good and consumption of all ideas is good (note consumption of is not adherence to or acceptance of), but you might better serve yourself to reading only the heavily-anthologized stories of Kafka.

But thanks, honey. It’s a handsome edition.

I inherited the Book Club Edition of Pet Sematary from my aunt. Or I bought it for a buck or change at a forgotten garage sale, but that would be meaningless, so I think of my aunt when I read my Stephen King novels now, regardless of the actual origin.

As one of the first of King’s prolific bursts, this book fits into that time period. That is, he build suspense and dread, but ultimately the end rushes through the climax and leaves one with the obvious lingering evil still out there. In what I’ve seen from this era (see also Christine), the victory over evil is very tenuous and it’s apparent that it will eventually catch up with the survivors of the story.

So let me continue with the beginning…. or at least the plot. Dr. Louis Creed moves his family from the Midwest to small town Maine where he’s going to run a university infirmary. In the front of the house, there’s a two lane highway used often by oil tankers. In the back woods, a burial place for pets. The family has a cat. You can see where this is going. I, owner of an aging cat whom I know won’t lie upon my lap while I read Stephen King books forever, dreaded reading this book, and I was going to put it off indefinitely until I decided to denancy my self and just push through the death of the cat and the horrors beyond. I did. At least the death of the cat and so on where handled off page fairly well.

Come to think of it, King leaves most of the gory wetwork off the page in this particular volume. We don’t get a lot of flesh peeling from the muscle, tendon, and bones kind of thing going on, but we do get the idea that it’s going to happen, and we put the book down thinking we’ve gotten a pretty gory dose of it, but textually, there’s not much there there. That’s what makes King so powerful; he builds the dread and he makes you think you’re getting gore, but it’s your own imagination splattering blood on the wallpaper.

Another thing that makes King powerful, and what draws his readers into the books, is that he doesn’t play favorites with his characters. Most writers rely on series for their long-term fiscal viability, and with every series one or more characters run through the plot in little danger. Sure, they get shot and sometimes almost die, and sometimes a major or minor character dies in a Very Special Episode. But the reader can proceed page-to-page with the comfort that the main characters will be tested and will prove true. King can spend pages making us like one or more characters in a book right before they die suddenly. The reader has to pay attention because although four main characters walk into a scene, four main characters are not guaranteed to walk out of the scene. In every moment, King’s characters risk life and limb from dark forces outside of their control. King takes this aspect of life and amps it up to make clear the tenuous hold we each have on our lives. Overall, the effect works.

Ergo, even though I didn’t care for the ending, I appreciated that the book achieved its goals in manipulating my emotions. Did I like it? Well, it was effective, and I enjoyed the writing. I’ll read more King, of course. Because I enjoy the works and, quite frankly, because my aunt (and the garage sales of past days) have left me with quite a few remaining on my bookshelves.

I paid this book at Borders on the day it came out, but that will come as no surprise to those of you who know me or who have read this blog for the last couple of years. I have been a strident Parker partisan for about twenty years now (see also "Meeting Robert B. Parker").

This is the fifth Jesse Stone novel, and I don’t mind telling you, I like this series least. Jesse Stone comes across as less hard-boiled and more simpering….although he’s hard enough with the bad guys and bantery enough with his police force, his issues with his ex-wife and whatnot really take too much of the book. Any of the book is too much. Unfortunately, as the snippets of him with his therapist unfold in a linear arc beginning with the first book and only advance the character when taken over the course of the series and advance the character independently of the action within the book, which means they’re ultimately superfluous.

Jesse Stone, within this book, has to deal with sleazy sex and murder among the yachting class. He and his force plod along, encountering old standards Captain Healy and Rita Fiore and making a new acquaintance with a no-nonsense cop in Florida who’s now eligible for repeat encounters in any or all of Parker’s series or perhaps a series of her own (since the whole Helen Hunt/Sunny Randall thing seems to have gone by the wayside).

Still, I enjoyed the book and read it almost in a single sitting. Parker’s dialog-laden prose is not very dense, and he hits a lot of familiar tropes, so long time readers can almost skim.

I bought this book about a year and a half ago at Downtown Books in Milwaukee for $3.95. I don’t know why I was looking for an almost scholarly survey of private eye fiction, but I bought it.

As I mentioned, this book surveys the evolution of the private eye character within American fiction from its origin in the pulps through the middle 1980s (when the book was published). It identifies certain eras (early pulps, post WWII detectives, sixties touchy-feely detectives, and modern detectives) and then identifies certain seminal authors and their most famous or influential creations. The book includes Raymond Chandler, Robert B. Parker, Ross MacDonald, Brett Halliday, Mickey Spillane, and Richard S. Prather among the obvious. I’ve read books from each of these and probably work from among the others in the list. Oddly enough, these sorts of summary books not only inspire me to read more of these authors, but also to write more so I can hopefully get included in some of these volumes in the future. If I’m lucky.

(As for inside baseball, Roger L. Simon is only mentioned in this book when the author notes that a character is not as Jewish as Moses Wine. Simon and Wine do, however, make up a large portion of Sons of Sam Spade: The Private-Eye Novel in the 70s, which I read in college when I should have been attending Biology 001.)

I got this book as a Christmas gift, and as I was looking for a quick read in my recent spate of nonfiction, so I picked it out of my hundreds of volumes that I have yet to read. It was a quick read.

I won’t go into too much depth with the book, as it doesn’t go much into depth itself. Of course, it’s preaching to the seminary here with its indictment of entire classifications of people whose individual goals counter the cohesion of our country for no real purpose except to aggrandize the individuals. It’s not a creative indemnification of the collective, but rather the buzzards shrieking that distracts a weakened nation.

Although he became a conservative pin-up author for Bias and Arrogance, Goldberg doesn’t just identify liberals, nor does he fall into pinning the tail on liberals because they’re liberals. He identifies destructive ideas and people who champion them, and I agreed with many of his selections.

So it’s a good book for a couple bucks, and it’s a great book for nothing. Just keep in mind you’re getting a list book and not a deep analysis of ideas, politics, or society.

On my second attempt, I made it through this book by blogger Roger L. Simon. Of course, the book was written in 1979, before blogs. As some of you long-time readers know, I bought a number of the Moses Wine iBooks reissues in November 2004 and I read the two books (The Big Fix and The Lost Coast) in the first week I owned them. Then I tried Peking Duck. And it took me over a year to try it again.

The book centers on a trip Moses Wine takes to China. A liberal by philosophy, Wine has some sympathy and reverence for the Chinese Communists and their noble ideals. As he’s belonged to a Chinese friendship society to please his aunt, he’s invited on her tour of China. While in China, a crime occurs, and he’s the one who has to solve the mystery and set the things aright, to make the world safe for Chinese communism.

One of my complaints with this book is the same as with The Big Fix: We get a complete enumeration of names and professions for the people on the trip with Moses Wine, but for the most part, they remain names and professions, and I couldn’t keep many of them straight. Which wasn’t too important, as they’re just scenery. The book goes at length to describe the trip to China, the Chinese cities, and the Chinese line on communism in the late 1970s. As a matter of fact, it reads more like a fictional, sympathetically political travelogue. On page 120 or so, the crime finally occurs, and I knew who did it immediately.

So the book didn’t really hold me in any suspense, nor did I really enjoy it all that much. However, I did make it through it this time. Roger L. Simon was nominated for an Academy Award for a screen play, and I think his strength must lie in that medium.

Like the Lupica book, I bought this book at Barnes and Noble (Ladue) off of its clearance table for $1.00. I mean, if I don’t burn those points off of the card, the card management company will gladly do so for a certain number of cents every ten days until such time as they have to garnish my wages for the overage. So it’s desperation, coupled with the twin desires of acquiring trivia knowledge and preparing for a historical perspective when the Torino Olympics start, I dove into the book.

It’s a series of top ten lists which include different athletes and incidents within the past Olympics, sliced and diced by topic. Unfortunately, that’s led to some repetition in the records. Also. as I read, I found that the trivia infusion only re-inforced the information I’d experienced. That Zola Budd was responsible for Decker’s loss in some track event in 1984….Man, the number of times I retyped the decade digit indicates how powerful that bit of trivia is, so I better not indicate that I know how South African Zola Budd got to compete anyway, or else I’ll be in jeopardy the next time the North Side Mind Flayers step into a St. Louis Trivia night.

The book’s major flaw is that it repeats anecdotes in different sections as the author tried to leverage limited material into more pages. For example, we read about the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding incident in two chapters. One anecdote focuses on Kerrigan and one on Harding. This retreading of material gives one the idea that the author was indeed stretching to make his limited sources pay off. Hey, as a writer, I can’t knock it, but as a reader, I can sure mock it.

This book was on the deep discount rack at Barnes and Noble for only $1.00 when Heather and I made our way in to spend the season’s gift cards. Only $1.00. I read Full Court Press in April 2004 (that long ago already?). I enjoyed that book and thought I would buy another. I did.

Wild Pitch tells the story of Charlie Stoddard, a pitching phenomenon with the 1980s Mets who blew his arm out and then served as a journeyman for a number of years. Five years out of baseball, Stoddard spends his days chasing women and booze, earning a living making appearance at sports memorabilia shows. A particularly vigorous sexual escapade throws his back out, and his partner puts Charlie in touch with a Chinese therapist who can not only fix Charlie’s back, but also his arm.

At the age of 40, Charlie tries to put his life back on some sort of track, reconnecting with the ex-wife he wronged, the son who doesn’t acknowledge him, and perhaps just to feel the thrill of pitching…and maybe even winning….again.

Lupica’s deft characterizations of the lightly-comic people populating his books (damn, I tried to avoid characterizations of characters, and ended up with people populating….) drive the story along. I sympathized with the understated themes of redemption and growing older and maybe even up. The focus of the winning isn’t winning it all, it’s playing to win.

Man, this Lupica fellow is good. I’m looking forward to reading more of his novels, and they’re sports novels, with nary a body to be found.

This book is gritty. A police procedural written by a former cop, set in New York City of the middle 1980s, the grit is in everything. The cops talk gritty, the scenes are gritty, and the grit gums up the smooth operation of the narrative, preventing me from really connecting with the inchoate characters.

Tony Scanlon lost a leg in a shootout, but thanks to the favors and back-scratching that grease the wheels of the Job, he gets to remain with the force as a detective squad leader in a backwater precinct. The precinct’s quiet is shattered when someone hits a well-known and well-loved police lieutenant who’s wired into all of the benevolent associations. Scanlon leads his team of detectives on the investigation, delving into the unspoken-of world of police parties complete with hookers, gambling, and booze, the world of police getting freebies on the arm, the world where police amputees with issues only find solace in the arms of hookers. Did I mention this was a gritty book?

William J. Caunitz was no Ed McBain, no Joseph Wambaugh, and not even really Tom Philbin. He throws a lot of material into the book, a lot of flashbacks, subplots, and all of his notes. The book isn’t unreadable, per se, but it could have been trimmed to about sixty percent of its current heft to great effect. Perhaps this book could serve as a gateway to police procedurals for Tolstoy scholars. I don’t know; all I know is it took me too long to read this book.

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.

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.

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.

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.