Category: Books

This book is the source for the George Clooney film of the same name, but a quick perusal of the film’s plot indicates they differ widely.

In this book, a business consultant whose job it is to counsel laid off employees across the country is nearing a million frequent flier miles on an airline. His employer has given him pretty free rein to travel the country to meet with clients, and the consultant also travels for some pleasure and for some of his side projects. He’s left a resignation letter on his vacationing boss’s desk, so in a week he’ll be out of a job. But he should make the million mile club before then, before they cut off his company credit cards.

He’s been travelling like this for many years, and he’s got no home but the series of airports and hotels he calls Airland. He’s got his own set of rules and expectations from other business travelers, and he’s working on a book with it. He also thinks a secretive consulting company might be trying to recruit him through a series of tests and contacts with his clients and friends.

It starts out a lot like a Stanley Bing novel (see Lloyd What Happened and You Look Nice Today). A bit wry, with an obviously unreliable narrator. However, over the course of the book, it becomes clearer just how unreliable the narrator is: he’s having a breakdown of some sort, or perhaps an entire psychotic episode where none of it really happens.

Which is unfortunate: I would have preferred a better payoff for what was a pretty engaging narrative and voice.

As I finished it, I didn’t think it would be the sort of character George Clooney would play, so I’m sort of interested in seeing the film now to see how little they overlap. And it’s definitely possible I’ll like the film better than the book.

Books mentioned in this review:

I have an embarrassing and stunning admission to make: I have read this book twice even though I didn’t like it. Not exactly. Let me explain.

This book is based on a desktop calendar that features pictures of cats, sometimes doing things that make them look a little guilty, accompanied by qouted captions where the cat is saying something. And they include the cat’s name, age, and hobby. Here, have a taste:

Obviously, this one would have come from December in the calendar.

Most of the captions have a sexual or drug use angle, and all of them are not funny. As a matter of fact, some of them are so not funny that they’re enjoyable for the spectacular badness. Although it’s been seven years since I had the calendar, I remembered some of them.

But this collection is really the sweepings on the floor of cat caption industry. Your Facebook wall or Twitter feed have better examples of the genre.

This book was a Christmas gift, as was the desk calendar. But at least with the book, I was able to flip through it in a couple hours instead of over the course of a year, one dreadful cat sex caption at a time.

Books mentioned in this review:

I got This book at a garage sale in June, and it looked like a good short read that sums up the career of Conan.

It is indeed a chronological history of Conan taken from some comic book series or several, which means in addition to the canonical material there are some references to other stories not written by Robert E. Howard. The text is presented in a legendary history sort of fashion, with the non-Howard stories blended as more legend and the Howard stuff as more history.

This book is a smaller book of a larger work, and that leads to some unfortunate consequences, namely that the text was sometimes very hard to read. The book is by the publisher DK, who does a lot of comic book stuff, so the pages are full bleed graphics with text atop them. Sometimes, the contrast was not very good. To make matters worse, the font size doesn’t appear like it was designed for the size this book is. Instead, it looks as though they took the plates from a larger, more coffee table sized book and just shrunk everything down, including the text. Look:

For Pete’s sake, I almost had to go out and buy a pair of cheaters for this book. Or an electron microscope.

At any rate, it’s an interesting and brief book on the history of Conan and features some interesting art work from the comic books, but the book’s format itself hinders it quite a bit. Go for the full-sized Conan: The Ultimate Guide to the World’s Most Savage Barbarian instead.

Books mentioned in this review:

Shortly after reading Last Seen in Massilia, I rediscovered this book on my to read shelves. So I thought I’d take on a thicker tome.

Well, if you’re classically educated and over forty, you might well know how the book turns out from its title. For those of you too young or too public school to know, the three legions were Roman legions defeated by an alliance of German tribes in the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD. The Romans never recovered the German territory lost.

At any rate, this book covers a couple of weeks leading up to the battle. The Proconsul is vain and overconfident. The commander of the Eagle legion is smitten with a woman captured in the raid of a small German outpost who craves to be taken care of in a Roman way. Another lesser leader craves the first commander’s position. A brutal but effective legionaire flouts the rules and rules by fear. The legions’ historian is eager to write a scholarly treatise about the downfall of the legions even though he does not believe it to be true. Then the proconsul demands the German woman and an Achilles/Agamemnon storyline breaks out as the commander is stripped of his position and his self-definition. The lesser leader takes command and leads his men into disaster, and then the army decamps into a disastrous ambush in Teutoburg Forest.

