Category: Books

I didn’t like Odd Hours when I read it last year, so you might have believed, as I did, that I would not rush right out to get one of the Odd Thomas graphic novels. Well, we were both right: I only bought this on a trip to Hooked on Books because I’d already picked up something else that was not quite ten dollars, and I still like to push my credit card purchases over that threshold whenever possible.

In Odd We Trust is a graphic novel prequel to Odd Thomas, so Thomas is still in Pico Mundo, bein’ a fry cook. A child is murdered, and Thomas uses some of his skills to find out whether there’s a child killer lurking in the town or if the killer had something else in mind.

As a graphic novel, the interior voice of Oddie is muted, which is double-edged. As I’ve mentioned in previous reviews of the series, sometimes that interior voice is engaging, sometimes it’s padding. With a graphic novel, you don’t need padding. The book also make allusions to a darker, greater evil game afoot, which fits the Odd Thomas mythos.

So it’s a graphic novel and won’t take too long to read. Basically, a short story with pictures. I’m almost seriously reduced to reading coloring books to fill my annual reading total. But I’ve hit my mark already, and this is book 105 for the year as I prepare to turn the spreadsheet and start listing for 2012.

Books mentioned in this review:

Sadly, it’s not uncommon for me to accidentally re-read a book I’ve already read if I buy it again, but this book presents a special case. I did not even choose to read it. Well, not exactly.

As is my wont, I keep a book of short pieces, columns, and whatnot at the bed side so I can read in 600- or 1000-word increments until I am ready to sleep. It’s also not uncommon for me to bring a book up, brush my teeth, and determine that I am too tired to read after all, so a book will sit on the headboard until the next such time I want to read in bed, which can be a week or two later.

So, anyway, one night, the book was there, I was there, so I started reading it. Little did I know that it was my beautiful wife who brought it up so she could read it, but in the time between when she brought it up and I discovered it, the headboard book shuffling that occurs during dusting had put it onto my stack of books. So this might be the very first time that I’ve re-read a book accidentally in this fashion, although now that my wife knows I can fall for this sort of trickery, I might start finding other books she wants me to read on the headboard.

So my reflections on the book closely mirror what I said in 2004: the book is bifurcated into a part about adolescent love, which is spot-on and amusing, and the second part is about being married to his wife which focuses on the nitpicky little ways they get on each other’s nerves. Maybe those moments make for the best comic recounting, but as for a book that celebrates marriage, they really give short shrift to the basic daily comfort of having a life partner and the joys that surpass the general contentment of a good marriage. That’s, again, probably just because the comedian has to focus on the disparaties, but it doesn’t serve as encouragment to wed.

Not the best Cosby book, but I still love the man and his work.

This book is the 25th in The Executioner series. Within it, Mack Bolan finds himself drawn into a net in Colorado, a trap designed to kill him but also to do something else, something bigger. Bolan finds himself encircled by a paramilitary force that has all the earmarks of the United States Army, cut off from support at a ski resort during a blizzard, and the only way to save the President is to attack. Of course.

Hey, it’s a pulp Bolan book. It’s a fun little read. I still like them, which is good, since I still have 20 or so on my bookshelves to read.

I have this book in the Walter J. Black edition, which is part of the Zane Grey series you find often in book fairs. It’s the second Western I’ve read this year (The Virginian being the first), and I can see the debt that Zane Grey owed to Wilson and to Frederic Remington, the artist. Grey writes a standard western plot and then fills the book with lush, at times too-lush, description of the landscape. It actually detracts from the pacing of the book, but it’s an eighty-year-old narrative, so it has that going against the pacing for a modern reader, too.

Within it, a horse wrangler named Chane meets some horse thieves and whips one of them before being driven from his camp by the gang. The one he whooped shows up at a large, Eastern-based wrangling operation and assumes a position of power, but not before drawing the ire of Chane’s young brother Chess who caught on with the same outfit. The daughter of one of the financial backers is along, and when Chess can’t win her heart, he promises that Chane will.

So you’ve got some romance, some Western violence, and whatnot. It’s not a bad read, but not something I’m going to make a habit of reading. I’ll have to try something from Louis L’Amour to see if that suits me better. As L’Amour wrote his work a little later than Grey and he has a pulp background, I’ll bet it’s more punchy.

