DSM-IV

David Foster Wallace so loves the DSM that I decided I needed to break down and get a copy. Thanks to the wonders of Amazon’s used book sales, this is easily done. The DSM (in case you’re not a reference book fetishist) is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fourth Edition). If you are going to be diagnosed with some form of mental or emotional malady in the Western world, it’s described herein. Because many of these terms and diagnoses are tossed around willy-nilly in the modern post-therapy world, we’re quite familiar as a culture with depression, PTSD, bipolarity, and various forms of addiction and dependence. For these well known disorders, its fascinating to read clinical descriptions of what the terms really mean. (Turns out we use them pretty haphazardly in everyday life.) And then there are all of the other more arcane disorders, from Pica (eating dirt and other inappropriate things) to paraphilia (sexual compulsions associated with some atypical objects.)

I’ll admit that I’ve not finished reading the entire book. It’s about a thousand pages of reference, frequently cross-referenced against diagnostic code lists, and other similar disorders. But for all that, it is a surprisingly readable reference work. Those who would never consider sitting down and reading the OED might be surprised to find that the DSM presents mental and emotional disorders in readable, interesting, bite-sized chunks. It’s the perfect gift for the budding novelist, psychology grad student, or hypochondriac bookworm in your life. Which gives me an idea…

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace


I’d started a writing project this summer in which I wanted to tell a collection of tales of short relationships between a man and a number of different women. Maybe this was a way of capturing the fantasy of various girls I wish I’d gotten to know better earlier in life. Or maybe it’s just a subject that is interesting. But because I wanted a fantasy or supernatural angle, I wanted to make at least one of them a witch, maybe more. Not a mysoginist “all women are evil” witches, but instead a way of sort of celebrating the mysterious and magical diversity of various feminine personalities. (Though I did want to include at least one bit of serious darkness – if you’ve ever done much dating, you’ve got a story or two to be sure – and not all witches are about love spells and pet kittens.) Carried away with my own cleverness, I decided to title the collection Brief Interviews with Supposedly Fun Witches I’ll Never Do Again in a sort of homage to one of our postmodern masters.

This little project led me to reopen David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, a collection of spliced together short fiction relayed as interviews with people who are, as the title suggests, generally not very nice in one way or another. I was reminded of how enchanting DFW’s linguistic hi-jinx and chicanery can be to word worms like me, and in short, what a dazzling writer he could be at times.

Since the men here are not named, but instead identified only by subject or case ID information and a location, and since the stories are arrayed in an order designed to slowly ratchet up the hideous, rather than grouped by subject, part of the puzzle is figuring out who is who here.

Even after more than a decade and a helluva lot of zeitgeist, Brief Interviews holds up quite well. DFW was a master of the craft, albeit it not for everyone. His self indulgence and focus on relationships and the nuances of self-absorption read like paeans from a pre 9/11 world. He regularly loses sight of the forest of the narrative, and can be found climbing the tree of some particular metafictional angle or footnote. But none of this obscures the obvious (and now somewhat over-celebrated) brilliance, of a man who loves language, has terrific gifts with construction, and sees many things clearly.

Proofing process finished for Social Game Design -- now it's off to the printers, and will be availible on Amazon and store shelves by the end of the year!

Two more reviews! Hot, fresh, kinda messy, and late-night. Just like you like 'em!

The Kraken by China Mieville

Ummm, Lumm, Dumm indeed. Mieville is smart, erudite, wacky, and has great skills with language. But this is much more Pynchon than Perdido Street. In London, cults with strange magics vie for control of sacred artifacts. There’s a stolen picked squid corpse involved. But it’s all a bit silly and the main character was too much of a clueless Hitch-hiker’s Guide castoff to be that interesting. The darkness, the blood, the beating heart of awesome that infected New Cruzoban and rode distant rails as part of the Iron Council just isn’t to be found in weirdo cult London.