The book is deep and well-written with a lot of characterization and a lot of detail about life in the Roman legion. It was not as expository as Last Seen In Massilia, either, and the book delved into the politics of not only the Romans but also the Germans who were unsure about uniting under a leader to attack the Romans when the Romans were not actively at war with the tribes.

I liked the book a lot, and I was sad to discover that the author appears to only have written this two novels. The second is a contemporary (to its time, which is 1958) book entitled Let Us Find Heroes; I will keep an eye out for it.

Books mentioned in this review:

I previously read this book in May, 2011. I didn’t have much to say about it then other than it was a stock men’s adventure novel with shooting and explosions.

In it, Bolan goes to Washington and uncovers a Mafia-run blackmail ring designed to lure in important officials, elected and unelected, into a videotaped tryst and then controlling those men to the mob’s gain. Bolan rescues an attractive widow who had second thoughts about her role in the scheme and was targeted for a hit because her change-of-heart came with a plan to bust up the operation. A Bolan imposter shows to kill the blackmailees and set Bolan up for a frenzied law enforcement manhunt, but Bolan eludes capture and tracks the operation to its lair and rescues the girl, implicates a congressman, and discovers that the hidden figure behind the scheme was the “widow’s” husband.

So it’s one of the Pendleton books of the series, which puts it a cut above a lot of men’s adventure books. Additionally, as I think about it, the men’s adventure series (and comic books) paved the way for the arc of modern television storytelling. These are episodic, but with continuing plot lines that build and crest over the course of a number of books.

So while I ding modern hardback fiction for being informed by television, I have to do the opposite for men’s adventure books. They set the pace, and they’re cheap little paperback designed for quick consumption and discard. Is that a double standard on my part? I don’t think so, but I’ll have to think it over further.

So this book is worth a read if you’re into this sort of thing. You can definitely do worse with the genre.

Books mentioned in this review:

This book almost makes me regret saying:

It’s an interesting bit, an enjoyable little read from the era–the middle 1960s through, what, the 1980s? where the future is dystopian and overcrowded and the plots are novel and clever.

The book collects three stories, only the third of which I would call novel or clever. The other two are run-of-the-mill apocalyptic bits that put Man in his place.

They include:

• “And Us, Too, I Guess” by Geo. Alec Effinger, which presents a scientist and a working man who wants to breed fish in parallel story lines in the near, dystopian future, when the “scientists” (who work in their own labs on simple experiments that only recreate past discoveries) discover that a single species is dying every day (and might have been for a long time). Hey, here’s the shocking ending: MANKIND DIES. Because of nature or maybe what mankind did to it.
   
• “Chains of the Sea” by Gardner R. Dozois, in which aliens invade, but nobody can see them. A child, however, who has maintained his imagination even beyond his very early years in the dystopian near future can see the “Others” which are intelligent species that adults cannot perceive. Through them, he learns that the aliens have come to renegotiate compacts with the other species and with the new species, the artificial intelligence in human networks. In a moment of poignant coming-of-age drama for the lad, MANKIND DIES. Also, I’m not sure what the title means or how it applies to the story.
   
• “The Shrine of Sebastian” by Gordon Eklund tells the story of a reluctant “pope” of a decadant church is tasked by the previous, newly deceased “pope” with burying her remains at the shrine of Sebastian, a future profit who convinces mankind that it should leave the wasteland of the Earth behind. Most men do, but some remained with the robots in a decaying society. Then, MANKIND DIED. Sorry, I was going on habit there. In this case, the things that thought they were human discovered they were Androids, like Sebastian. Mankind might have survived, somewhere out beyond the sky, but here on Earth, ROBOT AND ANDROIDKIND WILL DIE.

In an essay in the Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky ponders
When Science Fiction Stopped Caring About the Future

Most people think of science-fiction as being about the future; it’s a genre that explores possibilities, from Dr. Frankenstein’s invention of artificial life to Ursula K. Le Guin’s world populated by humans who have all evolved into single-gendered hermaphrodites. What might happen if? What could happen when? Sci-fi thinks about new technologies, new societies, and new ways of being, good or bad.

