Category: Books

As part of my ongoing project to up my geek cred, I went ahead and read Dune, too (in addition to Lord of the Rings) this year. I’ve been exposed to the mythology before. The 1984 David Lynch film starring that guy who looks like a grown-up Matthew Broderick was in heavy rotation on Showtime back in the days when I was trapped in a trailer in Murphy, Missouri, for days on end, so I saw it a couple of times back then, but not in the last 20 years. Then, there was the time I bought a first edition of the book (not a first printing, mind, but definitely a hardback published by Chilton) for a buck and sold it on Ebay for $150. Granted, I did not read the book, but I was somewhat steeped in its publication history if nothing else.

When I first picked it up, I wondered if I was still reading the Lord of the Rings. I mean, it’s chock full of intrigue and every once and again it breaks into a verse of poetry or song. Also, it’s broken into books within the book. More subtle similarities that I’d go into if I were really that into it or if I were seeking and advanced degree.

Except this book is American in nature. The language is more accessible, and the writing is not as, erm, textured. Additionally, the main character is less of a cipher and the intrigues play out in real time instead of having a wizard show up every decade or so to tell you that intrigues are going on, and the cipher must do something to play his unknown role in it.

The story, of course, tells of Paul Atreides, son of a Duke whose father is double-crossed and killed by the Emperor and another royal house on the dismal outpost of Dune, the only place in the universe where one gets melange, the spice that extends men’s lives. Paul joins the natives, becomes a native leader, and plots his revenge.

So the book flowed better than the trilogy, and I got through it quicker. My greatest disappointment is that the third book-within-the-book starts really jump cutting. Whereas the first two portions of the story take place in a pretty limited time frame, the last third of it starts skipping whole years and starts telling of battles that happened instead of, you know, having battles happen.

So I enjoyed it enough to get through it. I also bothered to read the appendixes (which did not number in the hundreds of pages), but I skipped the glossary, though, having muddled through the language in the text.

I’ve like to think I’ve upped my geek cred slightly with the read, but I’m not going to hunt out the sequels any time soon. Besides, I’ve spent a lot of time this summer on four paperbacks, and I need to start making some little ding in my several thousand books of backlog here.

This is my second Dave Barry tome this year (I read Dave Barry Turns 40 in March). Somehow, Dave Barry or someone convinced Random House to send Dave Barry and his family to Japan for three weeks to get a book about it. Really. It must have been something to be a humorist in that golden age. My employer here at the blog won’t even pay for my trips to the coffeepot.

The book comes at the height of Dave Barry’s popularity and the height of Japan’s economic power. A couple year later, Japan hits the economic skids and falls from the front rank of American citizens’ bugbears. To put it clearly: Instead of American sitcoms dealing with the zany antics of a fish-out-of-water American in a Japanese auto company (Gung Ho, and yes, I know it was a movie first, but it was later a sitcom), we get American sitcoms dealing with the zany antics of a fish-out-of-water American in an Indian call center (Outsourced, which was also based on a movie). No word on if someone is going to send Dave Barry to India for three weeks.

My point in the preceding, aside from having the sudden urge to compare Gung Ho to Outsourced, is that the book is a period artifact since it fits into the period genre of trying to understand the Japanese who were economic geniuses. It has Dave Barry’s amusing spin on it and has a travelogue thing going on, but it’s mostly Dave Barry being Dave Barry.

An amusing read.

I bought this book not because I’m a big fan of self-help motivational books, but because I knew how the main conceits story ended, right about the book was publshed. Larry Walters attached some helium-filled weather balloons to a lawn chair because he wanted to fly. Armed with a pellet gun to shoot the balloons to control his altitude, some sand bags for ballast, and a six pack. He shot up to 18,000 feet and into the flight paths for LAX. After he finally came down and got tangled in some power wires, he told a reporter he did it because “You can’t just sit there.” A great conceit for a self-help motivational book.

In 1993, Larry Walters killed himself. A little less rousing premise.

So I opened the book to chuckle at the woe-begotten central conceit, and indeed some of the other examples in the book are dated and the end result of the stories ends up not being optimal for the participants. Aren’t I a sophisticated cosmpolitan pooh-pooher?

