Category: Books

Here is the review of Martian Knightlife that somehow didn’t make it onto the site last August.

The more I read of James P. Hogan, the more I like him. That’s saying quite a bit considering that I liked him a lot when I first read him 25 years ago.

This book is a ripping adventure taking place on Mars. A Saint-like character (come on, in 2001, you’re selling a character as like The Saint? Really? How many science fiction readers in 2001 also read Leslie Charteris books from the 1930s and 1940s?) arrives on Mars and has two intertwined adventures. In the first, he investigates the case of a scientist, the first teleported, and why his bank accounts are cleaned out. Secondly, he helps some archeologists defend a significant dig from a mining corporation that has rights to the land.

As I mentioned, the plotting moves quickly (more so than The Legend That Was Earth), and Hogan drops good tidbits of libertarian philosophy while tackling some weighty questions of identity.

I recommend it.

Book Report: Junk Beautiful Outdoor Edition by Sue Whitney with Kimberly Melamed (2009)

I picked this book up because I thought it was a crafting book designed around using junk for other purposes, kinda like Trash to Treasure or something.

Instead, it’s an interior design book that focuses on building your rooms with pieces of junk that you find in antique stores and rummage sales, sometimes combining (juxtaposing) disparate things for a new function. Like an old skateboard for a paper towel holder. Most of the stuff is not refurbished, refinished, or improved; instead, it’s put to some other use. Well, not all things are left untinkered with, and not all things are junk. One perfect sign that capped the room was a little weathered, wood-routed sign that cost $15 at the antique store. For an accent piece that most will overlook. That’s not junk. Some of the improvements involve glass tabletops special ordered. That’s not inexpensive.

So there’s not any crafty stuff in here, but I did browse for some ideas that probably have been put on simmer for my own use later. I have to say, though, that I did not care for the design herein. I’ve been a bachelor, so I’ve retasked some things, and no readers on this blog but my wife remember the red velvet covered industrial cable spool that served as a table, night stand, or entertainment center between the years 1994 and 2000 in my house. One can accept weathered, rusted, and otherwise ticky tack elements to a room or a whole room (or in this book, outdoor spaces) if one accumulates the pieces over time and doesn’t tend to them because, well, your grandparents or great aunts or whomever is getting older. But to freshly design things with this look is an abomination. In my aesthetic ca 2010. In a couple years, my backyard will no doubt be a combination of newer but used pieces with things I buy at yard sales to fill a niche. But it will be out of cheapness and necessity, not because I designed it to look that way.

Surely you have wondered if I’ve stopped reading books entirely. Well, not entirely, but for the last several weeks I’ve focused on watching some of the backlog of films I have lying around here. With every book fair and garage sale I visit, I seem to pick up a couple of videocassette at fifty cents per, so I’ve been building a bit of a video library. I’ve been working to clear that out, and none of the books I picked up after the A.A. fair twin pack have really caught on. Most of them are still sitting on the little table beside my reading station.

I still manage to flip through the occasional craft book, though. This particular book is another book of fountain designs (Tabletop Fountains is the other I’ve read recently).

Like the preceding, it features a lavish photograph of the fountain along with step-by-step instructions on that particular fountain. It’s best for looking at the pictures and seeing the materials, really, because the step-by-step instructions don’t offer a lot of useful illustrations and suffer from the usual lots-of-steps-with-one-number syndrome.

Still, a pretty book to look at. Someday, I shall make a fountain.

This edition is another Walter J. Black book club special that puts two of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Cool and Lam books into a single volume. I think that, at one time, Walter J. Black must have been the biggest publisher in the country. That said, it’s not designed to be a heirloom edition; the book does not have a single numbering system and is typeset independently in each of the two novels. That’s weird, but I bet it was inexpensive.

Up for Grabs finds Lam working for an insurance company that investigates potential claim fakers by sending them to a dude ranch in Arizona to see if they act according to their injuries. When the latest whiplash sufferer comes, Lam determines that this guy won’t tip his hand because he’s been tipped off. The insurance company wants to settle, but Lam goes off on his own and discovers a crazier scheme than mere insurance fraud.

