Category: Books

I read these books over the course of a couple of football games this month. You know, I’m not by default a particular fan of Blondie, but I’ve glanced over it when reading comics in the newspaper over the years. In the past, when I was young, they really didn’t speak to me because I was young. Now, I am older, but the cartoons themselves are old, too, so they don’t relate to my current situation. Of course, my current situation–independent computer contractor working from home–does not lend itself to workplace humor or getting to the workplace humor. I dunno.

But I can appreciate them as an artifact of a simpler time. The Blondie comic started out in the flapper era, so its fifty year run (to the time of these books’ publication) has seen some changes, but a bit of stability through the middle to late part of the last century. How stable life seemed then, in retrospect, and through the representation of cartoons. Father worked, mother stayed at home (later, took some work outside the home) but the dynamic of the family and the workplace seemed so stable. In cartoons and in cartoonists’ imaginations I guess.

At any rate, that’s what I took from them: a bit of nostalgia for a time I don’t remember and that probably did not exist. Kudos on the cartoonists, though, for keeping the strip going for 80 years.

Bits of trivia: according to the Wikipedia entry, the original author claimed the cartoon was set in the suburbs of Joplin, Missouri, which is just down the road from here. And in addition to Red Ryder, Blondie spurred a series of other media, including a string of movies, television series, and books. Not to mention a series of relatively recent Dagwood Sandwich Shoppes, which has a location here in Springfield.

Do you think we’ll ever see cartoons younger than Garfield get wide media play like this? I doubt it.

Ask me in seventy years and I’ll have a better answer than my half-informed prognostications.

When we went to San Francisco in May, there were two places I wanted to go: Yoshi’s jazz club and Hearst Castle. Of course, further investigation revealed that Hearst Castle is in San Simeon, which is half way between San Francisco and Los Angeles. So I read this book this autumn instead.

For those of you who don’t know what Hearst Castle is (how can you live with yourselves?), it is a palace built by newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst in the 1920s and 1930s. It is huge, it has many buildings (what modern newspapers call a compound if they don’t like the owner), and it has lavish architectural details, antiquities, and pretty much everything I dreamed about when I thought I’d earn fabulous amounts of wealth.

The book, written in partnership with the people who manage the current national park on the site, has a little bit of text about the life of Hearst but really focuses on the details of the construction of the buildings and his vision for it and how that changed over the years. Its text is very meticulous on this subject, and it straddles the boundary between a picture book and a historical treatise. Personally, I would have preferred more photos and a little less detail in the text, but your mileage may vary.

Unfortunately, it did not quench my desire to see this place in person.

You know, when faced with opulence of this nature, some people want to firebomb it and take it away from those who have it. Perhaps I was born in a different century, but I find this inspirational. Hearst came from a wealthier background, surely, but he built a publishing empire and earned the capital to build this place that he had half in mind to make a museum–which it is now, of course. Good on ‘im. Let the rich have theirs, and let us all have a system that allows us to get rich if we can.

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The name of the artist from this book probably isn’t on the tip of your tongue. It’s probably further from the tip of the your tongue than even Frederic Remington if you think of artists who painted the old West.

But you probably know something of Fred Harman’s work indirectly.

Fred Harman, before he took up painting seriously, was an illustrator and cartoonist who created the comic strip Bronc Peeler. Which did not get syndicated so well, but Harman moved back east and renamed it Red Ryder, and boy, howdy, it took off. The comic was carried in a pile of newspapers, and its popularity led to comic books, novels, dozens of movies, and a television show. It made its creator rich enough to retire to Arizona to paint.

Of course, in the next century, we only know the name because of the film A Christmas Story where Ralphie wants a Red Ryder licensed product.

At any rate, about the art: It’s vistas and broncos. Probably less adeptly administered than the images by Remington, but they’re okay. It ain’t my bag, baby, as far as art goes. One thing about this volume, though, is that Harman himself wrote the text about the images, so you get the voice of the artist instead of an academic, which makes the text a little less dry.

Worth a browse during a football game if you like picture books between plays.

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I recognized the author’s name, and when I Noggled him, I remembered that I his other book that I read.

But this book is different; it does not take the snark summary view. Instead, it gives a couple hundred words on individual events such as The Murderer from the Mayflower, the First Kamikaze, H-Day in Sweden, the Man Who Walked Around the World, and more. It’s like a Damn Interesting collection. (Are those guys still around? It would seem so.)