City of Thieves by David Benioff

A fine tale of adventure and camaraderie during the Siege of Leningrad. City of Thieves is fun, poignant, a little sexy and a little sad. Our hero and his tough, handsome, outgoing friend go on an epic quest for eggs in the midst of the war. I quite enjoyed this one, and I’ll do you the favor of not giving away anything else.

Crimson Alliance Gone Gold!
The Senator's Birthday!!
Tomorrow, a 30 year old Weezel!!!

Decline and Fall by Gibbons.

What a weekend! :)

-tf

Inspiring day at Blizzard. Reminded me of why I got into this business.

Can't believe it's been 7 months. Yikes!

But luckily, the book readin' continues, and I've got some fun reviews all set to share!

Unfortunately, (or fortunately) I'm fat in the middle of another new book project right now; one with some rather insane deadlines. So it may be a few weeks still.

But rest assured -- these two goals I vow:

1) I'll get 2011's books all posted before the end of the year. I've not yet missed a book (I think) or a year since I started this thing, and this won't be the first. We're closing in on 10 years before too long -- wanna make sure they're good!

2) I'll get the broken index on the side fixed, so the links to reviews actually work right.

In the meantime, as a teaser, some of the interesting stuff I've read and need to post about:

City of Thieves
The Kraken
Where There is No Doctor
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (again)
Full Dark, No Stars
The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
The Monk and the Riddle
A Wise Man's Fear
Horns
Caught
The Windup Girl
Elegy for April
Little Brother
The Devotions of Suspect X
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
Rogue Island

But for now... Work needs my attention, and The Professor is telling me it's bed time, and I still owe my publisher another 15k words in about a week, so...

Until later,
-tf

23 new book reviews added!

Now off to New Orleans for NYE!

Love,
-tf

Agents, Editors, and You by Michelle Howry

A useful, if somewhat dated introduction to the world of literary agents, publishing houses and the like. I need to get up to speed on the business side of publishing. While I’ve one published book, my understanding is that the non-fiction side of things works a little different. And from what various people who might be in-the-know tell me, having been published on the non-fiction side isn’t likely to help me any.

Editors, Agents, and You consists of ten chapters. Do you need an Agent? (Yes.) How do I find the right Agent? (Internet, go to conferences, write them.) How do I approach an Agent? (With a well crafted query letter.) What does an agent actually do? (Contact publishers on your behalf, help with negotiations, take part of the money.) And so on.

First, I need to find another book on the topic written after the advent of the internet age. Second, I need to generally read a few more books, blogs, etc. on the topic.

But mostly I think I just need to reach out to a bunch of agents to see if anyone is interested in representing me for my newest book: The Arc!

Coldheart Canyon by Clive Barker

Eternal novel; vintage Barker. A fun look at old Hollywood’s romance with itself. Should have (and could have) ended five times before it did.

What happens is: In an old and evil monastery in Transylvania in the nineteen twenties, the rich consort of a Hollywood starlet purchases a tile fresco which has been driving monks mad for centuries. Because, see, the devil’s wife inspired the fresco (or something like that.) The starlet installs the fresco in her mansion in the Hollywood Canyons, and then throws orgies for the who’s-who of Hollywood, in which they are allowed to taste the immortality offered by the world within the fresco.

Cut to the modern day, in which a soulless Tom Cruise type gets bad (and unnecessary) plastic surjury to appease his vanity. He then moves into Coldheart Canyon to recover, and awakens the ghosts within. Evil and naughtyness ensue.

This is classic Barker stuff – good if you like his brand of brutality and depravity, but certainly not as good as many of his other works. If you are even slightly squeamish about sexual perversion, you might want to steer clear.

Just After Sunset by Stephen King

Short story collection in which a number of tales feature aging and sickness as themes. There are a few good stories here, a few stinkers-- the one about the port-a-potty comes to mind—and a few that are standard King fare. I always enjoy his readability and the straightforwardness with which he approaches storytelling.

