The American Red Cross First Aid & Safety Handbook by Kathleen A. Handal

I’ve spent so much time learning how to dismantle people with krav these days that it seemed I should spend a little time working on skills on the other side of the fence. I needed to gain a point or two of First Aid Skill, and this book seemed like just the way to do it!

This is an imminently practical guide to the very lowest level of First Aid and care in critical situations. The book serves as a reference to be consulted in case of different types of emergencies, from Amputation to some emergency that starts with a Z.

It’s handy, and is better than nothing, but even if one had memorized all of the knowledge herein it wouldn’t be good enough in the case of a real emergency. Makes me think that I need to find and take a few classes in EMT or basic combat medicine.

Shadow Country (Killing Mr. Watson) by Peter Matthiessen
Killing Mr. Watson is the first book of a trilogy which are collected in this version as Shadow Country. Matthiessen has rendered a compelling vision of the landscape of the lawless Florida Everglades at the turn of the century. Almost every detail of the hard lives of the settlers, seminole, and the criminals who make up the region’s cane farms and villages feels authentic. The narritave is brooding and piecemeal. Each chapter is written from the perspective of someone who had a personal relationship with the Watson family, or was present on the day of the lynch mob execution of Edgar J. Watson. This collection of voices creates a patina of tales which taken together give a shadowed, murky picture of Watson’s life and his ultimate death. The language is precise is a bit florid when describing the natural beauty of the region. Matthiessen’s ear for dialect is superb. He tackles themes of mythmaking, the American deification of the outlaw, mob justice, and the lawlessness of a frontier which is very different than the dusty west, but still unquestionably American.

The first book of Shadow Country is compelling, and surprisingly easy to read given its daunting heft.

Shadow Country (Bony By Bone) by Peter Matthiessen
The second novel in Matthiessen’s epic saga of Ed Watson and the Florida Keys is more personal and self aware than the first. It tells the tale of poor lost Lucius Watson, son of the notorious, now legendary “Bloody Watson.” After his father’s Lucius goes to war, goes to the university of Florida and nearly gets his doctoral degree in the history of Florida. He drops out ABD (as many do!) and sinks deep into drink and an obsession with the past. He tries to dig up the “truth” of what happened to his father and learns a Faulknarian lesson about how shallow a grave the past lies in.

The writing is better than in Killing Mr. Watson and the tale is sadder. Lucius is never able to live a life of his own, giving up everything in a misguided attempt to seek out a truth that is mired in local legend, loss and sorrow.


Shadow Country (Lost Man’s River) by Peter Matthiessen
The third book of Watson’s saga and Matthiessen’s opus is an incredible payoff for the six hundred or so dense pages of slog that it took to get here. In this final installation we get to learn what really happened or at least what Ed Watson tells us happened. From his tragic boyhood in the deep south during the worst days of Jim Crow down to his fateful final day on the banks of Lost Man’s Key, Watson tells us of his life, his drive for the American notion of “progress” and his peculiar and violent moral code.

The echoes of Shadow Country and the tale of Bloody Watson linger with you for weeks after finishing the novel. This sequence is a powerful journey though the transformation of America between the Civil War and the First World War. It’s a meditation on violence, progress, history, race relations, and cultural moral evolution. Fantastic work.

The Box by Richard Mattheson
Yep, now I know there is a Cameron Diaz movie of this released just in time for Halloween. Lots of people told me this when they saw me reading the book. Hopefully the movie is better than this retread collection of old short stories that were all published several decades ago. Mattheson is a decent storyteller, and I’ve enjoyed a few of his nuggets in other places, as I’ve mentioned here before. Unfortunately, most of these are just plain bad. This is a collection of eight or so short tales that have either been widely published elsewhere, or should have been left in a bottom drawer. Sentient organs, jazz encounters told in verse, walking suits of clothing, etc. Moving on.

Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris

The weres go public and local bigots get evil. Jason is suspected of something, and the FBI is nosing around asking about Sookie. This one ends about one hundred pages short of where it should have, feeling a bit rushed.

From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris

Gosh, let’s see… There is upset in the vampire kingdom following the incident in Chicago. Sookie is trying to lay low in Bon Temps, but Mrs. Harris has other things in mind! Good surprise ending.

All Together Dead by Charlaine Harris
Sookie goes to Chicago as a servant of the vampire queen. I won’t tell you what happens there, cause it’s soooo awesome!

Definitely Dead by Charlaine Harris

In Definitely Dead we meet Quinn the Weretiger! He’s pretty cool! But this novel is a little weird because there is a missing chunk of time between the previous novel and this one. And for Mrs. Harris, who has almost nothing happen offscreen ever, this is puzzling. Add this to the lack of numbering on the books, and I found myself wondering if I’d somehow skipped one.

But no indeed, apparently a few of Sookie’s adventures just fell on the cutting room floor, to later be included in a book of short stories. But Charlaine didn’t both to rewrite any of this to make it any more clear. And it didn’t really matter. By this point in the series, the books are all so far from stand-alone fictions that you wouldn’t be here unless you’d already read the rest and were hooked.

Dead as a Doornail by Charlaine Harris

Just when you thought the naming of the novels couldn’t get much worse, you realize that Mrs. Harris is just grabbing for any phrase with the word “Dead” in it! But that doesn’t much matter, because by this time you are hooked on the wacky world of Bon Temps, Sookie, and all her supernatural friends. Now Jason gets involved with a werebitch, and I think we meet faries and demons for the first time.

Dead to the World by Charlaine Harris

Sookie’s involvement with Alcide gets her wrapped up in werewolf pack-succession politics. There’s also a sniper in Bon Temps blasting non-humans!

Club Dead by Charlaine Harris

Club Dead flags a bit, because nothing much happens. Sookie goes down to New Orleans
and we get a deeper understanding of the were community. She gets involved with Alcide H., a wearwolf contractor. (Oh yeah, the books really are that steeped in the PWT culture of the south.) A few people (and nonhumans end up dead.)

I should mention that it’s irritating that while the books are definitely meant to be read in chronological order, there is no system of numbering on them. (Sookie Stackhouse #3, for example.)

Living Dead in Dallas by Charlaine Harris

Sookie goes to Dallas to help out Erik and gets involved with the vampires there. She causes trouble for the Fellowship of the Sun. Every bit as much fun as Dead Until Dark.

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

Wow was I not ready to read anymore pulp vampire crap. But I picked it up after The Professor’s recommendation that it “really wasn’t like Twilight.” And sure enough, it isn’t.

Dead Until Dark is the first of the Sookie Stackhouse novels, named after their heroine, a telepathic waitress living in Bon Temps, Lousiana. It also forms the basis for the (fairly divergent) HBO television series True Blood.

Sookie is a great heroine, grandly entertaining and likable. Bon Temps and the supernatural dirty south around it are brought to life with a smile, a dirty joke or ten, and a lot of sly humor by Mrs. Charlaine Harris, whose picture on the back of each book make her seem like someone who would be great fun to share a drink with.

Dead Until Dark is barely a novel at all, weighing in at barely two hundred pages. It introduces us to Bill, Sookie, Erik, Jason, Sam, Tara, and the rest of the Bon Temps regulars at Merlotte’s Bar, epicenter of the Sookie Universe. We also meet drainers, the Fellowship of the Sun, and at least a few weres. The written is silly, the plot is silly, but the sex and violence are high and the characters are exceedingly likeable. The murder mystery component of the first few books make for a fun whodunit, and the books tie together nicely.

Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs

Mr. Burroughs is clever, if deeply unlikeable. He’s a snotty gay Manhattenite who embodies a slew of traits that represent the worst neurotic self-indulgences of his generation of Americans.

Possible Side Effects is a series of comedic essays on Burroughs awkwardness in social situations and times when he has been mildly inconvienced. A former advertising agent from a shitty childhood, Burroughs turned into a drunk, which gave him the type of lowbrow James Freyesque “life story” that sells books like Running With Scissors, his previous bestseller.

Now, all of this may make it sound like I don’t much like Mr. Burroughs, and that would be accurate. But his book was funny, diverting, and occasionally insightful and not badly written.

I read this one in Stillwater Minnesota during a weekend long wedding. Stillwater was a beautiful town on the St. Croix river. This book wasn’t the most memorable part of the weekend.

Double Indemnity by James M. Cain
An honest man falls for the wrong woman, and they end up killing her husband for the insurance money. He’s an insurance man, an expert in sleuthing out insurance fraud. She’s a manipulative bitch who seduces him and cynically manipulates everyone in the novel. No one wins.

Double Indemnity is fast paced and fun to read through. Again, like the rest of Cain’s work, it’s not a crime novel in the way Chandler or Hammett prepared us for. This is more psychosocial drama than anything else.

Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain

Mildred Pierce is a housewife and a baker. When she kicks her husband out for infidelity her life begins. This novel is fabulously successful as a period piece and a look at feminism and class in the nineteen thirties.

Mildred takes a job as a waitress to support her family, including the petulant Vera, one of the least likeable children in literature. We get sex, love, betrayl, crime and a lot of knowledge about how to cook the books (hehe) of a diner.

Of the three James M. Cain novels I read in 2009, this was my favorite, because the texture of the piece and the tragedy of the deal were the best conveyed. Don’t expect gat wielding gangsters here; this is crime of a different sort, and social drama of a more realistic nature.

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain

I picked up a handbound volume of James M. Cain’s three most famous novellas in the dog-days of August in Austin.

James M. Cain didn’t write what I expected. From this legendary name in crime, with a title like this (no, I’d never seen the movie) I was expecting a tale of a criminal stalker and real mur-der. There is murder and death does come to call, but not in the way I expected.

Cain writes in a cropped style here which makes the whole sleazy Southern California Diner scene every bit as unambitious and lowbrow as he intends. This is a crime novel in a very literal sense, not in the stylized noir mode of Pulp Fiction.