At any rate, a much better read than The Lowbrow Guide to World History, and I’m envious. I almost wish I could gather the steam to put out a collection like this. Maybe I will sometime. I still have like 3 ISBN to fill.

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In my grim tour of the recently deceased (starting with Elmore Leonard), of course I would pick up a book by Frederick Pohl since he passed away earlier this month. This book isn’t the first of Pohl’s work I’ve read, though. I’ve even reported on Man Plus eight years ago.

At any rate.

This book is set in the future about a hundred years. After a nuclear exchange has wiped most of the Soviet Union and the United States out, China and India have split what remains of the world. The former United States are now republics and collectives in the Chinese mold. One young man, denied the opportunity to study at the University, is a farm laborer until he finds a part of a murder victim in his rice paddy. This red herring puts him into contact with an attractive Han police inspector, and his testimony at the trial brings him into contact with a surgically schizophrenified professor at the University and in the know about the alien ship approaching Earth and asking to speak to the President of the United States. Faster than you can say “Jack Ryan,” the lad is the president for presentation sake and he’s on his way out into space to meet the visitors….

You know, I could go on, and I have when recounting it for my beautiful wife who thinks it sounds interesting enough that she might read it. And she doesn’t tend to science fiction.

It ends a bit abruptly, but it goes in such directions. It builds the world, and then things happen to shake that all up, and…. Well, it reminds me (again) how untethered (in a good way) science fiction from those years could be. Almost anything could happen. I haven’t read much contemporary sci fi, but I get the sense that it falls neatly into subgenres–Military sci-fi, urban fantasy, fantasy, and whatnot–that makes it less wonderful and imaginary.

Of course, I’ll drop back into my paperback suspense fiction, but once in a while, science fiction is good to make me just wonder.

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I’ve owned a couple of Elmore Leonard books for a while, but I hadn’t read one until now. Mr. Leonard’s recent passing prompted me to pick up this book.

I have seen the film, of course, because for some strange reason in the waning years of the twentieth century, I saw George Clooney movies. In the cinema. Huh. That was a weird time.

At any rate, it read pretty well, too. Of course, seeing the movie before reading the book means I had in my head the appearances of the main characters, so I’m not sure how well Leonard described them. The action is punchy, the situations different and amusing.

I have one or two more Elmore Leonard books scattered amongst my stacks. When I stumble across them, I’ll pick them up.

It’s neat to find an author new to me that I enjoy. I know, it’s not like I lacked indicators that Leonard’s books were good. But sometimes it takes a little push to get me to read something.

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I’ve already read one Matt Helm book this year (The Ambushers and another book by Donald Hamilton (Murder Twice Told), so I guess it’s not a change of pace at all that I picked up this book.

Within it, Matt Helm gets involved in solving the disappearance of several boaters in the Bermuda Triangle area. He’s under the thumb of a rich Texan whose fiance is among the missing and who pulls some strings in Washington to get an agent on it. Helm is also running ahead of some assassins who are targeting him and from a former associate and lover who wants him dead–and whose help he needs to unravel the conspiracy.

It’s an interesting bit of thriller, a bit slower than The Mordida Man, but there really is a bit of a cut over somewhere there in the 1970s where the paperbacks become more punchy.

I enjoyed it, and I think I’m about out of Matt Helm books. I’ll have to hope for some luck at the autumn book sales.

Books mentioned in this review:

It’s been over a year since I read a Ross Thomas paperback (The Pork Choppers in November 2011), and I’ve been mostly reading paperbacks this year, so I picked up this book for a change-of-pace from my normal paperback haunts.

Unlike The Pork Choppers, this book is a straight ahead thriller. The plot stems around a secretive group that snatches the leader of a terrorist cell close to the ruling leader in Libya (a different colonel, as Khaddafy is overthrown in the near future of this 1981 novel). The Libyans think the CIA took him, so they snatch the president’s brother and hope to exchange the two; unfortunately, the terrorist died in the snatch, and it wasn’t the Americans. While the CIA muddles about trying to figure out who and where, a fixer summons the Mordida Man, a veteran and one-term Congressman known for getting important people out of the clutches of Mexican drug lords.

The book is fascinating: It’s a pretty good read, thirty-two years on, if you can relate to the olden days before cell phones and the Internet. It’s strange how undated elements of it are: the non-US vs. Soviet spymastering, for example, and that the bad guys are still bad guys 30 years later (contrast this for the extra suspension of disbelief you need for WWII thrillers: by the 1970s, our former enemies were our allies). There’s one bit of dated technology, though: the automatic garage door opener makes its appearance twice, including one where it’s sort of marvelled at.