The World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes

Written in 1989, The World in 10½ Chapters is a fun little bit of intellectualized masturbation from a bygone era. Far too clever for its own good and erratically unpredictable, the book cavorts between various musings on the tale of Noah’s Arc, some tongue in cheek legal satire dealing /with the trial of a woodworm in sixteenth century France, and some authorially intrusive diatribes on love and heaven. It all adds up to… a playful romp without a lot of real coherence.

Zero History by William Gibson

Following in the same footsteps as Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, Gibson tells us of the modern brand elite and their machinations. An ex-addict, Milgrim, and Hollis, the former lead singer of the band Cerfew, get caught up in another of Big End/Blue Ant’s schemes in London and Paris. As with most of Gibson’s books, he presents us with a power struggle which takes place in the pantheon above normal mortals, and in which the main characters play a role they don’t understand in bringing about a power shift that changes a world one order of magnitude above the one they live in. (Case frees Wintermute from the bonds of Turing, loosing a new godhead upon the Matrix; Count Zero frees the Loa into the Matrix, changing the power from one AI god to a pantheon, and in this case, Bigend ascends to a new level of financial moguldom through the unwitting, confused efforts of Milgrim and Hollis.)

It’s another fascinating look at our-world-as-cyberpunk. Ono-Sendais are replaced by iPhones, but otherwise the prose and the song remain much the same, albeit with the violent and sexy juicy bits at far greater remove. (Remember when Case spreads Molly’s labia? Here a veiled reference to a shower scene is the closest we get to sex. Remember when “someone made wet sounds in the alley and died” during the show for 3Jane? Here at a climatic moment an AK appears (but is never used.)) It’s a conscious choice to focus instead on brand intrigue, the texture of consumerism, and the stately mechinations of a media elite rather than the low-level heat of sex and violence on the streets of Chiba City. But unfortunately the story loses some animal pleasure as a result.

The style works for the most part. Occasionally Gibson’s tangled sentence construction, layered clauses, and aggressive disregard for basic subject verb relationships gets tedious. Likewise the so-hip-its-incomprehensible dialog which serves as narrative most of the time sometimes just isn’t worth untangling in order to figure out WTF these folks are talking about. But as a general rule the language still reads as Gibson, and helps serve up the world of today as a fresh cyberpunk utopia that lives in each of our pockets.

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

First book I read in digital format. (Kindle app for iPhone.) First book I’ve ever read by a celebrity chef. Quite an engaging look at the back rooms of New York’s high (and low) end kitchens. Bourdain knows and loves food, and is a far more literate writer than I’d have expected. He makes his crew, and kitchen staffs in general seem like a bunch of salty pirates. While a bit self-aggrandizing at times, I also find that I generally believe most of what he’s telling me.

Gave Mike a copy to see what he thinks. So far he says it’s a fairly accurate description of the many kitchens he’s worked in over the last decade.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

Rothfuss has done a fine job of writing a kickass book in a genre so mired in cliché that it usually struggles really hard to do anything fresh. The Name of the Wind deals with the story of Kvothe, a young phenom who is cast adrift in the world and becomes a hero of sorts. The story is told as a retrospective; a legend related by the legend himself around the table at a tavern in a troubled land…

The writing is smooth, clever, and engaging. Rothfuss refrains from the leaden sentences and archaic diction that pollute so many fantasy novels. Kvothe is a likeable character in a cast full of likeable characters. And while we’ve seen many of these places before (the gypsies here are reminiscent of Robert Jordan’s gypsies, the University here has shades of Hogwarts, etc.) they all feel fresh here and tie together into a mostly believable world.

I wish the novel had been longer, which is as high praise as a book can get I suppose. I started and finished over the course of a few days surrounding the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. The sequel, A Wise Man’s Fear, comes out in March of next year. I look forward to reading it.

Pandemonium by Daryl Gregory

Finished this one last night on the plane to Penny-Arcade. It’s a fun premise, executed with plenty of sloppy cleverness and pop culture razzmatazz. “What if demonic possession were real?” What if we’d become almost blasé about it? In this short first novel Gregory gives us a look at modern America, complete with Starbucks, Google, etc. that has just learned to deal with the occasional bout of possession; as when the Demon Truth started shot OJ Simpson dead in the midst of his trial, or when the Kamakazee Demon flew a plane into Ike, setting the stage for Nixon’s presidency. It’s a cute premise, though it gets lost in its own cleverness and a lot of rabbit trail homage to Phillip K. Dick periodically. Not a bad first novel, though about as filling as Crunch n’ Munch.

The Death and Life of Bobby Z by Don Winslow

Because I enjoyed his book Power of the Dog, I figured I’d try another Winslow product. Turns out, Bobby Z is a bit of a stinker. The tale is good enough I suppose: a self-proclaimed three-time loser gets offered the chance to impersonate the famous SoCal criminal dobe dealer and surfer, Bobby Z. He does, and gets pulled into a world of Mexican drug lords and double crosses. Luckily, he was a trained marine badass before becoming a petty criminal loser. Eventually, he gets the kid, the girl, the money, and sails off (literally) into the sunset.

No, it wasn’t the clichéd plot of Bobby Z that bothered me. It was, like, the language, man. When the narrator is like, hip as a motherfuck to the SoCal scene, man, it’s like, hard to, you know, take the prose seriously. If it were like restrained to like the goddamn dialog or some shit like that it would be, like, a bit easier to take, man. But since the prose itself is supposed to sound like it was like narrated by like some Hells Angel reject acid casualty, man, it was just a little, like tres fucking ridiculous, you dig?

When Lebowski talks like this, he’s a parody of the Southern California burnout scene. When the prose itself is written in this fashion it’s just tedious and obscures the cool.

Luckily, Winslow got a lot better by Power of the Dog. So if you’re going to read something by him, I’d recommend that instead of Bobby Z.

20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill

Good collection of horror shorts by the author of Heart Shaped Box. A few of these stories are actually quite good. I particularly enjoyed the poignancy of “Pop Art”, which reminded me of the best of George Saunders. “The Cape” had some good writing in it. “The Black Phone” was tightly wound, if a little obvious. And “Bobby Conroe Comes Back from the Dead” was a piece with a lot of emotional nuance. Overall, I give this one an A. Nice work, Mr. Hill. I’ll certainly read the next thing you publish.

Under the Dome by Stephen King
A massive, sprawling tale in which King does what he does best: Introduce us to a cast of small town characters, then put them in a “Monsters Are Coming to Maple Street” setting in which the shit hits the fan and social order dissolves. In this case, the “What if…” scenario involves a giant impermeable dome being dropped over the town, and the resulting social politics of the residents.

King’s characterization is fun, his heroes and villains obediently huddle on either side of the line of scrimmage, then play their roles nicely. The ultimate conclusion is a bit stupid, but the ride along the way is lots of fun if you like King.

The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow
The Power of the Dog is a look at the cartel wars along the Mexican border. It is a hip, nasty little tale of betrayls, double-crosses, and small-arms skirmishes. There are a few clichés here (hooker with a heart of gold, for example), but generally, it’s a fast paced, savage look at border intrigue and politics from the early nineties. Quite cool.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

Dr. Cronin is a professor of creative writing at Rice University here in Houston. His sprawling tale, The Passage, is rumored to be the beginning of a mighty trilogy, and the advances he received for his first horror novel are rumored to have been impressive.

The Passage tells us of the decline and fall of North American civilization under a plague of vampirism brought about by a Miltary/CDC experiment gone wrong. We get a long buildup to the catastrophe, then jump forward about 100 years to a post-apocalpytic world in which a band of survivors tries in vain to keep the lights on to protect themselves from the hordes of night-stalkers. Eventually, a small band of misfits must undertake a journey across the blighted land for some reason. They encounter other civilizations (shades of Watership Down here), and have some cool skirmishes. (Vamped out Vegas is pretty cool.) Some of the characters are really memorable. Some of the action scenes are excellent (others, like the runaway train-car bit feel too much like someone was trying to create a movie…) The resolutions to some of relationship drama is touching. Other times, deus-ex-machina rears its ugly head in a way that is frustrating.

Overall, it’s a cool setup to what could be a much longer tale, and despite being almost 900 pages, this book itself could have been longer.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Subtitled “Men Who Hate Women”, The Girl… series has ended up being an international sensation, based mostly on the appealing strength of the heroine, Lisbeth Salander.

She’s cool, and Blomkist is an interesting foil to the villains (he’s the man who loves women.) Since pretty much everyone has read these, or seen the movies by now, I’m not sure there is too much else to say.

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Steig Larsson
Lisbeth Salander moves into Jason Bourne territory in this second installment of the most popular thing to come out of Sweden since… ever. We learn more about her mysterious past and end on a cliffhanger that will send you out to buy the third book in the middle of the night…. But what’s with the opening sequence in the hurricane? Seems to have nothing to do with anything else.


The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Steig Larsson
By now the tale of Lisbeth Salander has become silly and a bit tedious. Mostly a police-procedural at this point, things wrap up as we’d hope. Mostly. Too many new characters introduced, too many irrelevant subplots, some of which seem to have just been dropped.

Still, these were a fun romp through the life of a Jason Bourne-esque Swedish hacker girl and the men who surround her.

Licensed to Kill by Robert Young Pelton

Subtitled “Hired Guns in the War on Terror.” Pelton is an travel-adventure-journalist better known for his series on “The World’s Most Dangerous Places.” In this illuminating bit of journalism on the rise of private mercenary armies, like Blackwater, Executive Outcomes, or Triple Canopy, Pelton explores the world of the private military contractor, from Baghdad to Central Africa.

Some fascinating details: Contractors, primarily made up of former special forces, SAS, or police officers, are usually hired by private firms to provide security in guarding fixed position installations (offices, etc.) or security for transporting goods. These guys are armed to the teeth, paid well, and subject to virtually no governmental oversight. As a result, there are likely as many as 100,000 private mercenary soldiers at large in the world, who report only to the highest bidder. Some companies, like Eric Prince’s Blackwater, operate hand-in-hand with the US Federal Government. Others, like Sandline or Executive Outcomes can be employed for far more nefarious purposes, like overthrowing governments in Equatorial Guinea, or seizing diamond mines in Sierra Leone. In this shadowy world, civilian deaths are common (particularly in Africa and Iraq) and contractors are held to no legal standards, and no moral standards but whatever they bring in with them. It’s a fascinating brave-new-world of steroid monkies and ex-cops toting automatic weapons, armored vehicles, and private gunships in some of the world’s least stable places for fantastic sums of money.

Pelton does a good job of keeping relatively neutral on the topic, neither condemning nor deifying the cowboy contractors. He poses thoughtful questions about the role of such large corporate armies in nation building. Interesting book.

The Little Black Book of Violence by Laurence Kane and Kris Wilder

Wilder and Kris are martial artists. Their book is subtitled “What Every Young Man Needs to Know About Fighting.” It was recommended by Sgt. Rory Miller and a couple of my krav instructors. I picked it up in order to round out (and likely conclude) my readings on violent encounters in the US. (Rory Miller, Gavin deBecker, Marc MacYoung). The book is written for someone fifteen years younger than I—a lifetime ago. It is interesting, though likely most effective as a sort of “scared straight” book to be given to a young man in your life who is just beginning to get involved in a lifestyle or peer group which are encouraging him to think violence and fighting is cool. This book is a three hundred page reminder that violence and fighting are dangerous and have very high costs.

Kane and Wilder describe ways to avoid violent encounters, ways to de-escalate an encounter which is on the brink of erupting into violence, a few techniques for resolving violent conflict quickly. These topics constitute approximately one-third of the book. The rest deals with a lengthy and elliptical enumeration of all the reasons that you don’t want to get involved in a violent conflict. They discuss the legal implications and costs (jail time, lawyers fees, prison sentences, effect on future employment, etc.) as well as the risks of injury and death. (No shortage of gruesome photos of stab wounds, etc.) They also cover (less convincingly) the moral costs of violence and the long term impact it can have on a person’s psyche.