Jess Gibson was a businessman before his calling to serve the Lord, and it shows. The book is definitely a business kind of motivational book with some scriptures overlaid. I can’t say that it’s roused me out of this chair to do something–I’m busy writing book reports that upwards of a dozen people will read–but if you’re the kind of person influenced by this, maybe it will help you. Actually, I wonder about people who read a lot of these kinds of books. People who read self-help motivational books tend to read a lot of them, don’t they? Do they build up a tolerance, or do they just need a steady diet of motivation? Hey, if it works for them, I won’t knock it.

On a side note, although the author looks a little, uh, seasoned in the jacket photo, he’s still around. I just saw him on PBS promoting funding for public television. Good for him.

When (if) you think of Clarence Day, you think of Life With Father. And with good reason. Not only was that middle-1930s reminiscience of growing up in the 1880s Manhattan a good bit of nostalgia that really caught on, including a Broadway play of the material, but it’s really about the only good thing Day wrote.

This volume includes: Life with Father, which collects a number of memoir essays that Day published throughout the Manhattan publishing world of the 1920s and 1930s; Life with Mother, a collection that tried to recapture the success of the earlier work, but was published by his widow and contains scraps and fragments and does not work because Mother was not the character that Father was; This Simian World, his first published book that muses upon civilization as a collection of apes, complete with wondering what civilization would be like if ruled by catmen or elephantmen; and a collection of drawings with short bits of doggerel below them.

I read Life with Father in 1999 or 2000, right after I got married. I was not yet 30, so I identified a lot with the narrator of the pieces, Day and his double-effect narrator self-appointed omniscience. Although I would not have applied those adjectives and adverbs then. He was the young guy, and Father was the old man stuck in his ways. Upon re-read, I identify more with Father, bellowing for his dinner or his way after working all day at the stock brokerage. The character of Father is seen through the eyes of a child, retold by that child as an adult. As such, Father is a bit of a cipher and a bit of a caricature. But he’s providing a damn good life for his wife, a lightweight deb of the postbellum world, and his four boys. Underneath the buffoonery of his wanting his own way and throwing what look like temper tantrums to get them, he’s a good man and the son knows he cannot emulate the father.

Aside from the father/son relationship, this book is great for the view of New York City in the 1880s. Gas lights. The installation of telephone replacing the bell you ring for a message boy. The horses and carts riding underneath the El to the farmland north of Central Park. Fascinating. I started reading this soon after I read The Virginian; in that book, the Virginian tells a tall tale that involves the New York restaurant Delmonicos sometime in the recent past. In Life with Father, Father takes the son to Delmonicos, probably right about the time the story from the western was set. Interesting confluence of my reading.

Life with Father, frankly, is the best of Clarence Day. The other things really aren’t worth much.

Interesting side note: This is a 1948 edition of the collection (I can’t imagine there were many more); the previous owner used a photocopy or reproduction of an industry article from 1948. The bookmark was in the early part of Life with Father, so the previous owner did not make it far into the book at all.

This book finds Mack Bolan, the Executioner, winging into Texas to take on the Mafia there. In this particular book, Mack rescues a hostage, buys an old fighter jet to hit important men with mob connections in three cities in rapid succession, and destroys what might be an attempt to create a new petro-state out of the former Republic of Texas. The books are very similar in the series, but each has its own plot and twists, so they definitely keep fresh. Also, they’re books on can tear through to make quota.

This year, I decided to bone up on my geek bona fides and read some geek lore that I’d previously skipped. Although my beautiful wife read the trilogy ten years ago when the films came out (I said TEN YEARS AGO, granpa!), I didn’t. I also missed out in my youth in the middle eighties to read these in the formative years where they’d have had the most impact and I’d be a slavish fanboy. As it is, I am not.

You know the plot, surely, so I won’t bore you with going into it. Instead, I’d like to point out the book that The Fellowship of the Ring (yes, I know, Tolkien himself called it the Company more than the Fellowship, blah blah blah. I did catch that) most reminded me of was Kim by Rudyard Kipling. They both feature very lush descriptions of exotic locations populated with strange (to us) people, and both feature someone who is elevated to play a big role in The Great Game/The War of the Ring. Both feature Roads which cut through the wilderness. I don’t know if any serious scholar has seen it and written a dissertation on it, but you could definitely put a deep comparison through the works.