And if you want to know what I was talking about when I mentioned reading a book about horse wrangling while watching Krull, there you go.

You would think that since I have chased poor Rob Prather around the Internet for a decade, from his old blog Insults Unpunished to his guest time on Outside the Beltway to social media outlets telling him “I love your Shell Scott novels!” that I would have read more than two in that time period. You would be mistaken. I’ve read Kill Him Twice in 2008 and this book in 2011. I have read more than that, anyway, since I have at least one other paperback on my read shelves and might have gotten some from the Community Library back in the day.

Shell Scott goes to an Arizona resort to rest up and recouperate after being shot in a disagreement with some mob types, but shortly into his stay, movie star and Sophie Loren proxy Lucrezia Brizante seeks his help. Her father is in some kind of trouble, so Scott goes down to the Arizona retirement community to find out if the old man is really in danger. And he finds the mafia moving in, looking for some government money that’s coming to the retirement community.

The style of the book blends some lighthearted, irreverant humor with complicate plots endemic of Ross MacDonald or Raymond Chandler. It’s not quite as campy as the Dean Martin Matt Helm films, but Scott doesn’t take himself seriously, and one expects that Prather doesn’t take him entirely seriously either as some realism is sacrificed for spectacle. I think I was a little more down on it in 2008, as the review isn’t without reservations, but I guess if you’re in the mood for this particular style of book, it’s better than if you’re not.

So it’s worth a look if you’re in that mood.

I have an advanced reader’s edition of this book, and, blimey, I wouldn’t send this out for review. It contains misspellings and improperly formated sections. As some of you know, I’m working over another book presently, and I’m gnashing my teeth about every last missing comma and whatnot. But the difference between me and a professional is that this ARC contains those errors, but the pros will weed them out by the time the book has gone to press, whereas I’ll publish something with typos in it. And it drives me crazy.

Oh, right, we weren’t talking about me. We were talking about Ghost Radio.

This is a story about a young man with a radio program about the paranormal who has to deal with a ghostly sound pattern communicating with him. He suspects it’s the ghost of his friend Gabriel, who like Joaquin (the narrator) survived an automobile accident that orphaned them both (maybe). Gabriel died during an electrical storm as the duo, rockers and sound engineers, commandeered an abandoned radio station for an impromptu performance.

You know, I can’t really some up the plot for you because it bends and twists reality a bit, and you can’t be sure how sane Joaquin is and what’s going on. The book moves among flashbacks and the present as well as shifting from the first person narrators of Joaquin and his girlfriend/radio partner Alondra. So it moves along, keeps you guessing, and, if you’re like me, you eventually worry that the thing is going to go all Lost and end up sucking. Well, it’s not that bad, although I was a bit disappointed in the resolution. The book’s ending reminded me a lot of Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma (which I must have read before I was blogging since I can’t find a book review for it–did I read before I blogged? What was that world like?).

Still, it’s a pretty good book. And Gout has not published anything since. I hope he’s working on something.

As advertised, this is a book of questions and answers about various things, such as why the sky is blue except at sunset, why the ocean is blue, who Dr. Pepper was, why the mile is 5,280 feet, and whatnot. It runs about 128 pages and is probably geared to a younger audience, so don’t expect that it’s a science textbook. The questions are not so esoteric that Cecil Adams would cover them in The Straight Dope columns nor Slate in The Explainer columns.

But if you’re a bit rusty or if you want to bone up for obvious questions from your children, it’s probably not a bad idea.

This books finds Bolan hitting a joint in Buffalo to rescue a Canadian undercover policeman who is the brother of a dead compatriot of The Executioner. Bolan catches wind of a plot to take the Mafia international with a meeting in Montreal. While there, Bolan impersonates an Black Ace, again, to infiltrate the hotel taken over by the mafiosos and their crews. Once there, he finds a group of terrorist Free Quebeckers who might be planning something for the 1976 Olympics–or maybe just for Mack Bolan.

It’s a quick read with a lot of “snorters” flying through the air. The political takeaways from this: One, Mack Bolan believes that people should have the right and the ability to defend themselves. Two, Mack Bolan doesn’t have much truck for revolutionaries who are just playing at it, much as he thinks the Free Quebeckers in the book and other young student-type revolutionaries are. He points out that in those kinds of civil wars, a lot of innoncent people die needlessly, especially when terrorists attack soft targets instead of engaging the military. Of course, he compares this to his War, which is different, and it is.