Overall, the book works well as a tool for convincing young men that they should not fight, and that the costs of ANY violent altercation are likely to be far, far higher than they may seem when the testosterone and tequila are both flowing freely. Useful and interesting, if not necessarily intended for me.

The Negotiation Toolkit by Roger J. Volkema

Volkema’s book, subtitled “How to Get Exactly What You Want in Any Business or Personal Situation” was published in 1999 by the American Management Association. I picked it up after reading an excerpt from the book on the internet. Volkema seemed as if he had sufficient experience in the topic to be a valid source, and who couldn’t stand to be a better negotiater? The book is useful. In two hundred easy-to-follow pages it covers common negotiation strategies, how and when to best employ them, and how to counter them when used against you. Most of what’s here will already be familiar to veteran businesspeople or anyone who negotiates deals for a living. But formalizing some of these hard won lessons is definitely useful. I found myself remembering specific events or occasions in the past when I’d first learned whatever lesson Volkema was attempting to teach; suggesting that reading this book when it was first published might have given me a head start.

The book is well organized and useful, though much of the actual text of the “negotiation exercises” seems like filler. Still, as a foundation for a course in Business Basics or similar, this book would be quite valuable. And there are many folks I know who operate on a fairly high level who would benefit from reading through Volkema’s thoughts and practicing some of what’s contained herein.

2666 by Roberto Bolano

2666 by Roberto Bolano
Fascinating, unsettling, depraved, and strange are just a few of the words it would take to accurately describe Bolano’s final work. It’s a a masterful and twisted labyrinth of violence, creation, and madness. (To use a few other words that seem appropriate.)

2666 is a novel in five parts. In the first, several European scholars who are experts in the work of an unknown novelist visit, worry, fuck, and ultimately, plan their travel to Mexico in an effort to find the artist. In the second part, a professor at a school near Ciudad Juarez (here called Santa Teresa) goes slowly crazy. (The geometry book he hangs hung on a closeline so the wind and elements can teach its abstractions a thing or two about real life is one of the novel’s more enduring images.) In the third section an American sports writer travels to Juarez to investigate a prize fighter and gets caught up with the narcos who run the place. In the chilling fourth section we get a journalistic enumeration of the hundreds and hundreds of women who have disappeared near Ciudad Juarez in the last decade. In the fourth section we meet the mysterious German writer, Archimboldi, and learn his strange tale, and a lot of complicated byplay about the relationship between creations and their creators.

All of this complexity adds up to a very disturbing and complex work that… I wish I had read twice (despite being almost 900 pages translated from dense Spanish), and wish I had a friend or class to discuss it with. Make no mistake, Bolano was a brilliant writer who tackled an important topic in his final years. It is unclear to me what his real intent with 2666 might have been, and I’d love to ask him if he realized it.

Death Interrupted by Jose Saramago
Death Inturrupted was a silly tale, by a master writer who just didn’t seem up to his game in this one. What if Death took a holiday and just stopped killing anyone on the Iberian Pennisula for a few weeks? Imagine the social upheaval. Imagine the response of the mafia!

Now, what if death herself fell in love with a cellist? Yeah… They do it.

It’s been almost a year since I read this one, and it didn’t really do that much for me, unfortunately. Short and silly, without much lasting value in my humble opinion.

Song of Kali by Dan Simmons

One of Dan Simmon’s earliest works, if not his first, Song of Kali takes place in a vibrant, filthy, deplorable Calcutta. A journalist and his wife and infant daughter travel there to research a missing poet. They get caught up in the city’s magic and corruption. Their lives are pretty much ruined, though I’ll not spoil how.

As a setting piece Song of Kali works well. Calcultta here is reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s Venice or China Meville’s New Cruzoban. The setting itself is a character of sorts.

Otherwise, this wasn’t a particularly memorable novel, but I do like Simons and enjoyed reading some of his horror.