Top of the Heap details a rather convoluted scheme involving mining companies as money laundering for a gambling house, at least until one of the mines turns out to actually have gold in it. Then the bullets fly and Lam has to get to the bottom of it even though he has originally been retained to hunt down two women used to make a fake alibi for a banker’s son.

In all of the stories, Lam is engaged to do something simple, but he finds something beneath it that causes him to go against the explicit wishes of his employer. Then he’s beaten a couple times but puzzles it out to get a big financial reward in the end. Formulaic, but enjoyable enough. Unfortunately, the titles are not tied enough to the plots that the title alone evokes memories of it. So much so that I had to look at the first few pages of Up for Grabs to remember what it was about.

One thing, though. Bertha Cool, Lam’s partner and sort of comic relief in the series, is presented as a huge woman. She has to squeeze her bulk among furniture when she’s not flinging it around with one hand like a gorilla. Picture that in your mind. Okay, you can imagine it. Then Gardner throws the weight into the text so you can realize how humongous (add your own echo in your imagination here) she is: 165. What? Dude, 165 is voluptuous, not ginormous.

I really like ESG, both for his Perry Mason books and these A.A.Fair-pseudonymed works. You can expect to read more book reports about them from time to time in the future. Like next year or so.

This is a full evening play with four characters: a professor of Greek tragedies who tends to portray things in an Athens vs. Jerusalem template, which might just be an educated way to say “Anti-Semitism”; the Dean of his college, an old lover who doesn’t like the administrative life as much as she hoped; a Jewess student who decides on her own to write and stage a modernised version of Antigone instead of a paper for the aforementioned professor; and the girl’s boyfriend, a chemistry major uncommitted to chemistry but with a talent for the classics.

A lot’s going on in here. The girl takes on the arms race (its from the 1980s) with her Antigone, but becomes more stridently Jewish when the professor’s anti-Semitism is suggested to her. Additionally, she doesn’t want to settle any more for a Wall Street job. The professor discovers that he’s about to be retired as students stop signing up for his classes. Is it him or is it less appreciation of the concepts of tragedy in America in the latter part of the 20th century. So many things to ponder, but nothing really brought to the forefront or to a conclusion.

The play leaves the story kinda in media res. Some alliance shift, some changes happen, but in the end, the resolutions are temporary and illusory. I can’t tell if the professor’s point about the inability to appreciate tragedy is supposed to be shown through his story being tragic–or the opposite.

That said, how come so many plays are plays about plays or plays about colleges or screenwriters? Does this make plays less accessible and more insular or does it reinforce the fraternity of people who see plays through common languages and metaphors? Does the use of the word “Jewess” bespeak of my own anti-Semitism?

There’s a lot to think about in this one.

This is a crafting book for the DIY lifestyle. It says so on the cover. In the introduction, the editor talks about how doing it yourself is part about getting off the grid, man, and freeing yourself from the institutions. Or something. One of the contributors, before showing how to put patterns in moss on rocks, laments that he could go to prison for spray painting someone’s property, but that someone blasted and chiseled a natural treasure and made Mount Rushmore and they call that a national monument.

So this is a crafting book for loft-dwelling latte suckers in Janeane Garafolo glasses. Personally, I’ll take the dowdy old lady craft books for their no-nonsense, make something but not a statement style.

That said, the book breaks it down into categories of different media, such as metal, wood, fabrics, and so on, so it runs the gamut of different craft styles. You can probably find something to do in the book. I’m thinking about painting using the glass in frames. I remember a kid did that in the gifted program in seventh grade. Surely I could do something equivalent to that.

The book wasn’t a waste of time by any means, but that idea above and, frankly, the tone of it are about all I remember of it. So buy yours by clicking below!

I savaged the preceding book in the series, Forever Odd, when I read it in 2007. Why the gap? I didn’t like the predecessor so much, and I had a hard time finding this book at book fairs. I finally found one without a dustjacket and read it.