That said, Lord of the Rings might be a touch too lush for optimum enjoyment. Its very populous cast of characters makes it hard to relate to a single person within it as the reader’s proxy. The best you can do is Sam Gamgee. Even Frodo is a cipher, really. And you need that proxy when running through dozens of pages of elaborate history/description/meeting of the minds to get to the next brief bit of action–although by the beginning of The Two Towers, we get to more action, but by splitting the Fellowship into two or three parts and giving us complete books without Sam, it can still be a slog to read.

Also, note I did not read the appendices which account for something like 200 pages of the final book. Seriously, more of the lush background and description with none of the action and, ultimately, none of the relevance to the story at hand? Maybe, as I say, this would have been more relevant had I grown up a decade earlier or read these books in my younger, more time to kill days.

That being said, I do have the rest of the Tolkien canon, and I will get to it eventually, but not right away. This stuff is rich and deep and dense–more so than Kipling himself–and I need to tear through some books to make sure I make quota this year.

So it’s worth reading if you fancy yourself a geek, and it is a 20th century classic that will probably be studied and relevant in the future when so much is not. But steel yourself. This is not a comic book nor a 20th century American thriller.

I read this book before I read The Well-Stocked Bookcase, and I liked the genre enough so that I decided to read the latter, too, in addition to checking another book of the type from the library (returned unread, as the completion of this book and then the aforementioned The Well-Stocked Bookcase sort of put me off of them for a while).

This book stems from a newspaper column for the Baltimore Sun, where he read and wrote book reviews on classic literature. The early part of the book deals with actual dyed-in-the-wool classics, and as I read his book reviews on them, it really made me want to go on to read the books themselves. Then, the chapters wander into more contemporary nonfiction and into lesser books by noted authors, and suddenly it veered into that “my stamp on classics” territory.

Still, a good read, and you’ve probably recognize the titles of most. I won’t enumerate them here to clutter up your skimming. Suffice to say, I have most of the classics he mentioned and don’t remember any of the non-classics he talks about.

This book marks Pendleton’s return to the series after the one-off Sicilian Slaughter by Jim Peterson. By comparison, it’s a better book. Also, it’s clear that the book was planned to be number 16 in the series, as it mentions 15 different campaigns and begins the same way as 16, with Bolan wounded and needing attention. Instead of going to a bad doctor in Manhattan, though, he’s taken in by a brother and sister on a New Jersey farm. Actually, since Bolan was unwounded at the end of Peterson’s book, they had to graft a wounding into the first chapter. But it’s pretty clear what happened in the real world. Also, the back has a bio and photo of Pendleton to show he does exist and does not (yet) represent a stable of writers.

Bolan has to recuperate in hiding while the mob searches the countryside for him. He does, but his benefacting farmers are captured by the mob, so Bolan has to conduct a rescue instead of just hitting and gitting.

Contrasting a bad Bolan book with a Pendleton Bolan book really puts the latter into stark relief. The books often begin with epitaphs from famous poets and philosophers followed with a Bolan quote to spin it; the books also feature cast-off allusions to classical literature that one finds in a lot of WWII veteran-aged pulp writers that you don’t really see in modern popular fiction. Telling.

This book follows Panic in Philly, which I read way back in 2007. That book report contains the immortal lines:

Of all the series I’ve sampled this year, this is the least likely for a return visit; that’s not to say that it’s bad pulp, but it’s the worst of the pulp I’ve read this year.

Something changed by the time 2010 rolled around and I read Missouri Deathwatch and Arizona Ambush. Maybe I got better acquainted with pulp. But I changed my mind about the Executioner series.

But about this book: This book was not written by Don Pendleton; I read somewhere it was about a licensing dispute or something. So this take on Mack Bolan is more straightforward brutal than Pendleton’s philosphical (at times) hero. A couple of the set pieces involve Bolan killing people that I don’t think Pendleton’s Bolan would have, and in theatrical fashion with bad “numbers” (Bolan’s calculation of the odds, a recurring trope).