But the book mixes up the good guys and the bad guys and has a third side playing against both that adds a dimension. Given the intra-side fighting, and you get an exciting read coupled with enough brutality that you realize that anyone is expendable in pursuit of the plot and the story.

Wikipedia says he was a well-respected thriller writer of his day, and I believe it.

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I bought this book from a book review in the Wall Street Journal. So that review was pretty compelling, and it sounded like it would be a fun book. And so it was.

Mark Edward talks about his life and times as a psychic. Well, he thinks of himself more as a mentalist, a showman who might have some gift but who mostly entertains people and sometimes helps them with their problems as a sort of counselor and storyteller. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, and he knows the business is some level charlatan and yet he’s hopeful he is making something good of it. Of course, he would, being the author of the book and trying to present himself in the best light. It makes for a very complex narrative voice that really pulls one along.

And what a story he tells. Edward has worked for the Psychic Friends Hotline, has done radio, has done infomercials, has worked the party circuit, and has done private readings for a fee.

So he’s earnest, and he’s self-aggrandizing, but he doesn’t take the business or himself very seriously, so the book was a joy to read.

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I have tried to read this book many times in the years past; the first time, actually, was when I needed something portable to stick in my pocket so I could read it at the airport while waiting for my sainted mother’s flight to arrive. That, my friends, was six or eight years ago.

So I stuck it in my pocket again recently and, since I’m running behind on my reading this year (I might crack forty books this year if I buckle down), I resolved to finish it. And I did.

But I bogged down a bit in the same spot as last time.

The first part of the book is as much history as mathematics: Asimov explores ancient civilizations and how they began enumerating and coming up with the basic concepts such as 0, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. So far, so good. Not only is this basic mathematics, but it’s history and narrative in nature. Then, when he gets to square roots, exponents, and higher order concepts, the history that makes the first half of it so easy and enjoyable to read evaporates, and he focuses on proofs and formulae. As such, the juice that made the book succulent dries up. Yeah, I learned some things, but some of it rolled right over me, and I was content to let it do so.

But at 140 pages, it can be a quick enough read once you give yourself permission to skim the formulae at the end. It’s also a bit of a gateway for me to acutely wanting to refresh my math skills. So if you’re into that sort of thing, give it a whirl. There are a couple of others in the line, Realm of Algebra and Realm of Measure, that I’ll keep my eye out for, but you don’t find a lot of Asimov at book sales and garage sales. Sadly, people have turned from informed and informative books like this to reality television and Twilight fan fiction tie-ups.

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This book is one of Heinlein’s young adult rocket jockey pieces, the ones that made him famous and wealthy enough to do his longer, adult sleep-with-your-mother books later.

The book is set in the near future of its publication date (1947). A trio of high school seniors build a rocket in their back yard (roughly). It fails on launch testing, but their steady improvement has brought their attention to a government scientist, a sort of maverick, who happens to be the uncle of one of them. He has them join him in building and outfitting a real rocket on the cheap (government funds are tight, you know) and flying to the moon. When they get there, they pick up radio signals from someone who has beaten them to it… Nazis!

In the 21st century, the book is an artifact. Nazis have been played for fictional foils in the seventy years beyond their actual shelf life, but in 1947 and shortly thereafter, there must have been a real fear of redoubts of holdouts in places like South America. Going to the moon must have seemed like quite a dream. And high school students with that ability and interest? They must have been more common then.

The book depressed me a bit on the meta level. Here was young adult literature in America’s prime. Science lectures wrapped into it, reasoning skills emphasized, and every boy is a tinkerer and a good shot. Some kids who read this book probably went on to make the trip to the moon a reality. Meanwhile, in 2013, young adult fiction is all fantasy, vampires, and intrigues. Not what man can do, unless man is doing it to another man for some slight advantage.

One could argue that we’ve really lost something in how we entertain our young and what aspirations it leads them to. But one would probably waste one’s time.

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I picked up this book at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale a year ago, and I regret not macroing out the spelling of Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale because, gentle reader, I do not touch-type, and typing the name of that particular affair takes a lot out of me. Pardon me while I go nap to recuperate.

Ah, that’s better. Now, about this volume.

As you might recall, I read John Varley’s Millennium three years ago and liked it better than the Kris Kristofferson film.