New Year, new posts!

It's been far too long!

Since my last post, we've moved twice. First into a treehouse apartment in the Austin Arboretum, now into a three story tower in Houston Midtown. Still working with CA, and RS starts a new job with FBJ next week. I finished a book of my own, Distributed Game Development, and it will be on store shelves (likely very few of them) by late March.

Of course, I've been reading lots, and for the first time have violated my rule about getting a year's books all posted before the end of the year!

I need to post on:
The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain
Double Indemnity by James M. Cain
Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs
Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris
Living Dead in Dallas by Charlaine Harris
Club Dead by Charlaine Harris
Dead to the World by Charlaine Harris
Dead as a Doornail by Charlaine Harris
Definitely Dead by Charlaine Harris
All Together Dead by Charlaine Harris
From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris
Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris
The Box by Richard Mattheson
Shadow Country (Killing Mr. Watson) by Peter Matthiessen
Shadow Country (Bone By Bone) by Peter Matthiessen
Shadow Country (Lost Man’s River) by Peter Matthiessen
The Red Cross Guide to First Aid by The Red Cross
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahari

Stay tuned! The posts will be coming soon, I promise!

-tf

Going Native by Stephen Wright

A man walks out of his life in the midst of a dinner party on the East Coast somewhere. He may steal a green Galaxie automobile. Nearby, some awful crackheads have sex, score, and argue. Someone steals their green Galaxie. A hitchhiker kills a truck driver on the Interstate, then later hitches a ride in a green Galaxie. A young woman runs away from her family with her boyfriend, later ditches the boyfriend for a man driving, yep, you guessed it. Some guy involved in porn goes to a party and his car is run into by our old friend the GG. And so on. These vignettes of wrecked and unpleasant modern lives have three things in common: sex, drugs, and the green Galaxie. It’s a collection of meaningless searches for meaning. The writing is occasionally clever, but usually feels like it’s trying way too hard. There is also a certain pre-911 self-absorption that was common to fiction in the nineties, but which now just feels a tad petulant. I’d skip this one if I were you.

The Woods Are Dark by Richard Laymon

What a turd. This horror novel is an incoherent mess and dirty in a way that reminds me of a kid drawing pictures of genitals with crayons. I doubt even Dimension Films would option a script for this thing. Plot: Two women driving at night stop in a dinner. They are kidnapped to be sacrificed to a local tribe of savage barbarian sex-fiend man-beasts. Some other dumb shit happens. Beasts win.

Lucky for Laymon, I was trapped in a middle seat on a trans-Pacific flight between two chattering Chinese and no choice but to devour his crappy horror novel.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Since I wasn’t a theater guy after high-school, I missed out on Beckett earlier in life. But after Rushdie quoted him in one of his essays in Imaginary Homelands I became intrigued and decided to dive into his most famous work. Waiting for Godot is a compelling, hilarious, though-provoking piece in which, as a famous critic once said, “nothing happens. Twice.” It’s almost true that the purgatorial setting and nearly nonsensical dialog between Vladamir and Estragon are beyond puzzling. So much has been written about this intentionally opaque work that it’s hard to imagine anything I can add, except to say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading the play, and enjoyed even more trying to interact with Pozzy, Lucky, and the text after the fact, in ways that I think the author might well have appreciated.

(What do I think? I think that despite Beckett’s denial, Godot is God, the men are in Purgatory awaiting a conclusion or judgement on their lives. I think that Vladamir has a venereal disease and that Pozzo is a demon of some sort who is punishing the hapless ‘Lucky’ who is a standin for mankind as a whole.)

Woman in the Dark by Dashiel Hammett
This mini-novel is vintage Hammett, but there’s a reason that it isn’t as well known as The Thin Man or Maltese Falcon. His style is minimal here, terse and so unadorned as to be little more than a sketch of actions at some points. A damsel in distress appears in the night and a manly hero rescues her, which quickly turns things into a man-on-the-run tale. It’s not particularly interesting unless you really like the genre or the time period, but it would likely have made for a popular movie in the middle of last century.

Imaginary Homelands by Salman Rushdie
Rushdie’s essays are as good as his novels, if occasionally equally unfocused. In this collection, written between 1982-1992 we get some pre-Fatwah Rushdie. He is younger, perhaps a bit more arrogant in some ways, and just as outspoken and bright. These essays, about politics, literature, history, sports, and music ramble across themes, but always return to the notion of home as more than a location. There are a total of almost seventy-five essays here, which reveal a mind that is unable to rest with comfortable definitions or life unexamined.

This book seems to be out of print. I looked high and low for a second copy to give to LT, (whom I thought might find Rushdie’s comments on Borges interesting) but was unable to find it in any new bookstore. So if you find a copy somewhere at a used bookstore, grab it and run like hell!

Shanghai City Guide by Lonely Planet
A useful overview of one of the world’s megacities. It seems clear that the authors didn’t particularly enjoy their time in Shanghai, but then, I can also concede a number of their observations about the pollution and exhausting climb for status and wealth that seem to so occupy the citizens. Their several sidebars on “The jews of Shanghai” also struck me as a little odd, as other ethnic minorities don’t seem to get similar coverage.

Lonely Planet guides are typically a little better than this. And not a single one of the various drivers I had was able to decipher the map in the center of the book, which made it more or less useless too. So, maybe try a different guide if you need an overview of Shanghai.

The Shining by Stephen King
Somehow, years ago when I was trying my damndest to read everything Mr. King had written I missed this old chestnut. Perhaps odder still, I’ve still never seen the famous Jack Nickelson film of the same name. So I was in for a delightful treat when I found a tattered bright yellow copy of the novel at Halfprice on one of the infernally hot summer days we’re all enjoying right now.

The Overlook Hotel isn’t hot. At least not outside the boiler room in the dead of winter. And that’s the setting where Jack and his family end up trapped while ghosts eat their sanity and make them turn on one another.
The Shining is a tight psychological thriller for the first two thirds, a well written survival horror piece for the remainder. Vintage King. REDRUM.

Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

Stone chronicles the depressing collapse of the sixties and the morally bankrupt characters in his novels always remind me of lost children wandering around the remains of a birthday party that ended hours ago because their parents never came to pick them up.

Dog Soldiers tells the tale of a heroin smuggling deal orchestrated by two former marines still living in Vietnam. They return to the US with more smack than is good for anyone, and they draw a collection of their former lovers and friends into the messy deal, which ends in ruin for almost everyone. This is all set in California, the canyons of LA, the mean streets of Oakland in about 1973. Peace and love have died, and only sex and drugs are left. There’s a sense of intense paranoia, as if everyone might be running a number of some kind. (And most people are.) Our characters are all awash in philosophies, from zen to… weirder stuff. But none of them are able to really pursue enlightenment of any kind, because they are all too drug addled.

Ultimately, this is Stone’s message in Dog Soldiers: That the movement(s) of the sixties got sidetracked, trying to take shortcuts, or becoming wrapped up in hedonism, and ended up missing the more high minded, spiritual targets they initially sought in the communes and San Francisco gatherings of the mid to late sixties. What remains is a sticky criminal residue of paranoia, psychosis, and social fragment. It’s a message we hear at the end of Easy Rider; (“We blew it.”) and hear echoed in A Scanner Darkly.

Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill
An jaded aging rockstar buys a dead man’s jacket from the internet. Then things start to get evil.

The premise works. The dialog is believable, the characters are interesting, if clichéd. The evil is small bore haints, wicked stepparents and the like. People learn things about themselves and some of them don’t make it.

Quality horror, especially in a debut novel. Reads almost like… oh, I don’t know… a young Stephen King…

Cause, oh wait, he is. Well, that’s cool anyway. Street cred for not having your dad endorse your book on the back jacket, and for using a psudo-pseudonym, I suppose.

It’s also cool that The Shining is dedicated to this (once) young man, even if it has no relevance to this particular tale.

Good pulp horror novel. I’ll buy the next one.

Bangkok 8 by John Burdett
Take a tour of steamy Bangkok’s red light districts, prisons, and police stations with your guide Detective Soncheep, the last honest detective in the city. Mostly, he’ll take you to tourist destinations, like Khao San, Pattaya, and so on. But he’ll also muse a lot about prostitution, tell you all about the drug Yaa-baa (speed), and let you in on a murder in the jade-smuggling/sex-change/S&M industry.

This is a fun noir style novel written by a farang, but with a superficial understanding and discussion of thai culture. It’s seedy, seamy, never really dull, and has enough occasionally well written paragraphs to hover just so slightly above crap, but still firmly in the pulp-o-sphere.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
This collection of terse, heartbreaking little stories are mostly about infidelity. Carver’s vision of the desolation of suburban America is distinct and his eye for detail is superb, though it tends to only light upon the melancholy. Twelve stories here chronicle the dissolution of marriages and relationships and the fallout of same. Carver’s dialog and ear for language is superb; hardly a word rings false in this collection. Sad stories from the sixties which chronicled the dissolution of the idealized American marriage.

Planet Law School II by Atticus Falcon
Writing under his silly pseudonym, Atticus Falcon slams the pedagogy of law school’s case method, reveals the men behind the curtain trying to part students with their money while not teaching them anything, and rails against the incompetence of most lawyers. No wonder he needed to protect his identity!

But along the way in this nine hundred page journey, he also opines on almost everything else under the sun, and gives the reader a very firm grasp of the basics of studying law in the US. I suspect that the “PLS Method” he proscribes is likely a very effective, if very time consuming, way to both get good grades, and to emerge from law school much better prepared to practice law than most of your fellows would be.