The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker
Gavin De Becker approaches the subject of violence as a scholar. He is considered an expert on providing security and threat analysis to high profile individuals. His basic assessment is that almost no incident of personal violence is unpredictable. People give off warning signs when they are contemplating a violent act. If we are able to read these signs correctly, using our innate “Gift of Fear” then we’ll be able to better protect ourselves and our loved ones.

DeBecker is bright and his subject is interesting. Take home lesson: Trust your instincts. Cross the street to avoid sketchy looking characters. Don’t open the door to strangers. If someone creeps you out, tell someone, and avoid that person. Your instincts are honed through millions of years of evolution. Don’t ignore them.

First, let's get the apology out of the way... No updates since March???! Terrible. Undisciplined! Shameful!

Luckily, I've read lots of books since then, and am committed to posting them all this afternoon!

In the days since March 2010:

We moved from our Midtown condo into a great townhome in the Heights. The Professor has become acclimated to her new job. I've continued bouncing between ATX and The Third Coast. I wrote a new novel called The Arc, for which I'm now seeking publication. My book, Distributed Game Development, was released by Focal Press. Various family dramas have unfolded, but none to a tragical conclusion, for which we can be thankful. And we've learned that we more or less love living down here; lots of good friends, etc. We're off tomorrow for a NYE vacation in The Big Easy.

But first, the books!

How to Survive the End of the World As We Know It by James Wesley, Rawles

What a fascinating book! In three hundred clearly written pages Rawles (no, I don’t know why the comma appears in his name, but he’s consistent about it) tells us how to survive and thrive after a total social collapse. He covers water, fuel, transportation, food, medical necessities, communications, security, and so on. Depending on how likely you believe social collapse to be Rawles is either a prescient sage or a paranoid wack-job.

For example, he advises everyone to move out of the cities and live in secrecy in armed, fortified compounds with hundreds or thousands of pounds of foodstuffs, batteries, supplies, ammunition, etc. Now, if most of us were to follow this advice society would cease to function, and we’d all be considered to have gone off the deep end. On the other hand, if widespread EMP devastation suddenly killed the power grid and social order dissolved, those who had taken Rawles’s advice would suddenly be the smart ones. All a matter of your perspective.

I learned a lot from this book, almost none of which I expect to ever need. So, Rawles, I hope you’re wrong, but I appreciate you arming me with a little knowledge that just might come in handy some terrible day WTSHTF.

Ending Violence Quickly: A Professional’s Guide to Ending Violence Quickly by Marc MacYoung

Mark “Animal” McYoung. “On how bouncers, bodyguards, and other security professionals handle ugly situations.” Probably not wrong, but so badly written as to be ridiculous. The guy quotes Robert Jordan, in a section on tactics, for Chrissakes. This book is two-hundred and fifty pages of bravado and juvenile writing with a few useful diagrams on how various take down principles.

Unfortunately, so much of what Mr. MacYoung is trying to explain is marred by poor illustration and prose so tangled that it regularly loses track of whatever point it was trying to make that the book as a whole is not all that informative. If I were to try to summarize:

1. Best to neutralize the situation before it escalates into the realm of physical violence.
2. If it gets to violence, you need to end a fight in three moves or less.
3. Break the threat’s attitude using pain to shock them out of their aggressive posture.
4. Drop them to the ground.
5. Make it clear that further resistance or aggression will result in far worse pain or injury.

These principles probably work pretty well for most bouncers. So in the immortal words of The Dude, “You’re not wrong, Marc. You just come across as an illiterate asshole.”

I’ve got a couple more books on the topic to get through, but so far the genre seems to be mightily short on capable writers.

Distributed Game Development: Harnessing Global Talent to Create Winning Games by Tim Fields


Is this a shameless plug for my own work? Not sure. But I just got the first copy of my book on Game Development from the publisher and read through it last night and this morning.