At any rate, wounded Bolan goes to NYC to get healed up after the Philadelphia adventure (and has to kill the doctor who helps him). He then decides to go to Italy to take out a training ground for mafia soldiers. He blows stuff up and whatnot. The end.

An relatively unsatisfying outing, but I guess Pendleton was refreshed after his brief hiatus, as the next novel (which I’m currently working on) is better.

This book updates an earlier edition of the book, wherein the editors of the Book of the Month Club got together to decide what a well-stocked bookcase should include and then included a couple paragraphs of why they think so. The subtitle limits the conceit to 72 Enduring novels by Americans published between 1926 and 1998. The analysis of each book is much shorter than in Vintage Reading, as they more likely reflect the blurbs in the BOMC newsletter than actual news reviews.

So what do they think should be on your bookshelves? (I have italicized those I know I own and have bolded those I have already read.)

Apparently, my bookshelves are not well-stocked. I must find another book fair, stat! Although it would not surprise me if I did not own more of these titles hidden among my to read shelves and forgotten.

The only one on the list I read but do not own is Catch-22, which I read the summer before my freshman year of college when the big Swedish mechanic next door taunted me for not having read much literary literature and planning to be an English major. He recommended it. Thanks, Mark!

The thing about this sort of popularity contest is that the list tends to be stacked toward more recent books. Or, in this case, books recent to a decade ago. You end up with a lot more “Who?” responses the later you get; I think the “classics” portion of this list really stops about 1960, and anything after it is very suspect. I mean, two books by Joyce Carol Oates? Really?

At any rate, it’s a quick read and hopefully has brushed me up a little about contemporary serious literature, but I’m not sure I’m going to remember anything new except that Carson McCullers is the author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

This is the first book of trivia-stuff or fact-review things I picked up for my upcoming June adventure, and I chose wisely. If I was looking for a quick read, this juvenile book is it. I should start checking publishers so I don’t get snookered by Scholastic.

It’s a quick bit of paragraphs with history vignettes / trivium in it, but it’s not without some trepidation. Any time you run into something in a book that you know is not true, particularly in a trivia book, you have to wonder if any of it is true. In this particular book, the author explains that the origin of the term “jeep” is that soldiers named it after the Popeye cartoon character. Well, that’s one theory of many.

Regardless, if anything in here stuck in my head, hopefully it’s the right questions.

This is the 14th book in the series. Mack Bolan is summoned to San Diego by some former associates who worry about Bolan’s mentor from Vietnam, who seems to have become embroiled in some sort of mob scheme. Although Bolan does not consider San Diego a major target, he decides to investigate. When he tries to visit the general, Bolan finds the man dead of an apparent suicide and his papers in the fireplace. Bolan decides to investigate and clear his former boss’s name as much as possible. During the course of his investigations, he uncovers a ring involving stolen military-grade equipment.

It’s not one of the strongest in the series, and it contains a little more speechifying than the norm, but a quick and enjoyable read nevertheless.

This is the 13th book in the series, and it follows closely the events from Boston Blitz. Bolan goes to Washington D.C. to break the Mafia’s growing control over the levers of power. He meets a woman used to bait powerful men into compromising positions who might be an ally or who might be an enemy and discovers that the powerful man behind the Mafia’s efforts–the elusive Lupo–knows the woman better than she knows.

Also, explosions and guns. Bang! Bang!

Here’s another bulleted list of trivia items, ungrouped. This one, though, is targeted for adults. And in case you’re wondering, this book’s known untruth is the assertion that the Great Wall of China might be the only man-made thing visible from space. As you and I know, 35 years after this book was published and some decade and a half after the rise of the Internet and Snopes.com, uh, no.

So I don’t know if any of this will help me at all, if I retained any of it, but I did find something of interest in this book. As it was written in 1975, it includes trivia about cigarettes, and they are not demonized. Additionally, there’s a lot of trivia about tea in this book, so the knowledge of the author speaks to the things the author likes, perhaps. I can almost picture what he looked like in 1975, swilling tea and smoking on a cigarette. Hippie.