This book is eternal, but every time you get sick of Falcon’s screed, he introduces some fascinating new topic, or delivers a paragraph that just seems so very right on target that you can’t help but to keep reading. Anyone who is considering law school should read this book, just… take it with a few grains of salt.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut’s sad funny little tale about the firebombing of Dresden is a fast tragic-comic romp which is still probably the best example of his writing. I read it back in high school and enjoyed it immensely, and again in the early part of this summer in South Austin with no less love. I’d love to grab it and include a quote here, perhaps from the beautiful image in which time reverses so that the buildings all grow back together and the bombs fly up into the air where the airplane hanger doors shut quietly, and the planes fly backwards to land in reverse on the runway and the pilots and crew all walk backwards down the tarmac and return on boats to their homes in America and the bombs are disassembled in reverse and their dangerous chemicals returned to elements and carried backwards into the mines beneath the earth where they can never hurt anyone again.

But alas, we’ve moved from the library on Mosquero into an apartment near the Arboretum. So like almost every other book I own, Slaughterhouse Five now lives in storage, awaiting the return of a new gilded age when it will be able to go back on a shelf where it belongs in some new library somewhere else.

And on the third day, it continued raining. But no one here complains because we need it so badly. The professor is away on Cruiseapalooza, and I'm taking a break from working on finishing the book. Which means it's time for a long overdue update! This set were read in June and July of 2009, while still living in South Austin. I'm writing this from an apartment in North Austin on a rainy Saturday in Septmeber.

Starting Off Right in Law School by Carolyn J. Nygren

I purchased this helpful little treatise a few months ago off Amazon.com. At the time, it seemed like law school might be an interesting backup plan in a world tilted a little sideways. It still might, but the current near-collapse of the Biglaw institution in the US makes a person think twice about jumping into very real and immediate debt in exchange for the possibility of future long term satisfaction and recompense.

In any case though, I hate to buy a book and not read it.

Nygren’s tiny little tome tries to explain to the incoming One L some of what they’re about to encounter. From her initial overview of the US legal system, to some interesting case studies of inadvertent fishbone consumption, she tries to help prepare you for the type of caselaw reading and analysis you’ll be expected to undertake in the first semester. Having discussed much of this with the Professor while reading it, it seems a useful primer. She tells me that a number of the lessons herein would have been a great compass for her in those first confusing months of study, when even knowing how to read a case, how to identify the cause of action, the issues, and so on were all foreign.

I’ve got two more of these “before you start law school” type books on the stack, so once I’ve read them, we’ll see how this one compares.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Another Booker prize winner, but… not quite where it should have been. Now maybe this is because Adiga has (in my mind) big shoes to fill. Big indeed. And he strives mightily at his task. We’ve got the obligatory framework story (open letter to Wu Jintao), an unreliable narrator (criminally negligent, you might even say), a lot of (bitter) thought about the role of colonialist countries in the formation of the crappy plight of the poor in the developing world. There’s also at least a little clever wordplay. Somehow though, the whole just falls a little short. I’m promised an Indian Palahniuk and I get a petty schemer instead.

Adiga tells us of a “truer” India. It’s a place of filth, lies, deceit, prostitution, degradation of every sort, in which a teeming amoral populace strives to put their boots on the head of the person beneath them. His Ganges teems with sewage and the corpses of the dead. The streets of Mumbai and Bangalore are filled with dead children gnawed on by rats. Our narrator – well, he’s an enterprising lad to be sure – don’t trust him for a minute.

It’s not this darkness that bothers me. Indeed no, I understand very well that Adiga is playing his part in the creation of the mural of English writing Indian fiction. First we had the fictionalized, idealized imposition of an external narrative of the subcontinent. This was the Raj Quartet era of fiction about India – emeralds, elephants, the exotic beauty of the tiger and the kama sutra. (Rudyard Kipling wrote in this tradition even earlier, I suppose.) Later, we get Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, (we’ll even be generous and include) Jhumpa Lahiri, and the like. They told us something closer to the truth, maybe. It was still gilded and fantastic, but at least it was an authentic worldview, albeit from those from the upper classes of Mumbai who managed to get western educated. Theirs was a multitude of voices, hyper educated and as attuned to the nuance of language as only a polyglot can be.

And then comes Adiga like a graffiti artist coming along to scratch in grubby coal atop the highbrow oil paintings of old masters. “No, no,” he writes. “Fuck you guys. This isn’t my India that you write about. It’s as big a pack of lies as the narratives of the imperialist swine. Your education and erudition might make you sound smart, but it’s made you forget what it’s really like out here in the darkness. Let me tell you a truer story, about filth and poverty and corruption lies and murder. ‘Cause that’s India. At least it is to me.”

And that’s the story you get from the White Tiger. It’s interesting, especially taken in the context I’ve just described. It’s even an excellent novel, perhaps. But a Booker Prize? Well… For that, I need to be shocked, dazzled, enlightened, or at least two of the three.

However, I’d read Adiga again, if only because his voice is (to me) fresh.

The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie

What a fine, delightful, playful and sensual novel! Rushdie’s tale cavorts between the Mughal empire in India and the Medici’s great Florence of around the same time period. The novel is filled with historical detail, but at its heart is a wonderful mediation on the relationship between creators and their creations. Also, there’s plenty of sexy sex, delightful wordplay, deftly interwoven narratives and stories, stories and more stories. Rushdie succeeds wildly in keeping hundreds of shimmering plates in constant motion before catching them all stacked neatly, taking a bow, and leaving you with the unshakable sense of having just watched a master perform.

--

As an aside, I've just started adding tags for author to these posts, so you can sort by author finally... Not sure why it took me so long to think of this. :)

Step Across This Line by Salman Rushdie

Oh sir, you have done it yet again. Read mostly in the Fairmont Waterfront on the Vancouver harbor in the first month of the year, this fine collection of essays landed in a suitcase and didn’t get finished until a different man read it months later in Puerto Vallerta. I suppose that’s fitting, since Rushdie himself wrote this as a lot of different men over a span of years from 1992 to 2002. And reader, let me tell you, you’re in for a treat. In 400 pages of dense, playful, angry, erudite and brilliant essays covering a wide range of topics, from The Wizard of Oz, to English footie, to his thoughts on the fatwa, Rushdie reminds us that he’s not just an important writer – he’s an important thinker. We get Christianity, judiasm, islam (of course), Pinochet, oral sex, infanticide, partition, Mercator projections, Bono, Bridget Jones, Ghandi, Babur, globalization, Nabakov, 9/11, Sammy Beckett, Kosovo, Elian Gonzales, Bush & Cheney, Yates & Faiz, tabloids, and a treasure trove of other topics.

This is a fantastic collection of essays, and as the title indicates, keeps coming back to a central theme that must have been very much on Rushdie’s mind at this time: lines, borders, their crossing; in short, the transgressive.

I’ll stop now, from fear that further expressing my admiration for Rushdie may begin to border on the sycophantine.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

Hosseini’s followup to The Kite Runner takes us back to Kabul for another closeup look at the Taliban’s evil. This time our narrator is a poor village woman, the bastard daughter of a wealthy merchant. She’s married off young to a creep from Kabul who abuses her and his second wife terribly. Things proceed from here, and we end up with a well written version of “Sleeping With the Enemy in Kabul.”

The prose is good, though not great. (But far better than my Pushtun or Urdu, so really, we should just be saluting Hosseini, and not worry about being too critical on this front.) The plotting is stronger than in the Kite Runner.

I enjoyed learning more about poor benighted Afghanistan and about some of the simple kindnesses and beauty that can help bring color and happiness to even the most unfortunate of lives.

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

Continuing my efforts to better understand the economy as a whole, and make up for some of the things I didn’t study during undergrad, I spent a pleasant hour flipping through various books on the economy. This one seemed the most complete and most basic at the same time.

Six months later, I finally finished The Big Book of Economics! At six hundred pages of not-that-dense economic theory for beginners, this one took a while. Certainly not as long as if I’d read a complex book of economic theory for smart people, but still an accomplishment of sorts.

Dr. Sowell of Stanford University is a dedicated scholar of Milton Friedman and similar schools of thought. He’s bright and his style feels approachable without being overly dimmed down.

In twenty-five chapters he covers such topics as Prices & Markets, Industry & Commerce, Work & Pay, Time & Risk, National Economies, International Economies.

The book was informative, and I now feel like I have a much firmer grasp of basic economics. I’d be remiss not to mention a few problems though. First, the book has a particularly right-leaning conservative bent and occasionally gets on a high-horse. Second, the organization is odd, such that section overviews come at the end of the section, with the sections themselves preferring to jump straight into sub-topics without any preamble or indication as to the fascinating twists and turns the subject matter will take.

Patient Zero by Jonathan Mayberry

When the TERRORISTS start creating ZOMBIES to attack the US, you know we’re fucked. Luckily, Detective Joe Ledger is there to save the day with Ju-jitsu, an MP5, and some hand picked members of Echo squad! The results are… perfect for beach reading!

Not sure I really need to say much more about this book. Did I mention TERRORISTS and ZOMBIES on the same plate???

Read it on a beach in Akumal in March while the Professor celebrated her spring break.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

This delightful little tale about a boy named Nobody represents the best of what I think Neil Gaiman does well. The idea is fun. (“What if a little boy were raised by the ghosts in a graveyard?”) The prose is easy to read and playful. The story is both light hearted and macabre at the same time. And Gaiman manages to play with some fun tropes without appearing clichéd. (Like Slias the never-called-vampire-vampire, or Gulhiem, the city of the Ghouls.)

Great, short little novella, without much lasting meaning, but with lots of fun imagery.

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer

So yeah. I read the tween vampire romance thing. I’m not ashamed. Not too ashamed anyway. Think about it the way you would Harry Potter and you’ll feel less guilt about how delicious it can be sometimes.

Twilight is the first in a four novel series Mrs. Meyer wrote over the last four to six years. There is a movie, which I’ve not seen. The novels sold; bigtime.

So I read through them in the first month of this new year, amid the tumult and pomp of presidential transition and towards the springlike week of Valentine’s Day. They were a great candy coated escapist fantasy.

Bella Swan moves to the town of Forks. She’s an odd-girl out, who doesn’t fit in with much of anyone. She’s awkward and charming and horrifically self-absorbed. Then she meets the Cullen family and her world is changed forever. Cause… You guessed it. They drink blood like barflies shoot tequila.

This first novel deals with Bella’s budding relationship with Edward, and her coming to grips with the supernatural elements of the world around her.

It’s short, written at about a sixth grade level.


New Moon by Stephanie Meyer
In the second installment, things continue more or less in the same tempo as they did in Twilight, only with a change of leading man. As the title indicates, the werewolves which were hinted at in the first novel come out to play, and we learn lots more about them. Poor Bella is heartbroken, and cries entirely too much throughout this book. Jake’s loveable demeanor and the ending redeem what is otherwise the weakest entry in the series.


Eclipse by Stephanie Meyer
The tween vampire bit takes a step forward here and we get a healthy tale of teen boys fighting over the girl they both want. Of course, one is a vampire, the other a werewolf, but hey, that’s what you get when you take a trite trope, like using vampirism as a metaphor for budding sexuality. However, the yarn is entertaining, very fast to read, and I almost guarantee you’ll go out to buy the next one right away. Because, while Mrs. Meyer seems as unaware of convention, or the rich canon in which she is writing as one could imagine, she does make you want to know what happens next to Bella, Jacob, Edward, Alice, and the rest.


Breaking Dawn by Stephanie Meyer
Here, in the final installment of the mighty Twilight series, things take a big leap forward. For starters, the book is much longer than the previous three. Second, the writing style and narrative jump about five grade levels ahead. We’ve finally got sex, some seriously gruesome scenes, and so on. One gets the feeling that Mrs. Meyer either had a lot of help here, or that it took her a thousand published pages to get warmed up, and that she’s finally come into her own a bit.

The plot takes a radical right turn pretty early into the novel. There’s a cool final showdown, and things are resolved to my satisfaction at least. The core mechanics of the series are still all here: pain, love, loss, angst about feelings, etc. (So don’t expect literature, just expect a slightly matured and longer version of the previous novels.)

As some reviewers have noted, the fourth book can be considered a bit clumsy (like Bella), because almost everyone gets what they want, and frequently we have to bend through some pretty uncomfortable suspensions of disbelief in order to accept the whys and wherefores of the deal. But everything is nicely wrapped up in a bow by the end, so you get what you came for, I suppose.

I’m comfortable saying that I enjoyed this series. I bought the central tenant, and the special powers that the vampires have make you want to be one. So it’s aspirational, and cheesy, and crunchy like popcorn without offering any real sustenance.

So I've let another season get behind me without updating. Shame on me.


But today I had a fun little conversation about a few books, and remembered that I'd been remiss...

First the personal update, then posts covering January through April 1st. Now, April still seems like three lifetimes ago, but it's late enough tonight, I've got some new demands on my time, and I don't want to do Mrs. Carter and Mr. Rushdie (among others) the discourtesy of hurried posts. So you'll just have to live with a few new books for now!

The Professor and I are still living in the house in South Austin. I'm now a free agent, no longer under the employ of the racecar shop in Vancouver. It's sad to say goodbye to that beautiful city and some of the friends there. But I'm not too sorry to have had to do a lot less travel this spring, and I'll not miss some elements of the job. On to newer and better things!

In other news, the Professor is now officially esquire tambien. So that's cool. The future is otherwise uncertain, and as Terminator reminded us this past weekend, there's no fate but what we make it. So wish us luck with whatever that ends up being.

Now, back to the books!

Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson


I love Bill Bryson. His great natured goofy commentary on anything and everything makes him a charming companion to explore almost any topic alongside. Neither Here Nor There lets the lucky reader tour continental Europe will Bill, from the frozen northern reaches of Scandinavia to the overcrowded bazaars of Istanbul. Along the way, you get to watch Bryson drink a lot of beer, fantasize about various Euro-lasses, and take a lot of trains.

You also get a fine history-lite commentary on many of the cities he visits.

Bryson is, simply put, a treat to read. He feels like a friend, and one whose opinion on nearly everything you’d be eager to hear. His everyman’s tone masks his interest in the erudite, and his sense of humor neatly disguises all the education he’s able to slip in to every work.

Great, fun stuff!

The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester


Another recommendation by (soon to be Dr.) KMK. As a fellow Word Worm, she gets my geekish infatuation with the OED and tales of a lexical nature.

The Professor and the Madman tells the tale of an unlikely friendship between an Oxford lexographer who is the leader of the efforts to build the first version of the Oxford English Dictionary, and an American Civil War veteran who is his greatest help, despite being confined to a lunatic asylum for being, um, crazy. The creation of the OED alone is a fascinating story, involving, as you might imagine, nearly seven decades and hundreds of thousands of word citations and sources. As the definitive compendium of English language usage, the OED is much more than just a dictionary; it’s a fantastically ambitious scholarly undertaking which comprised the life-work of many of its contributors.

The book is short and peppered with OED excerpts for various relevant words. It’s also, paradoxically a bit too long, as it becomes frequently repetitive, and often delves into detail that is so beyond irrlevent as to not even serve to provide texture. It seems clear that the core notion was a good one, the tale itself interesting, but that most everything can be said in about thirty pages.

Overall, this is a fun pop-history of the founding of the OED, and a compassionate look into the lives of two men who were deeply involved in its creation.

The Damnation Game by Clive Barker


“It wasn’t difficult to smudge sexuality into violence, turn sighs into screams, thrusts into convulsions. The grammar was the same; only the punctuation differed.”

Somehow, this quote nicely sums up what makes Barker’s writing unique. It’s the most sensual, overtly sexualized horror I’m familiar with. The Damnation Game takes the Books-of-Blood era Barker style and turns it into a horrific, full-length beast of a novel. It is quite simply the most evil book I’ve ever read, and absolutely not for the faint of heart. Virtually no taboo is left unexplored, and the vile and loathsome are paraded across every dark corner of London and post-war Warsaw.

The plot is detailed but fairly simple: a gambler makes a Faustian deal.

Bonus points for: the coolest necromancy I’ve read in a novel, some truly disturbing stuff, including the first use of the word “autocannibalism” that I’ve ever read.

At nearly five hundred pages, The Damnation Game is meaty enough that it takes a bit of effort to get through, but if you like your horror and perversion raw and wriggling, then it’s a fine ride.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Ben Franklin


I’d read somewhere that this was among the better autobiographies written by a famous American. I’ve gotta admit, that I’m fairly new to the field of autobiographies, having read only one or two now.

Big Ben Franklin’s skinny little volume was most noteable because it reminds us that autobiographies are written by people, not historical figures. Accordingly, what is most striking about this work is all that it doesn’t contain. For example, it ends well before the beginning of the revolutionary war, Continental Congress, Declaration of Anything, and so on. So forget most of the context in which you think about Benjamin Franklin, (no kites with keys tied to them either) and prepare instead for the self-aggrandizing tale of a citizen of Boston and Philadelphia, whose civic contributions to Philly were numerous.

Ben is concerned much with prices, the printing business, how to relate to others, and how to be virtuous without being a member of any of the New England sects which dominated the cultural landscape at that time.

A final detail which bears mentioning is that Ben’s language is delightful; written in a time far enough back to be tongue-teasingly archaic and irregular, but not so far back as to remind us of the incomprehensibility of Dryden. His sentences are long, winding, and chock full of clauses, and his vocabulary is a lot of fun to try on.

The Watchmen by Alan Moore


First “graphic novel” I’d ever read, and it took some coaxing by The Professor and LT, I’ll admit. But, this was a cool work of fiction; far more than I’d expected, even if there were people in tights who dress up and chase criminals.

I’ll not go into any plot or character details here, since I think the movie is about to break on the shores of North America like a marketing tsunami. The subject matter is very dark, the character portraits complex, the plot labyrinthine. The artwork is, as a rule, mediocre at best, but the “camera work” and scene composition is often interesting. There’s a particularly cool chapter told with attention towards the relativity of time such that it stutter-jumps around over a fifty year span every panel or two.

Overall, it was a neat bit of super-hero mayhem and murder to devour over the course of a few sunny hours in Florida in the days just leading up to Christmas.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuinn


LT recommended this one to me, and since I remember enjoying reading The Dispossessed a few decades ago, I eagerly gave it a try.

This is classic sci-fi from the eighties. Guy shows up on a planet where gender relations are very usual because, well, gender isn’t binary. Turns out that the inhabitants of this planet are neither male nor female most of the time, but enter a sort of estrus state where they can become a specific gender for a few days when it’s time to reproduce or to, you know, party. As you might imagine, this adds an usual dimension to the politicking and interpersonal relationships in their quasi-feudal society. Our primary narrator observes all of this and gets deeply involved in palace intrigue and international diplomacy. Then the story takes a radical right turn, and we get an extended men-vs.-nature bit in which a couple travels across arctic wastes for a few hundred pages.

All of this works out okay, I suppose, but several issues kept me from really enjoying the novel too much. The first was its plodding prose – frankly, just plain bad in many cases and dull in most others. The second was that I felt the novel was unable to maintain focus. If the idea was that traditional gender roles has a huge influence on society – okay, fine. Tell me about that. If the notion was that realpolitik works differently in a culture where gender is non-binary, okay, fine, keep focused on that. Instead, I’m left with a setup, and elaborately explained set-piece dealing with this core conceit (“What if instead of having a predefined gender, people could become male or female when it was time to have sex?”) that ultimately doesn’t really go anywhere. The politics and behaviors of the characters and kings here was basically what you’d get from similar Earth societies. The interpersonal relationships and intrigues weren’t markedly different either. And then, as if she was as bored as the rest of us with the notion, the author wanders into a different story for the last third of the book. Now, if the point is, “gender roles don’t really influence the machinations of culture all that deeply”, then I suppose this book would serve as some low-grade ammo for this perspective. But I’m nearly certain that this is exactly the opposite of what Ursula was trying to wrestle with.

Finally, I’d be curious to get The Professor’s take on this one, since she’s so much more deeply initiated in to the arcane of 21st century gender studies than am I. She might understand what was attempted here in a way I’m just missing. But, since it just wasn’t that cool or interesting, I don’t think I’ll ever recommend it to her.

The Cellar by Richard Laymon


More bad horror. Picked it up after watching the superb film, “Let the Right One In”, which I thought a beautiful work that does credit to the horror genre. So, with vampires and murder on the brain, I picked out a likely candidate from the local Chapters. Read it fast, maybe four hours total on a colddarkrainy Vancouver Sunday at the Fairmont.

What happens is, there’s a house where something eeevil lives. It’s so eeevil that lots of people have been killed there over the years, and the family of eeevil inbred hunchback types who live nearby run a haunted museum of sorts of out the place. Luckily, this collection of clichés doesn’t prevent assorted folks from foolishly venturing into “Beast House.” Turns out, mostly bad things happen there.

Meantime, a young mother and her teenage daughter go on the lam from her eeevil and rapacious ex-husband who has just been released from prison. But when their car breaks down, it isn’t near Disneyworld. Nope, unfortunately for them, it’s near—you guessed it! – Beast House!

Overall, this was lurid enough to not feel like it was pulling punches, mixing plenty of sex with its violence. There’s a beast orgy, some very unpleasant child-rape sequences, and lots of good old fashioned murder. Otherwise, not too remarkable.

I’d give this one a B- for the pulp horror genre. It’s not as good as House of Leaves or Salem’s Lot, but it’s a lot better than The Farm, or The Right Hand of Evil.

Shame by Salman Rushdie


Rushdie’s novel about Pakistan is satirical, biting, funny, beautiful, chilling, and usual all of his phenomenal bag of tricks. It’s a full-volume circus, featuring methuselean crones, virgin birth, generals who cry, magic prognosticating tapestries, fornication, enough metaphor to confuse the most devout scholars, and another fifty years of Indian-Pakistani history besides.

Shame tells the tale of a collection of men and women who are metaphors for the birth and fall-from-grace of the nation-state created by partition in the late fifties. But don’t expect a clear cut history lesson; while the literal narrative unfolds as it might well have, the world is chock full of magic realism.

Rushdie’s writing is, as always, so lyrical, so stylized and so, frankly, beautiful that he’s able to take the reader exactly where he wishes in every overfull paragraph... For example:

Once a beautiful young women rendered lovely and naked by the hot wind from a terrorist bomb that killed her father, the mother of brain-damaged girl who represents Pakistan grows old. As she ages, and her husband, the autocratic military dictator who runs the country becomes more and more corrupt, she dons the black burqua and begins to speak only in metaphors. “[she] became in those years, almost invisible, a shadow hunting the corridors for something it had lost, the body, perhaps, from which it had come unstuck. She became less than a character, a mirage, almost, a mumble in the corners of the palace, a rumor in a veil.”

Recall now, that this is the mother of “Shame”, the young woman who represents Pakistan, and who becomes a bestial whore, slaughtering the citizenry in her furious retardation… Ahh, Mr. Rushdie, tell us how you really feel about partition.

Anyway, this is a great book. Again, it’s not quite Midnight’s Children, but it’s not far from it. The language is beautiful, the characters fascinating, the scenes memorable, and the entire tower constructed in such a way that you don’t realize what you’re in the middle of until you’re surrounded. And by then it’s too late to do anything but keep turning pages, mouth slightly agape in wonder as this master juggler and illuminator lets his trick unfold towards it’s beautiful, inevitable, and chilling conclusion.

IF you haven't read Rushdie, and care at all about style, language, fiction, or the multiplicity of cultural perspectives which comprise our world, might I most heartily recommend?

-tf

It's worth interjecting here that these posts are made in the order in which I read these books. This is one reason that there is often a significant delay between posts -- many times I've not had a chance to go back and write a review of something, so while many later books have already had their writeups done, the posting of the whole is delayed.

It's important to me to stick to these two rules -- that I not write about any book I don't actually, completely finish. (There are a LOT that I only make it 2/3 of the way through and just get bogged down, distracted, leave them in another country, whatever.) Also, I refuse to post out of order -- to my mind, everything you read is influenced and weighed against the stockpile of knowledge and memory in your head. To read David Foster Wallace (RIP) without having first read Pyncheon is to miss much of the tradition in which the former is working. More succinctly: Revelations makes little sense without Genesis.

Who cares about all this? Likely just me. I'm not aware of anyone who reads this regularly, or even occasionally. Though, now that Facebook and Twitter have brought all us so much closer, it's possible that readership has increased! If you are out there, dear reader, add a comment and let me know!

Written from a 2nd floor study, grey day, Austin Texas, with the memories of Christmas and family fast fading in my mind...

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Dreams from my Father by Barak Obama


This fine and earnest biographical memoir reveals that we have just elected a first rate mind to be the next president of the United States. Written shortly after his graduation from Harvard Law, Obama gives us a history of his life and a superb meditation on race in America.

From his childhood in Indonesia to his troubled adolescence in Hawaii, through to the ghettos of Chicago in which he worked as a community organizer, and finally on to his father’s grave in Kenya, Mr. Obama writes with clarity, just the right amount of detail, and a degree of lyricism which is surprising from someone who has become a career politician.

The book is candid, and no doubt proved politically inconvenient at points; he speaks frankly of things and describes situations which most politicians would be tripping over themselves trying to disown.

I loved this book, bought and gave out two copies immediately after reading it. I hope that Sherry enjoys the book as much as I did.

This book made me even more proud of the choice we collectively made. Dreams from my Father suggests that perhaps we have our first philosopher-president in a very long time.

Profiles in Courage by John Kennedy


What a fine reminder that once upon a time, politicians were statesmen too. Luckily for the entire world, I think that such a time may have come again now that we’ve elected Barak Obama. But I get ahead of myself, because when I read this book, the election was still weeks away, and I still had some concern that the forces of ignorance would once again carry the day in the US of A. So I turned to a book I’d long heard mentioned by a man whose life was over long before I was born, but whole legacy of nobility in politics inspired a generation.

Written while he was a freshman senator, Kennedy’s book provides compelling and heartfelt portraits of other members of the US Senate who provided examples of political courage, typically by doing something that was against the common grain, was political suicide, or both. Sam Houston, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Thomas Hart Benton, Robert Taft, and one or two others. It is impressive, filled with historical portraits which are interesting and motivational. In particular, Kennedy’s descriptions of Daniel Webster portray him as perhaps the greatest American ever to live, and make me want to read more about him.

I’m disappointed to read that Kennedy is now believed to have not been wholly responsible for writing this book; apparently he had a lot of help. In any case though, this doesn’t cheapen the work. It is still a fascinating, occasionally moving collection of biographical sketches of politicians who were motivated by higher values than a need for reelection or a desire for power. Profiles in Courage should serve to remind us all that the US Congress is, for all its faults, a courtroom in which moral choices which shape our future and reflect our national character are tried. Though our leaders may too often be found wanting, the institution provides a venue in which the best in us can sometimes be found on display.

Winning by Jack Welsh


I had to read this one twice. My friend TJW, scion of Vancouver, advised me over a year ago that this book represented, in his opinion, the best of management theory and practice. Having now read it, I completely agree, and would add that it’s also a fine primer on how to be a leader in modern organizations.

The book is quite thorough enough and easy enough to comprehend that two readings aren’t necessary. But too long had passed since I looked at it, and I sincerely feel that a person could likely benefit from the lessons contained herein every year or so. From how to motivate employees, to how to hire new ones, to a superb chapter on business strategy, Welsh, the Warren Buffett of company management shares with us concise lessons on nearly every aspect of modern business.

The book is easy to grasp, and should likely be required reading for anyone with a stake in how a corporation or division is run.

Thanks, Jack. Useful lessons distilled from a storied career. Thanks, Tarrnie. Good recommendation.

Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki

Felt a little bit guilty reading this one, as if I wanted to put a brown paper book-cover over it, so people couldn’t see me reading a pop-finances book For Dummies™. For whatever reason, though I enjoyed some of Kiyosaki’s articles in the past, I wanted to avoid feeling like a chump, so I avoided this book.

Finally though, I broke down and decided to read it in October. Like many of us, I suspect, finances and the economy are much on my mind in these troubled days.

Kiyosaki’s trope is simple; he had two father figures, one of whom was highly educated, the other of whom was an aggressive, successful businessman. Kiyosaki clearly learned more from the rich dad than from the educated dad. He tries to impart some of these core philosophical differences to the reader in two hundred pages of tortured English.

The core point here is: invest your money in assets which will return money to you. Don’t invest your money in expenses. Then, work to grow your assets, and be smart about using a corporate structure to avoid as many taxes as possible. It’s sound advice.

Key points:

1. You must think differently about money, about investing, about assets and liabilities than most people do if you want to get out of the rat race.

2. Your job, no matter how well it pays, is unlikely to ever make you rich. The nature of the deal is such that your cost of living is likely to increase with your wages, you pay so much to the government, and no matter how hard you work, there are only so many hours in a day.

3. By being smart about taking advantage of various tax structures, the power of incorporation, etc. you can help avoid some taxes, and help pay your expenses with pre-tax instead of post-taxed money. This will help.

4. You must above all understand the difference between an asset, which is something that returns you money without any effort from you, and liabilities, which are anything that cost you either time or money in upkeep. (Your home being the principal thing most people mistake for an asset.)


Overall, I agree with most of the lessons in this book. Money is power, though not an end unto itself. In order to get free from the rat race, one needs more than just the income they can derive from employment.

Now, my ability to put some of these lessons into practice is what I really need to spend time on instead of this navel gazing blog.

Plainsong by Kent Haruf

Haruf has gifted us all with an unadorned, moving little novel about the intertwined small-town lives of Holt County, north of Denver. Our cast of characters includes a couple of old ranchers with hearts of gold, a pregnant high school girl, two boys whose mother is suffering from depression, and a principled teacher. These lives get tangled up in various small-town doings. Ultimately, we’ve given a hopeful message about the ways community can pull together to help out with kindness and love.

The novel is well written, the prose neither flashy nor too wooden. In terms of tone, it’s Richard Russo without the flashes of wit and comedy; John Gardner without the stylistic brilliance or hopelessness.

The parallels drawn between humans and animals are likely exactly the way you’d think if you lived in a rural area. (Indeed, I’ve noticed this tendency amongst the few truly rural dwellers I know.) This shows up over and over – the parallel scenes in which the ranchers use a “calf extractor” is contrast with a young woman’s first exposure to a speculum. Later, the brothers even argue about thinking of her as a heifer. But none of this is mean-spirited. It seems to be from a genuine desire to make the a point that goes a little something like this: “While we are all just animals, subject to the same indignities of the flesh as the lowest herd beast, humans pull together through personal bonds which form communities. And that makes all the difference.”

There isn’t a lot more to say here. The plotting is prosaic. The characters sketches. The language very Iowa school. The net is vaguely heartwarming; like a Hallmark Special. Nice, sweet, just lurid enough in a few details to feel authentic, while not quite as legit as a Terry Allen tune.

I enjoyed the novel. It’s quite fast (I read it in two days, late summer, Texas), and fits firmly into the “stories of the American heartland” genre.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnagie

This classic of mid-century boosterism is charming, useful and accurate, if terrifically dated at this point. This book is a collection of chapters dealing with ways to make oneself a more likeable, more sociable, better person. It is not cynical, nor are its lessons overly manipulative. The book reminds you that everyone wants to be liked, and thinks of themselves as a good person. It advises that you determine what motivates and interests others. It advises you to avoid criticism except in delicate ways. It is filled with practical advice on how to raise your charisma, be a nicer person, and get what you want by ensuring that others want it too.

Useful, concise, and now, having aged like a fine cheese, historically interesting.

Merry Christmas to all!

Having just had a few days to catch up on R&R, I'm just about to post a ten-pack update in an effort to get this page caught up on the year's reading!

Stay tuned for details on a few Rushdie novels, some sci-fi, bad horror, economics, the memoirs of a few presidents, and my first review of a graphic novel!

Happy Holidays!

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The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Wow! Wow. Wow! What a fine and fabulous book. Yet again, Mr. Rushdie has absolutely outdone himself. Wow.

The Satanic Verses is a sprawling epic of men, women, angels, prophets, devils(?), martial artists, movie stars, and nearly everything else between Bombay, Mecca and the great wet city Ellowen Deeowen. Like several of Mr. Rushdie’s other novels, it is told with a frantic post fall-of-Babel style. Everyone talking, multitude of voices in the wilderness, every sentence near competing with tits fellow, falling over itself to delight, entertain, amuse and perplex the reader. It is downright funny, a comedy first and foremost maybe; a tragedy second, a deadly serious meditation on faith third.

The core of the framework tale concerns itself with two men, both of whom fall from an exploding jetliner over the English Channel. The jet has been destroyed by muslim militants. One of the men, Gabreel, is a Bombay film star. The other, Saladin, is an Indian expatriate voice actor living in London. As they fall, the one takes on the countenance of angel Gabriel and dreams. The other adopts a more satanic countenance. Then things start to get really complicated.

Along the way, there are two other critical tales told. One is the story of the Prophet, Mahound (Peace Be Upon Him). The other is the tale of a young woman who is visted by the angel Gabriel, becomes covered in a gown of butterflies, and leads the residents of a North Indian villiage on a doomed crusade to walk to Mecca.

All of the above plot bits and major story arcs make up just the primary weave of the garment. As usual with Rushdie, there are hundreds or more sub-threads which are all woven together to ask some really compelling questions about faith.

So was the fatwa upon Rushdie justified? Is the book blasphemous? Why is “Satanic” in the title?

For a devout muslim, particularly one uneducated enough to miss the rich tradition in which Rushdie is operating, certain passages in the book would certainly seem sacrilegious. The prophet is not presented in the best possible light, and any number of questions about his veracity are slyly woven into the narrative. There’s a really haunting sequence in which an Iranian imam brings about and revels in the slaughter of students during the revolution. And one of the core question at the heart of the book could be summed up as “did the prophet compromise his message for political gain in the early days of Islam.” This is where the title comes into play. Turns out that some accounts indicate that Mohammed (PBUH) may have at one point acknowledged, however obliquely, the power and divinity of earlier three goddesses who were much favored by the people of Mecca. Later, the prophet rescinded his statement, indicating that Shitan had spoken to him in the voice of the angel Gibreel and misled him. These so called “Satanic Verses” of the Koran were excised completely about 600 years later, and are not recognized by most fundamentalist Islamic scholars, as they imply that the prophet was not infalliable.

Now, this Satanic Verses bit is really just the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to the blasphemous portions of the novel. And, since it doesn’t seem to take much to get radical islam riled up, it’s no surprise, I suppose that they didn’t like what was in the novel. What is more surprising is that there were any who were both educated enough to read it and rigid enough to want to kill a person for writing a novel. But then, as the prophet in the novel suggests, there are only two types of people for whom God has no forgiveness, “writers and whores, which are the same.”

I loved this book. Not quite as much as Midnight’s Children, but still among the finest things I’ve ever read. It really helps that, as anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, I’m trainwreck-fasinated by the muslim faith in its modern incarnation. I wish very much that I could travel to some muslim counties, or even more that I had a smart, educated friend who was also a devout muslim. I’ve certainly got a lot of questions…

Fine book, Mr. Rushdie. As always, you amaze.

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The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz

“Use bright, cheerful words to describe other people.”
“In moments when you are alone, recall pleasant, positive experiences.”
“Make sure you can always pronounce another’s name the way they pronounce it.”

These are the sorts of earnest, fine and useful advice that Scwartz’s delightful book is full of. In thirteen chapters which are filled with a zeal for life, a desire for right action, and a charming nineteen fifties brand of boosterism, Schwartz gives great practical advice for how to be a winner in all things you do.

I sincerely enjoyed this book, and believe that if a person read it twice a year for their life, and committed to living by the principles it espouses, that the person would really, truly have a better life, be more successful, and be a shining star to everyone they knew.

Does it sound like a self help book? Yes, and it definitely is. Does it sound cheesy? Well… It’s YOU who have become too cynical, too jaded to remember that being a good person, always striving to be happy, working to make other’s lives better, and so on… These are actually really good and noble values, even if our post-post-post everything culture makes us want to sneer at them.

Here is to trying to banish cynicism and trying hard to be the type of person who is able to think big in all things, and get the most out of life.

-tf

Vagabonding by Rolf Potts

Recommended on Amazon and by a few friends, but...

Rolf Potts had nothing new to say. The only interesting parts in his book were the quotes from other, smarter people, who had already laid down the philosophies he so clearly ill-understood. The quality of his writing was poor, and there was little to no substance. Dr. Seuss managed to capture the core spirit more succinctly in “Oh The Places You’ll Go!”

Potts was mighty proud of himself for being a person who had done some wandering, had a bunch of experiences seemingly at random – (yeah, okay, I get it, you scored with a Hungarian girl one time on the road – good for you) --and seemed to have drawn few useful conclusions from them. (“When you get home, your friends won’t understand you.” Being about the most profound— better summed up by Wilco a decade earlier.) His constant looking down his nose at others who are doing the EXACT same thing as he was irritating (see the section on “Trustafarians” and “Tourists” for examples). Aside from being a good refresher on “Common Quotables: From Thoreau to Muir”, I just didn’t see much in the book. In short, it was self aggrandizing without substance.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have anything against “vagabonding” as a way of spending some time. I just don’t really see either capital-T “Travel” or capital-V “Vagabonding” as an actual lifestyle or philosophy; just a way of making the act of seeing new places both more and less profound at the same time.

Four Hour Work Week was a far better look at similar topics.

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas by Dan S. Kennedy

Still on the quickly-getting-tired Business/Self-Help category we have Dan Kennedy's early nineties book on how to be a successful entrepreneur. Kennedy was highly involved in the mail-order, direct-to-consumer, and the early television info-mercial scene. He (apparently) made millions and has made millions of dollars for some of his clients by advising them on ways to build better businesses.

These could be summarized as:
- Find products and sell them.
- Make your business a service business in addition to its other functions.
- Use synergies between various businesses you control to get a multiplier effect.
- Market yourself and your business aggressively to get more customers; then sell these customers more stuff.

The book was vaguely useful, if occasionally smarmy. As part of a larger cross sampling of entrepreneurial case studies, there were a few tidbits here. In particular, a primer on how to get more money for a business you sell to a larger company was likely valuable. The end of the book also contains a (now very dated) list of various resources which could help you find products to sell, find customers to sell them to, deal with fulfillment, etc.

Not a waste of time, but... I couldn't help but feel like Dan Kennedy was just using ME, the reader, as yet another sucker he could toss off a quick book to and make a few bucks. The coupon at the end of the book for a PERSONAL PRODUCT REVIEW WITH DAN KENNEDY... Not sure the infomercial market is for me... Still, interesting as part of a larger study.

Demonology by Rick Moody

Bit of a snoozer, this one, I’m afraid. The title looked good, the cover imagery was provacatve. The core notion wasn’t bad, which was, “let’s tell some semi-zany stories that deal with modern social angst in our North American consumerist culture.” So far, so good. But, unfortunately, Moody just lacks the zeal and writing ability of, say, George Saunders, who did the same thing better.

I’ll admit that not a single story in this collection sticks in my mind. And that should tell you something.

The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss

Now this was something actually new! I stopped into a bookstore in Canada; a bookstore I really don’t like, I might add. I was irritated with the fiction I’d read recently and wanted to learn how to do something new.

I ran across Ferris’ book and opened it up with great skepticism. I was delighted. Ferris advocates a type of lifestyle design that is empowering, realistic, and entirely possible, if not for everyone.

In brief, Ferris encourages you to recognize that almost nothing is out of your reach and that most of the reasons people give for deferring their dreams are simple excuses. He goes on to give lots of great advice for how to manage one’s time more efficiently – sort of a “habits of highly effective people” bit – then he dives into a collection of chapters on how to reform your work/life balance in a fairly radical way. He gives further advice on a wide range of topics, from “outsourcing your life” to how to structure companies such that they aren’t a horrific burden on their leaders.

I loved the book, and have become a follower of Ferris’s blog, and, in large part, the lifestyle he advocates. It was the sort of book that well stated a number of beliefs I’ve had for quite some time.

In short: The rules don’t have to apply to you, because there are no rules. If you don’t like it, don’t do it. You can have the life you want; it’s there for your taking.

Highly recommended for anyone who is paralyzed by all the bullshit fears in life that prevent them from actually having one.

Ferris reminds us that learning new things is cool, that you can be anything you want to be, and that life is yours if you but choose to participate in it.

Ahh, what an interesting week!

The Senator and KMK stayed with us for the week, as their house had no power. The game continued, shuddering towards the finish line with as much grace as a drunken linebacker. I spent a little time reading, a little time writing...

And now, as of this fine Sunday morning, I'm ALMOST all caught up from the summer's reading. Without further ado...

-tf

Darkfall by Dean Koonz

Darkfall was exactly the kind of pulp horror Koonz has led me to expect. A series of grisly, unexplicable murders in New York send a prototypical Mulder & Scully team out into a terrible snowstorm to track the killer. He's open minded; he wants to believe, you might say. She's a by-the-books woman of science, no room for emotion or superstition in her cold heart. At least not until the right man can thaw her...

In any case, turns out that the killer is a voodoo priest, summoning demons and 'goblins' from various hells as part of a vengeance plot. Along the way, the Mulder character's kids get targeted to be gobbled up by these devils. Some chases ensue. Good wins. Love triumphs. The voodoo priest's black magic catches up with him. Scully learns how to love. Yawn.

The Iron Council by China Meville

Meville has cool ideas. It’s that simple. From golem commanding thaumaturgies to mangled half-men Remade, to the catacopic stained zones where chaos reigns, he shows us a darkly fantasic mirror of our own world.

The Iron Council is set in the same world as Perdido Street Station, many years after the events described therin. It’s not a sequel, or really related in any way, and you don’t need to be familiar with Meville’s other works to enjoy this one.

Meville could improve the occasional impenetrability of his prose, which makes wading through all of his novels a bit tiresome at points. He overuses arcane words, and obscures the flow of narrative needlessly on occasion.

But he gives you very interesting places, characters, and action sequences. What do they they all really mean? Not much, I think, other than telling a fine and dark tale of things that might have occurred in a strange place which never existed. It’s not fantasy, except in a literal sense. It’s not horror, though often horrific. It’s fine speculative science fiction, I suppose. And it’s good, if a bit tedious at times.

Taft by Ann Patchett

As I quite liked Bel Canto, I was eager to stumble across Taft in a Houston Half-Price Books. I dimply recall likely that our friend Kerri B. was a fan of Patchett’s other works. So in the hopes of feminizing my bookshelf slightly, I picked this one up to read on our trip to Honduras.

Taft is a mid-thirties ex-drummer. He’s a bartender in Memphis. He takes in a young woman who needs a job. We get a mildly tragic tale of broken relationships, broken families, and a man’s desire to do good with the wreckage of his life while resisting temptation.

It’s a good novel, Patchett is a good writer. It’s not Bel Canto, but as a bit of an homage to the Rabbit Angstrom, John Gardner’s heroes, and the protagonists of Richard Russo’s novels, it’s fine work.

Six Stories of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I suspect there is a reason that most of these tales never really got much mainstream interest. While they are entertaining, occasionally silly, they qualify as little more than pieces that reveal a bit of the character of the age. Little depth here, and they add little to the understanding of the life of this already overanalyzed writer.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

The Kite Runner had the same kind of buzz surrounding it that The Life of Pi did. The same people were telling me about it, the same vague part of the world invoked in their commentary.

As the first novel I’ve ever read from an Afghani, I was delighted. The prose is good without being flashy or great. The plotting is fine, if a tad contrived at various points. The descriptions of Kabul make me think it must have been a fine and fabulous city before the soviets came and wrecked everything.

I have issue with the inclusion of blond-haired-blue-eyed Nazism as a root of evil. It seems to me that the Taliban are a regionally grown menace, who reached their sick conclusions without much influence from Mein Kampf. So then, in a sense, having the evil Talib baddie as a white man felt like a way of shifting blame to an “other.”

Otherwise, the novel was pretty good; I enjoyed it but didn’t love it, and while I’d read his later works, which I see appearing in bookstores everywhere, I’ve not run right out to buy it yet.

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Nafasi writes a beautiful memoir of her time in Iran during and after the revolution. As we all know, things went from bad to worse for intellictuals once the Shah was overthrown. And for women, things got worse still. Throughout this period, Nafisi and her students undertook a clandestine study of several of the masterworks of Western literature.

I’m fascinated by Iran, and the Muslim world as a whole. I see in Nafisi’s story a microcosm of some important broad questions about how education, freedom, and the role of women can co-exist with some of the particularly virulent strains of Islamo-fascism that currently hold sway in the middle east.

My only complaint here would be that there’s slightly too much navel gazing on occasion, surrounding what it felt like to look at a certain tree, etc. But overall, this is a fascinating glipse into a world that as an American, as a male, I could never otherwise peek inside. And it’s a world in which scholars are heroic; risking everything in order to teach and acquire knowledge.

This book describes the kind of quiet bravery that I wish we could hear more about from the Muslim world.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

Cool little sci-fi novel. Bit of a classic, I suppose. Haldeman, who clearly served in Vietnam, writes the first half of his soldier’s story with a real ear for grunt dialog. Things get a bit steamy as he fantasizes about a free-love co-ed army. Then, once we delve into the meat of the tale, which addresses the social implications of faster-than-light travel, things start to get really interesting.

Our protagonist goes on several missions, one of which strands him in a galactic backwater. When he returns from each of these missions, some really significant periods of time have passed for Earth. The social and inter-personal revelations which unfold are fascinating and occasionally touching. Dan Simmons had clearly read Haldeman’s novel when writing a few of the tales in Hyperion.

Spook Country by William Gibson

I really like William Gibson, so I really liked this novel. It takes the same fictional-high-ground that Pattern Recognition did, which is to say, it embraces the post-Neuromancer future as the present and writes sci-fi sounding modern day fiction.

Our characters are the same international hipsters, cool hunters, artistes and mercs of other Gibson novels. The language is similar, though slightly plainer in many cases. But it’s still a treat to read his descriptions of places you’ve been.

In this case, since Gibson is a bit lazy and sets the novel mostly in the two cities he likely knows best, Los Angeles and Vancouver, I happen to be VERY familiar with the locations he’s describing, which is fun. In particular, the novel’s conclusion, amid the blue and orange shipping containers on the Vancouver harbor dockyard is a view that I see out both my office and my hotel window about 100 days a year. And since I’m fascinated with the spaceport looking place I can appreciate his fascination with the same.

A fun, fast novel. It doesn’t cover any new ground, and the inclusion of weird deities hearkens back to the Loas I liked the least in Count Zero. But it’s still cool fiction, and it’s cool that our world is now largely Gibson’s future from twenty years ago.

Wow! What a summer!

Houston, Honduras, Vancouver, Silicon Valley, Oxford, Napa, Austin... It just didn't stop!

The Professor accomplished all that she set out to; both law firms were excited by her, as one would expect.

I've nearly accomplished what I set out to. The games are all nearly in their respective boxes. It had been a while since I did a hard crunch like the last few months. Learned a lot, definitely advanced a level or two and picked up a few new feats.

Meantime, this week is (busy) but falling action on the games. The Senator and the esteemed KMK are here staying with us until their city has recovered from Ike's beating.

So many interesting times and good conversations with various people around the world in the last three months. And more than a few great new books read. At least one or two of them changed completely the way I think about things. Read on for more!

Oh, so far behind!

Last post was read in January! In Oxford! Since we've had fiction in Texas, How-To books in Vancouver, Lit'ra'ture in Honduras, and Horror in Houston!

Hopefully a real post coming up soon, but a few things I'd like to visit with myself about:

Taft by Ann Patchett
The Iron Council by China Meville
Darkfall by Dean Koontz
Winning by Jack Welsh
The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
Demonology by Rick Moody
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

I promise to at least TRY to get to all of these before the end of August.

Meantime, I'm grinding away on NFS - but things are looking good!

The Professor finished her summer with the fine people of FBJ in Houston, and is now working our in Silicon Valley. We had a great group vacation to Roatan, which reawakened my interest in scuba diving. Vancouver has been beautiful this summer, and the team up there is really coming together.

Family all seem to be well.

More soon, I hope.