The book reminds me a little of the Robert B. Parker Spenser novel The Judas Goat because the climax of that book is set at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. What a big deal that must have been that it makes its appearance so frequently in pulp of the era. Maybe the London 2012 Olympics has the same cachet in modern pulp, and I just haven’t gotten to it yet (and probably won’t for 30 years).

Wow, this is one cynical little book.

I bought this book in April with a bunch of Ross Thomas’s other titles, and I put them in chronological order in case they’re a series. This book is the first of the ones I got.

The book deals with a labor election, where the longtime president is standing for reelection and the secretary-treasurer is challenging him. The president regrets not having gone to LA when he was offered the opportunity for a screen test when he was a young man. Now, he’s a raging alcoholic who’s bored with the job but wants to keep it. His wife is thirty years younger and is hungry for sex that her husband can’t provide when he’s particularly alcohol-consumptive, as in the stress of the election. The man’s handler provides booze for the husband and sex for the wife, thinking she’s going to divorce the labor leader for him. The secretary-treasurer is an ugly man and a bully with the tendency to break into violent childish tantrums. Then there are the campaign workers, the power brokers, and the influencers who machinate in their ways to get their man elected. And the hitman hired for a couple bills to kill the labor president.

As I said, cynical. There’s really not one unflawed character amongst them. You feel a little sympathy for some, but I couldn’t relate to any, really, except perhaps the labor president’s son, a former policeman fired for being too compassionate, who returns to help his father.

The book moves really well as it shifts between characters and scenes. Each has a good deal of background thrown in fairly expositorially, but it’s not so much as to bog the novel down. The author reminds me a bit of John D. MacDonald for some reason, perhaps the pace and topic matter, but without the main character that the audience should sympathize with.

Another thing: the book dates itself mostly not because of the technologies used and whatnot, but it talks about salaries, and they’re low. Wealthy fatcats make $90,000 a year, and a lot of middle class types make under $10,000. Each one jars you a bit.

Then the book ends, kind of abruptly. But it’s a pretty good book and I enjoyed it. Which is a good thing, since I bought three other books by this author up in Bolivar.

It’s been six months since I’ve read a Dilbert book. I don’t know if that’s a record or not; it’s just an excuse to link back to the previous Dilbert book I read.

So if you read that review, you know what I’ll say about it: The humor holds up over the intervening 13 years (since the book was published, not since May). You could still stick these on your cubicle wall. It’s not that hard to read and is a nice respite from longer works or for browsing while you watch a sporting event on television.

Although maybe the deeper meaning in the deeper meaning of Dilbert lies in the fact that these books, of which I own 8 (numbers 6-14 now, so I’ll try to remember if I go looking in book fairs for the rest) is that they’re amusing, they’re relevant, but they’re not really deep and resonant that I remember any of the real ongoing storylines. The characters sketched, yes, but the plots? Not so much. They’re more like the Executioner novels than other sorts of fiction, enjoyed as one consumes them, but only really for the time one is reading. Not that it’s a bad thing, mind you, but nothing more, ultimately.

After I read a science fiction paperback recently, I chose from shelves laden with thick important tomes another of the many thin genre paperback novels: this book. I had already read this book, some 20 years ago when I was in high school and when I’d borrowed the paperback from the Community Library in High Ridge (memory and logic serves that I borrowed it from the Community Library and not the high school library because I read a paperback, not a paperback in library binding).

The plot: A Federal Marshal goes to a mining colony on Io where miners are cinematographically killing themselves. Sean Connery, back when he had color to his hair, uncovers a drug ring run by the colony’s administrator, and has to deal with hired killers. An Amazon reviewer calls this High Noon in space, and I immediately tut-tutted it, but there is a countdown-to-the-killers element, but it’s not a direct transfer and there’s more to it than that, but the film certainly nods to the classic.

So it’s a good lightweight science fiction book. Wait, some aficionados would call this a Western in space (see above). But you know what? That’s what science fiction really was before Niven and the engineers took over the genre. Accessible, breezy, and commonly themed stories set in space that people could relate to without pulling out the slide rule.