It is now available on Amazon...
Or you can check out my website on the topic here: www.distributedgamedevelopment.com –

It had been three or four months or so since I’d read any of what I’d written. After about the fifth draft you can get pretty tired of a topic. But in looking at it now, I’m pretty happy with the book as a whole. It seems skinnier than it did when working on it; barely more than a pamphlet. But when I compare it in girth to some of the other software books on my shelf, Peopleware, or Dynamics of Software Development, for example, it holds up pretty well. I’m happy with the writing; the tone succeeds at being conversational and still serious, informational without being (I hope) too pedantic.

The contributors all deserve a huge thanks, especially Robyn Wallace and Phil Wattenbarger, whose interviews come across as being mightily insightful.

Overall, I’m happy with the way the book turned out. In rereading sections, I still agree with what I had to say about the topics, and I DO believe that the book would be quite helpful to a number of producers, EPs, and junior BizDev people out there. So I hope in some small way I’ve contributed something to the industry.

But the next book will be fiction. 

Meditations on Violence by Sgt. Rory Miller

Sgt. Miller is a martial arts expert and a former prison guard. He’s both trained and experienced in the application of personal violence in real world context. (At least, to the degree that prison is part of the real world.) In this short memoir and instructional guide, he focuses on some of the deltas between the idealized training that many martial artists receive and the realities of violent interpersonal conflict. The book is about two hundred pages long and covers a lot of practical ground (where violence occurs, what it’s like when it does, what types of people commit violent crimes, how you can deal with the threat, etc.)

Mr. Miller is convincing in some areas, and comes across as a self-aggrandizing blowhard in a few others. The writing is uneven. (No suprise from a prison guard rather than a professional writer) and Mr. Miller comes across as either arrogant or flaky on some occasions (I suppose his profession might engender a certain stance of arrogance in order to succeed, and a lifelong devotion to martial arts has certainly made some people flaky before). The book also is in desperate need of a good editor; much of this feels like a first draft that went straight to print.

Some of his observations are quite interesting. A chapter of the different types of hostage situations that occur and how to deal with them (as one of the hostages) was quite interesting. A section on "places where violence occurs" was equally interesting, and probably right on. Then he went on to describe in 4 broad categories the types of violent criminals that populate jails. His chapter on "predators & process predators" was chilling. Made me get up and check the alarm twice last night. Lots of it is common sense stuff, but lots of it is also analysis of crime statistics and reports which is interesting. Makes me think that I should pick up a used textbook from a basic course on criminology, and I’ve already ordered a few additional books on violence and its resolution. We’ll see how others who have explored this topic compare.

I'm going to train with Sgt. Miller next weekend, so it'll be interesting to see what he's like in person.

As a followup: In person, I found Rory Miller to be an engaging speaker with a down-to-earth demeanor. His lecture covered much of the material in this book, and provided a preview of his next book, which I'll certainly read.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Still awesome.

On Writing by Stephen King
Still a great refresher on what matters about writing.

My Horizontal Life by Chelsea Handler

Chelsea is a ho. She does everyone. She’s proud of it. And that’s cool. In this book, she chronicles her bedroom adventures and one night stands with a surprising lack of lurid detail, instead choosing to focus on the comedic antics to which her promiscuous lifestyle lends itself.

A friend of the Professor’s sent her this one (eyebrow raised), and I picked it up while on a phone call recently to see what it was about. Read through it in a couple of days. Chelsea entertains with her foolishness, her alcoholism, and her quasi-dysfunctional family. But it’s not smart or really that funny. Sex & The City explored these waters with far more ability, insight, and wit years ago.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

PS: I cannot believe that this is in the top 10 of the NYT Best Seller’s List.

The Curmedgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law by Mark Herrmann

The Professor’s new employers gave her this book when she started. I picked it up off the kitchen table and ended up reading it this weekend. Herrmann, a self styled curmudgeon is an veteran lawyer. He gives practical advice to new initiates at major law firms in how to build their careers, impress their bosses, not piss off their clients, and so on. The slim volume is a collection of twelve chapters. It’s quick to read and gives some good insight into the real life problems and trials of being a young associate.

Time for more updates!

This time it's from a sunny afternoon in Houston, Texas!

-tf

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.

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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...

-tf