-tf

Belle de Jour by Anonymous


Belle won a number of awards a few years ago for her blog. At became a fan of her keen eye and lurid details back then, and was pleased to read a fuller account of her life. Belle is a high-priced call girl who lives in London. She writes a diary of her adventures, romantic, sexual, and otherwise. Her account is chock full of keen observations on people in general and Londoners in particular. It’s also quite shockingly sordid at points. So if there’s much on the internet pornosphere that disgusts or upsets you, this probably isn’t the book for you. She covers almost all of the same kinds of topics that, say, the syndicated column Savage Love addresses, albeit with far greater charm, wit and verve.

There never any real resolution here. Belle lives, works, dines out with friends, goes to visit her mum, and so on. But she’s a charming lady to get to know, and there are plenty of juicy sex tips.

I purchased this one for a few pounds in Oxford England while over there visiting some fine developers. I read the whole thing over the course of an afternoon at the MalMaison. Somehow, I think it was the kind of place of which Belle might approve.

The Prize by Daniel Yergin


At long last I finished Yergin’s masterpiece! The Prize is a sprawling epic history of the oil industry, from the discovery of the first well outside of Titusville, PA. leading all the way up to the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein.

Yergin’s opus was recommended to me by the Senator, who makes his living at least in part from the shuffling of international hydrocarbon resources. Weighing in at a dense nine-hundred pages, the book is nothing if not comprehensive. Yergin gives us a month by month accounting of the major incidents, deals, players and follies of almost everyone involved in oil from the mid-nineteenth century to near the present. This book is remarkably informative; I now know vastly more geography, political history, and way more about oil exploration, processing, and sales than I did before. Yergin’s writing is tight but filled with the kind of delightful anecdotes and details that humanize what could otherwise be a dry account of a history of industry.

Oddly, if anything, the book isn’t quite long enough. I’d love to read a revised new edition that dealt with the critical decade since the first gulf war. Oil and the politics and economics that surround it are a critical piece of understanding how the modern world works. It seems that this truism is becoming only more the case as we move towards the middle of the twenty-first century. We are all still Hydrocarbon Man, and look to continue to be for quite some time.

And just to be blunt: I really, really enjoyed reading this book. Found it fascinating, and it significantly changed the way I think about some elements of our world. Great work, Dr. Yergin!

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein


Milton Friedman, economic godfather of the modern neoconservative movement preached an extremist form of lassiez-faire capitalism. Friedman and his disciples from the Chicago School of Economics have shaped the growth of the modern free trade movement in countries from Chile to Russia to South Africa to the Maldives. But is the Chicago school doctrine, which calls for flat taxes, globalism, multinational corporations which replace most traditional functions of the state actually good for the citizens of those countries in which it has been implemented? Naomi Klein definitely doesn’t think so.

Klein’s work here is brilliantly researched and painstakingly footnoted. Her arguments are generally persuasive. She tracks Friedmanism and a corresponding destruction of democracy and worsening welfare of the body politic from Pinochet’s Chile to the corporatized Green Zone of modern day Iraq.

I can’t help but feel that Klein could have benefitted from a slightly tighter focus. Her attempts to draw a parallel between the sensory-deprivation, LSD and shock treatment experiments of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron and MKULTRA and the economic “shock therapy” of Friedmanic capitalism seems strained. Indeed, the whole metaphor of extremist capitalism as torture writ large upon a population ends up seeming weak. It presupposes the value judgment that Dr. Klein hopes to lead the reader to, weakening her arguments. This lack of focus occasionally pokes it’s head up in other ways as well – as with Klein’s comments about the benefits of the Canadian health care system, which, while accurate, end up reminding the reader that Klein is anything but open minded about her topic. As an avid anti-globalist, and a democratic socialist, Klein has wonderful insights, and has done great research; let them stand on their own. Descending into rhetoric which is outside the scope of the core argument distracts the reader, and ultimately slightly tarnishes Klein’s credibility.

This mild criticism aside, the book is a fascinating five hundred page tour through failed experiments in capitalism by the World Bank, IMF, and the US military-industrial complex. Klein walks the same halls as did Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hitman. But where Perkins came across as a bit of a self-aggrandizing hack, Klein is an eloquent, thorough scholar.

This book is a fascinating expose into the economic theory which has driven a particular brand of US foreign policy over the last half-century. If half the goateed teenagers protesting the WTO talks in Seattle had been even slightly as bright and well informed as is Dr. Klein, it’s likely that the world might have paid a lot more attention to their protests. This is the most articulate anti-globalism screed I’ve ever read.

If I Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O’Brien


I had tremendous respect for The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien. This earlier semi-biographic novel walks through the same rice paddies, NCO tents, and chopper rides to safety. Like O’Brien’s other works there’s a lot of meta here. The author and the narrative itself both exist inside the narrative. There’s an ongoing dialog between reader and writer which forms a subtext for the story.

At its heart, the novel is an anti-war message by one of those who knows best what the human costs are and how the fog of war can obscure both moral judgment and clear definition of purpose. When you’re head down in the trenches, or picking up the arm of a friend just killed by a child’s grenade, it’s hard to know think much about Marshall Doctrine.

This work is not as powerful or as sophisticated as The Things They Carried. It seems to have been a warmup piece. But it was engaging, short, easy to read, and contained at least a few things which had not yet been said about the most over-written war in recent memory.

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston


The Hot Zone may have started the “out-of-control-virus-stopped-at-the-last-minute-by-dedicated-scientists” genre that the film Outbreak capitalized on back in the late nineties. See, apparently Marburg, an Ebola like virus managed to escape from the Rift Valley of Africa and make it’s way to a suburb of Maryland. Luckily, CDC comes in and saves the day by taking out all the infected monkeys. Or something like that.

The Hot Zone wasn’t particularly fresh, interesting or compelling to my mind. But it did feature lots of detailed and gruesome descriptions of the effects a virus like Marburg has on the human body.

Pastoralia by George Saunders


Hooray! A new treat! Saunders short stories are a real breath of fresh air! Like so many new writers I’ve enjoyed over the years, I owe this one to Terry, so thanks!

Pastoralia is a rollicking treat – much like In Persuasion Nation. Again, we’ve got the same mismatch of characters in unusual situations. From the domestic squabble between a fake caveman and woman in a living diorama, to the poignant romantic misadventure of a loveless misogynist, there’s a lot here.


CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders


CivilWarLand in Bad Decline is even better than Pastoralia. Unfortunately, I seem to have loaned my copy to the slow reading MotherTucker a few months ago, so I don’t have it here to reference. But, off the cuff: another collection of short stories which are so weird and fast paced that they can be dizzying. The writing has a particular style which I would probably describe as intentionally forced and conversational. (“You would not expect me to take you there, would you? No you would not.”) Such that the reader is constantly in a strange sort of one way conversation with the narrators, or is listening to these sorts of one-sided conversational monologues. The title track to this book, CivilWarLand, is heartbreaking in its way – telling the tale of a Cival War themepark which falls prey to urban decay in a rather unusual manner. The whole piece ends up being a comi-tragic lament for our civilization in decline. Solid work, Mr. Saunders!


The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders


Eh. Maybe I was just getting tired of Saunders by this point, but the socio-political commentary of “The Brief and Frightening Reign” ended up coming across just as a sort of silly-stoned experiment. The plot in brief: Two nations made up of very small populations of strange mechanical creatures clash along a border. Phil, a nobody with delusions of grandeur ends up misusing mob rule and becoming a sort of demagogue. Under his brief, frightening reign the citizens of the lesser of the two countries have their rights badly trampled. In a sort of anti-IMF parody, they are loaned resources as such usurious rates that soon they are all homeless and have no country left. You get the idea. It’s silly satire but without the usual Saunders wit and pathos.


I Am Legend by Richard Matheson


With images of a Will Smith trailer running in my head, and hopeful visions of one of my favorite horror novellas finally brought to life, I loaned this collection of short stories to The Professor during our fall trip to Tofino. She didn’t get a chance to read it on that trip, but I snared it and read it again, for the first time in ten years or so there in the beautiful bar room of the Wickannish Lodge, surrounded by twisted tree-trunks worn smooth by wind and water.

Mattheson’s most famous work has inspired generations of horror writers. Stephen King speaks reverently of him in On Writing, and, I think, Danse Macabre as well. The stories are edgy as hell for the time they were written, mostly in the 1950s. You’ll feel echoes of Twilight Zones and other pop-horror and sci-fi tales on each page. In some ways, this book forms a backbone cannon for modern pulp grist as much as do Poe and Lovecraft.

The title story bears no resemblance whatsoever to the crap that Will Smith peddled on the silver screen this Christmas. It’s bleak, fascinating, post-apocalyptic and gruesome. And it contains one of the finest ending sentences of any horror story I’ve ever read:

“A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.”


Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen


A cute lawyerette in H-town this summer recommended this novel to me over cocktails in a treehouse one sunny afternoon. A week later, my mother recommended it as well. So I picked up a copy at Half-Price Books. I enjoyed it but wasn’t blown away. It was cute…

The novel involves the framework story of an old man, fading into the convalescent senility of the elderly in a nursing home. His memory is sparked by a rivalry with one of his fellow residents, and he recounts for us a love story wrapped up in a post-Great Depression circus tale. The framework story doesn’t work particularly well for me. An identical trick was used to better effect in the framework tale from The Green Mile, and a similar one worked beautifully in The Blind Assassin. By this time around, it feels like it was lifted from a “framework story template guide.”

The main narrative is engaging. Details of circus life, the wickness both petty and great in which the owner of the bigtop and his minions engage provide some compelling villains. There’s sufficient sex and alcohol to keep things at least a little lurid. An elephant is the hero of sorts, which is cool. Overall, when the narrative sticks to the past it’s quite deft, if a tad predictable.

Nice work, Mrs. Gruen. I’d read another of your novels.