This book is Varley’s first, and like much speculative fiction of the era (and maybe this era, too, but I get the sense a lot of stuff these days is either urban fantasy influenced or space marines stuff, mostly because I’ve read some of the latter and read blogs from Marko Kloos and Larry Correia–I dunno what contemporary science fiction is like outside of that). This book deals with a genetic scientist who is put into prison and sentenced to death for working on the human genome and cloning. It’s told in the milleiu of invaders who have driven humans from earth to outposts in the solar system because they, the invaders, favor intelligences like that of dolphins an whales. Similar creatures exist on Jupiter, and the invaders ignore humans who do not bother the invaders and the like intelligences. A technologically advanced transmission has erupted from somewhere near Ophiuchi (O-fee-you-key) 70 and helps humanity advance, including genetic technology (which has gone ignored by humanity but a few outlaw scientists).

Anywho, a politcal heavyweight on the moon rescues the scientist by presenting an illegal clone to take her place for the execution. He copies her memories and then trains her to work for him, killing her when she tries to escape and replacing her with a clone. After some number of tries, she goes to a moon of Jupiter and encounters a teacher clone and they plot an escape. And another clone goes to Pluto to try to find a way to Ophiuchi after the transmitters demand payment of hundreds of years of scientific knowledge. And allies of the scientist revive a clone she herself left in place.

For a while, it gets a little confusing remembering which clone team is doing what and why, especially as I had to put the book down sometimes for a couple of nights.

And then the book comes to a resolution, very abruptly, in an unsatisfying fashion.

It’s kind of how Lost ended. Remember that television show? Remember all the plot lines and questions, and how they ended it by setting up a final set of questions they could almost answer, and they did so in an unsatisfying fashion? This book has a lot of compelling things going on, some early questions about the nature of self and whether clones are you, machinations of a politician playing games several steps ahead of the characters, and this all gets abandoned for an abrupt ending that does not answer many of the questions.

It’s an interesting read for the speculative nature, but ultimately left me a little disappointed. But if I find another John Varley out there, I’ll pick it up and hope for better.

Books mentioned in this review:

I can’t believe I read the whole thing.

This tome is one of the 1000+ page books I’ve been going on about reading for the last year or so. It actually took me over a year–something like a year and three months–to read this book. Short stories will do that–offer you the ability to stop after only five or ten pages in a night, where a longer work with longer chapters will at the very worst compel you to read maybe a dozen, and then maybe another chapter.

Then there is “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”. I’m not a fan of the Dreamlands portion of Lovecraft; I know he sometimes liked to dabble in the very fantastic, but part of the grounding in his stories is that the bizarre and dangerous happens to people in the real world. When we get into the Dreamlands stuff, where Randolph Carter goes through a series of adventures in his dreams, where the weird does not have the grounding in every day life or reality, I sort of lose caring. So when it came time to read “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”–which I had never read before–I had to slog. For weeks or months.

At any rate, if you’re a fan of Lovecraft, this book will please you (your Dreamlands mileage may vary). It includes all the fiction, including the longer pieces such as “At the Mountains of Madness” and whatnot. In college, I read a number of shorter paperbacks of Lovecraft’s work, each based on one of the cornerstone stories (“The Lurker on the Threshold and Other Stories”, “The Colour Out Of Space and Other Stories”, and so on). So many of the pieces were familiar to me, but many of the shorter, lesser stores either I had not remembered or had not read.

So all in all, it’s a great collection if you’re in the mood for Lovecraft. And sometimes I really, really was, and sometimes I was not. His archaic style sets a certain gaslight feel to the stories that you cannot get elsewhere, and the language will teach you many neat words. In my twenties, I learned the words “foetor” and “eldritch” from Lovecraft, and I started keeping a list of words I wanted to drop into conversation. However, I misplaced that notebook eight months ago, so I don’t know what words I wanted to learn, and I didn’t learn them very well before that. Ah, well.

In addition to his fiction, the book includes some short stories he wrote as a kid and draft portions of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and Lovecraft’s nonfiction essay “The Supernatural in Literature” which explores the history of what he calls the “weird” in literature up until his present day (the 1930s). He name-checks a lot of authors throughout history and identifies works he likes. It’s a fifty page treatise, and it at turns made me want to read some historical Gothic fiction and bored me. He lavishes praise on Algernon Blackwood, though, and the complete tales of Blackwood is one of the few books I’ve actually put down with the intention of not picking back up, so I will probably avoid the authors he mentions except Lord Dunsay and maybe Machen. Or not.

This is less of a book report than marking my achievement. Sorry.

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