And then science-fiction fans turn to the new Star Wars trailer, and find, not the future, but a reshuffling of 30-year-old detritus.

Read enough of the C-List science fiction from the past, and you’ll learn that the best of science fiction sticks with you but most of it, especially the pedestrian stuff, falls away from you mostly unremembered. A lot of the old stuff retreads common tropes just as much as new stuff does; we just forget it if we even bother to read or to have read it.

So I won’t remember these stories much, but innovative and imaginative stuff from the era will still captivate me. And in time, I’ll recycle my line about how all the science fiction from the past is better than all the science fiction now. Because I’ll mostly remember the good and won’t remember this particular volume much at all.

Books mentioned in this review:

You might be familiar with William Goldman for a little book he wrote and adapted for the silver screen called The Princess Bride. This book ain’t that.

Instead, this is a mid-1970s crime thriller about a magician/ventriloquist on the verge of television success who flees from New York City to his hometown upstate because he’s afraid he might be cracking up. Then he cracks up. With a body count.

I’m afraid I’ve given much of the story away, but in the book, Goldman presents it as a little bit of a mystery. He has some diary entries that are labeled as part of a police investigation; then we have some interplay between the main character and his partner; then we have a flashback to the main character’s youth and early career and how that has led him to the precipice of success and this crack-up. So there’s some suspense in what sort of crime will occur, and it’s unfortunate what does transpire.

I thought the book was okay, but it does have a 1970s feel to it in the same way that 1970s science fiction does. Or is it just me?

Books mentioned in this review:

As I mentioned in my book report on Murder for Halloween, I have a number of Steven Saylor paperbacks I picked up en masse somewhere. The short story in Murder for Halloween provided me an excuse to pick up this book.

Strangely enough, although I thought I put the books in series order on the shelf when I first put them on the shelf, when I grabbed the first book on the left, I got this volume, which is number 8 in the series, but not the first one of the series I own. Now, it becomes very clear that the books have the series number and the year in which they take place written in marker atop the pages, but I did not know this when I grabbed the book, so I got one in the middle of the pack I own.

This book finds Gordianus, the Finder, sneaking into Massilia, which is under seige by Caesar’s forces in the Roman civil war. Gordianus’s adopted son, a spy for Caesar, has disappeared in the city, so Gordianus and his son-in-law pose as soldiers entering Massilia by a tunnel. When the tunnel assault is washed out, only The Finder and his son-in-law survive and make their way into the city where they become acquainted with the Scapegoat, an outcast chosen to take on the sins of the city and who sacrifice themselves. The group witnesses a murder or suicide from atop the sacred Sacrifice Rock and are approached by a leading Massilian to search for his missing daughter.

It’s intrigue and a bit of mystery wrapped in a bit of historical research that runs pretty smoothly, but does on a couple of occasions–sentences really–come out and have the characters speaks a bit of exposition. So it’s not without a touch of that, but it does get one into the setting and the time period rather well.

It is a bit intriguey for my tastes, but not so bad that I won’t read the rest that I have, starting with the newly rearranged first I own.

Books mentioned in this review:

As you would expect, this book is a collection of Rockwell paintings and drawings throughout his career, including some advertising work, Saturday Evening Post covers, and work for Look magazine.

The text with the images details his career and his biography and turns attention to the evolution of his style and subject matter in a fashion I’ve not seen in other retrospectives or in the monthly feature in the Saturday Evening Post back when I subscribed (before I completely grew weary with the Government Is The Solution articles interspersed among the Rockwell retrospectives and health advice for older people).

You know, I could read books about Rockwell and look through collections of his work that just put the images in a different order every couple of months because the work hits me in a sweet spot: It’s comprehensible and figurative (literally) and it hearkens back to situations, eras, and a general zeitgeist that might never have existed exactly as depicted, but I miss it just the same even though my youth was nothing close to it.

So I enjoyed it, and I’ll pick up more of the same (and quite possible exactly the same given my book buying habits) at book sales in the future.

Books mentioned in this review: