Six Short Book Reviews

I've been meaning to review these books forever and haven't got round to it and at this rate I won't for ages. So here's the abbreviated version in order of the first read. As always any of these are available for checkout from the Smitty Library.

1. An Embarrassment of Mangoes, by Ann Vanderhoof.
Wonderful book. Enjoyable to read, will whet your appetite for a Caribbean vacation. Great recipes, although we haven't actually tried any of them yet (but I really want to, especially now I know the DeKalb Farmer's Market in Atlanta has callaloo). Ann Vanderhoof has done what we all want to do--leave the rat race behind and take a vacation forever (or a year, in her case)--so obviously she has more money than the rest of us, but she never ever writes like it, and the book is just a pleasure. Highly recommended.

2. The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson.
A reread. I love Snow Crash and, the last time I read it, I still loved it. I like this book a great deal, but it runs out of steam 3/4 of the way through and enters a territory of great weirdness where it starts to get difficult to follow and even, frankly, to suspend disbelief for. Still contains wonderful moments of philosophy and lots of solid factual grounding, and still mostly a very fun read. But not as much fun as I remembered. Definitely worth looking at, but it shows the direction Stephenson has taken generally (i.e. increasingly hard to read).

3. Whatever You Do, Don't Run, by Peter Allison.
Subtitled "True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide." Lots of fun. Not quite as funny as you might expect from the cover blurbs and actually surprisingly touching at times, nonetheless a light, quick read, perfect for a bedside book as it consists of a collection of short episodes. I greatly enjoyed this book, and I don't think you need to have gone on safari to enjoy it yourself. It may make you want to pick up and go, though. I suspect Mr. Allison has three or four more books of stories in him and he is a fine storyteller. Smittywife needs to read this before it goes into the lending library circulation.

4. Airline/Transport Pilot Oral Exam Guide
Technical book of very limited interest. Will be out of date soon anyway, and since none of the airlines are actually hiring I won't need to take the test. Useful for brushing up on things before my interview, though.

5. Emergency Sex, by Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait, and Andrew Thomson.
Absolutely my highest recommendation; the best book I've read this year. The authors were UN Peacekeepers during the 1990s and into the early 2000s and these are their tales. If you are at all aware of the existence of other countries you should read this book. If you are a firebreathing conservative and think the UN should be shut down, you should read this book. If you are bleeding-heart liberal and think the UN should take over the world, you should read this book. If you think it matters at all how the US is viewed in the other countries, you should read this book. If you don't think it matters how the US is viewed in other countries but are aware that other people have opinions, you should read this book.
You should read this book. It is gripping. It is well-written. It matters.

6. The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene.
Interesting. On a lot of "Best Books" lists, which is why I read it. I will pick up The Quiet American and The Comedians on the basis of this, but I can't say I was exactly swept up in it or transfixed by its brilliance. Greene knows how to build a novel and is a good writer; if the subject matter, faith (in particular Catholicism) and keeping faith when there is no Earthly reason to do so, is of remote interest to you, this is one of few novels on the subject that doesn't preach to you (there's plenty of preachy junk out there for you if you want that). But it never really answers any questions, for the protagonist or for the reader. Valuable, but not one you need to put at the top of your list.

The Entitled

I picked up Frank DeFord's The Entitled a few weeks ago on sale at Borders, and decided I'd read it now, during the season, rather than wait until next year or whatever. Kind of a lark, really.

Dang is this a good book. It's subtitled as "A Tale of Modern Baseball," and the cover blurb says it "ranks with the greatest sports novels ever written." "Sports novels" are not a genre I've read much of, although I did read The Natural in college. But I won't dispute the cover blurb, and the truth is, this is waaaay more than a baseball book.

I'll keep this review short because, really, I think you should read this. I think you should definitely pick this book up at the library or the bookstore and give it a week, because that's all it's going to take (heck, it took me barely a week and I've been reading at my slowest pace in years). It draws you in, and although the first half of it will appeal to any even casual baseball fan (DeFord knows the game, knows the players and the managers and not for a second do you ever doubt the veracity of Howie Traveler as the veteran manager or Jay Alcazar as the gifted star), by the time I was into the middle of the book I was so drawn to the characters the book could have been about professional housepainters and it wouldn't have mattered. This isn't just a great sports novel, it's a great novel, period, and the issues it raises are really far deeper than you'd ever expect.

The Entitled gets my highest recommendation.

Little Green Men

If it weren't for a gift inscription on the inside page (thank you, M & L!), I would have no idea how long I've had Christopher Buckley's Little Green Men sitting unread on my bookshelves.But thanks to the inscription I know it's been six years and change. The first few chapters seemed familiar and I think I picked it up at some point and abandoned it, I don't know why. Unlike the previous, this is not a book worth abandoning unread.

Little Green Men is funny and knowing and wise in that snarky post-Lewinsky Washington way Chris Buckley has. I like his work, and this is representative. I don't have a lot to say about it other than that it's a bit deeper than such things tend to be and the story is a rollicking good ride. I finished it in less than a week if that's saying anything, and I haven't exactly been reading at a quick pace this year.

The book is essentially three Frankenstein stories interlaid, each monster created by the monster before it, each more out of control than the one before it. Makes for a good ride. There are comments I'd like to make about some of the author's choices and some of the points in the story, but I don't think I can without giving the thing away, and I don't want to do that. So, suffice to say, a nice quick read, good book, well-written, most enjoyable.

Here We Come A-Grishaming

Partly in order to increase my total of books read for the year, and partly because I've had Skipping Christmas in the house for at least three years, I decided it was time to read two John Grisham books in a row. Brief reviews will follow the jump. I started with The Runaway Jury. This is a story about tobacco litigation and a juror with a rather specific plan in mind.

We all know what Grisham is capable of and what he's good at, and this is a great yarn. The book may be 400+ pages long but it reads quickly and, like any good thriller, you want to keep reading and find out what happens next. Nothing new or unusual here. This isn't the greatest thriller in the world. It's probably not the greatest legal thriller in the world, and probably not even Grisham's best. But it's good enough, and that's good enough. I enjoyed it, and you can assume if you've read The Firm or any of his other works and enjoyed them, you'll like this one, too.

My favorite thing about The Runaway Jury was that the nasty bad evil character is actually likable. He's not really evil except in a somewhat esoteric sense, and he's surrounded by worse people anyway; he's just a mercenary who lets himself get excited about what he does. It's nice to see that. You know he's a bad apple and the people he works for are unethical and deserve what's coming to them, but by the middle of the book I really found myself liking him. He's sort of like a kid. It's nice to see somebody really enjoy their work, even if their work is very very naughty indeed.

I followed that up with Skipping Christmas. This book was made into a movie last year, or maybe in 2005, called "Christmas with the Kranks," starring Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis. You may have seen it, although not too many people did and it was poorly reviewed. I talked to somebody while I was reading it this season who thought the movie might have been better if they'd made it with a couple of b-list actors in the starring roles, because then they might have been able to stick to the book a bit more and not cater to the whims of the big names. I don't know. I didn't see the movie.

The book is charming; it starts out reasonably enough, the main characters get in suitably over their heads, but it ends with a nice heartwarming Christmas moral. Actually it's pretty standard stuff, but it's a nice ride and when Grisham published it the story was pretty fresh. You find yourself wanting to bop Luther over the head a couple times, though--just give in on this or that, you can put the dang Frosty up and get a tabletop tree so the neighbors won't talk and then you won't seem like such a nutjob. But so it goes. Some people become more fervent in their beliefs the more they're challenged on them, true believers, and Luther is one. Doesn't make him a grinch but he sure can come across that way from time to time.

Funny though: the book is structured like, and written in a tone befitting, a legal thriller. More noticeable to me perhaps as I'd just finished The Runaway Jury, but it was occasionally a bit distracting. I wish I could cite specific examples from the text, but I think it was more a feeling than anything specific. Still, if you haven't read this, don't let the lousy movie dissuade you. It's a fun Christmas story and a quick read, just right for this crazy season.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

This is such a weird little book, quite unlike any other novel I've read recently, but it's just a joy. It's the first book by its author, Paul Torday, and one of a handful of books I've picked up after reading reviews in The Economist. Thank goodness one of their reviewers has an oddball taste in literature because I haven't read a bad one from their selection yet; this may be the best yet. The rest of the review follows...

The author and the book are fully and completely British in every way, so there are some things here that are confusing to a yank. Yemen is referred to as "the" Yemen every single time it's referred to at all, a Britishism dating back to the Empire that I've never fully understood, and there are extracts from Hansard, without much explanation of what that is. However, the book contains a handy glossary, which is part of the narrative and used for mild comic effect--a "gillie" is described as a "man or boy employed on many Scottish rivers to stand at your elbow and explain why you are unlikely to catch a fish wih your present technique." Herein the Hansard is described as a the official record of the houses of Parliament.

There is nothing at all bad about any of this of course. And there's not much to complain about in the book itself, either. The characters are drawn well and are intriguing, the various plot threads are wound tightly together and each affects the other in meaningful ways. The twin romances surrounding the main character, Dr. Jones (if indeed he is the main character), are so excruciatingly well drawn you practically fall in love with him, too. This is a good sign.

Of course the premise of the book is ridiculous: a plan to introduce highland salmon fishing to the Yemen. The salmon would swim up a seasonal stream during the monsoon season, spawn, and then... well, then, says the project's creator, that's up to Dr. Jones to figure out what to do with them. Of course Dr. Jones is not just skeptical at first; he dictates a memo indicating precisely how stupid the idea is and that he won't waste a moment's time on it. Then, of course, politics gets in the way and off we go.