I liked this one better than Forever Odd. The voice didn’t great on me as much, but I think Koontz better interspersed the narrator voice with action and interaction with other characters this time around. I seem to recollect Odd spent a lot of time alone in Forever Odd.

In this book, Odd is living in a monastery in the Sierra Nevada mountains, trying to rest and trying to help the spirit of a brother who committed suicide to move on. As such, he has a special skeleton key that allows him all access to the grounds of the monestary and of the abbey and school for the disabled next door. Bodachs start appearing, which means bloodshed is imminent, so Odd and the brothers and sisters have to investigate why and to protect the children from a devilish creation of bones.

I enjoyed reading this book and looked forward to sitting down and reading it at night. I’ve spent a couple weeks where I haven’t looked forward to the nightly reading, which probably explains the recent dearth of book reports hereabouts. But when I get that way, I always end up reading a book that refreshes that hunger for the printed word within me. It’s probably as much biorhythms as Dean Koontz, but there you go.

Wow, it’s been over a year since I read Viets’ Urban Affairs, which is a good thing. It means I’m not obsessed with her. I am developing a little crush on her through these collections, though.

As with the previous collection, this book collects her columns from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In the introduction, she mentions that this collection is uncensored; as far as I could tell, the only impact I saw was one instance of a synonym for excrement that appeared on someone’s shirt.

I don’t know if the columns are timeless, but I lived in the era in which they were written near the city where they were written, so I like them. Sadly, I think I’ve run out of Viets’s collected columns and will have to start on her fiction when/if I find some.

This book represents one of MacDonald’s more bleak novels. In it, a middle manager in Florida is stuck in a rut during the summer when his English wife takes their children to England for a visit. He happens upon a 23-year-old wild rich girl, sort of a Paris Hilton type if you can imagine a Paris Hilton in the Eisenhower years. MacDonald did, so they must have been out there.

At any rate, the fellow falls in with this woman, falls into adultery, falls into drunkeness, falls into additional drunken adultery, slacks off on the job and loses it and then ends up with a three week blackout period after which he really has no taste for the rich girl, but when her rich father makes him a job offer to ease the whole kept-man thing, Craig thinks it over, but ultimately decides that he’s going to leave town, with his wife when she returns if she’ll come after what he’s done. The book ends there, although there’s a little hint in a phone conversation he has with his wife over a bad 1958 trans-Atlantic connection that perhaps she will have something to confess when she gets home.

The book reminded me somewhat of Kim du Toit’s Vienna Days in that the character starts out sympathetic, and you feel bad for him when he makes a couple bad choices that put him in a tight spot. But eventually they keep making the bad decisions, and I lose patience with them and lose empathy for them.

Now that I’ve sort of panned the book, let me pan the cover. Clemmie is a 23-year-old, lithe, small woman. This is the cover:

Click for full size

That is not a 23-year-old woman. That, my friends, is someone’s mother who is trying to put a little sizzle back in her love life after an Oprah marathon on Oxygen. Someone that the artist must have wanted to impress. Maybe even sizzle with.

I got this book fresh on the heels of reading The Joy of Junk. This book pales in comparison.

Apparently, it’s some sort of annual compendium, as it bears the number 8, but I’m not sure what it’s collected from. What it represents is a collection of projects that use things you might throw out to make kitschy little crafts.

Frankly, they could have called it Trash to Painted Trash You Can Give For Gifts. Most of the projects end up with a final product that you look at and say, “Oh, that’s a clever use of a .” That is, most of the things don’t transcend their origins. If you make anything out of an old coffee can, for example, you end up with something that looks like a repurposed coffee can. I prefer my projects to transcend the origin of the materials.

It’s not my bag. Maybe if you’re into the country style or whatever style relies on cutesy sayings and homespun appearance, you’ll get more than I got from the book. Me, I got one project idea and the recognition that aluminum cans are a good source of serviceable metal to use in crafts.