I loved this book, and the thing is, despite it's quirkiness (that's the word I was looking for earlier), I'd be happy recommending it to most any of my friends. It's just that charming and fun, and it's a quick read. This may be the best novel I've read this year.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Over the weekend, I finished Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Not your typical science-fiction--Heinlein's best work always transcended genre--this is really a novel of revolution... so of course it appealed to me right away. My review follows the jump.

Good thing, too, because from the first page I knew I would have trouble with the dialect the book is written in. I've discussed (in Plainsong and elsewhere) the fact that I'm very picky about writing style. In this case, after two pages I decided the narrator, Man (Manuel O'Kelly Davis), was Russian. This was based on some clues in the narrative (and the use of the Russian word for comrade, 'tovarishch'). Although I later decided there was no way Manny spoke with a Russian accent, by that time it didn't matter any longer. I still read it with a Russian accent in my head, which was amusing because if I read long enough I'd speak with one for a few minutes after I put the book down.

Anyway. Manny isn't Russian and the one place where Heinlein's future world falls apart is the existence of the Soviet Union and the fact that the U.S. seems to have disappeared some time around the turn of the current millenium. Hey, he wrote it in the 60's.

Two things make this book stand above others. One is Heinlein's political viewpoints, so well articulated within the framework of the narrative that the book in no way reads as a polemic. Stranger in a Strange Land, which I finished in early 2005, before I was reviewing books here, suffered a bit from this. It, too, was more than a simple work of sci-fi/fantasy literature, but Jubal Harshaw came across as a more direct Heinlein mouthpiece than Professor de la Paz does in this book. The politics is both clearer and more subtle at the same time in this book, if that makes sense.

Being a libertarian (classical liberal, whatever you want to say), Heinlein's political leanings mirror my own a bit so I just loved delving into Prof's (and Stu and several other characters') discussions. But the book also made me ache, for what Prof is describing, a state without government--a stateless state, I guess, or maybe an anti-state--was only possible on the moon because of the physical situation there. Individuals were forced to conform to a certain set of behaviors--to be a decent person at base level, having nothing to do with drinking or gambling or cursing and everything to do with working hard, being polite, etc--simply to survive in the harsh territory. It's not rule by law or by men, but by environment. Anarchy could conceivably have worked there--though, as Manny points out, men seem to have an unquenchable thirst to bully other men around, make laws, enforce standards, rather than let people get along by themselves. It's probably inherent in human nature, for some reason, for us to want to control what other people can do. As Prof points out at one point, no one wants to ban a behavior to stop themselves from doing it, only to stop other people from doing it.

The other thing that makes this book stand out is the well-crafted Lunar world. Heinlein got a few things wrong, as always happens when we try to predict the future, but the tightness and reality of his world is breathtaking. Everything fits together. The existence of Mycroft Holmes is entirely plausible in just the way Heinlein describes. The way the moon was settled, the view taken of the moon by the powers back on Earth, the necessity of living underground, the types of jobs done by Loonies (residents of Luna, naturally, are Loonies), the construction of the cities... it's done so well. Apart from the awakening of Mycroft Holmes--which I maintain is plausible--and the existence of water ice within the moon (not disproven but probably unlikely), there are no leaps of faith required, no suspension of disbelief. If the moon were to be settled surely it must be just this way.

It's brilliant. It's gripping. It's well worth a read. My friend Taemon sent it to me while I was in Djibouti, and it took me this long to finally get around to reading it. Sorry it took so long, T--but it was great. Thanks.

Absurdistan

I actually finished Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan two weeks ago, but I've had to cogitate over whether or not I really liked it in order to write an actual review.
Let me start out by saying, I liked it well enough. But I didn't always find it easy.

I won't claim the book has any great flaws. From a literary perspective I'm not qualified to claim that and, anyway, I don't have any nits to pick. Instead there were just so many little things that occasionally put me off. For example, the country for which the book is named, Absurdistan, doesn't appear in the book until almost halfway through. The author shows up and makes fun of himself for writing this book. The protagonist is... shall we say, he's not terribly easy to accomodate.

To wit, Absurdistan introduces us to Misha Vainberg, a Russian Jew, the son of a mid-level Russian gangster, a man of large appetites and the wherewithal to feed them. He is not easy for any of us to recognize. He is tremendously overweight, suffers from anxiety and depression, and does not work. He is in love with New York but cannot go there because of things his father the gangster did to Americans in the past. He is in love with a poor girl from the Bronx he met at a Coyote Ugly-type bar. What she sees in him, apart from money, I can never really understand, because to be honest, Misha is not, for the first half of the book, all that likable.

In fairness, as Misha himself explains, he is a Russian, not an American, so if Americans think some of the things he does are unusual... bah! In Russia it is acceptable to throw your shoes at your servants. (That he has servants sets him several levels above most of us who'll be reading about him.)

Misha also idolizes his father in ways that don't always seem healthy. To be honest at times I found myself wondering whether Misha was dancing around the fact that his father sexually abused him. It seems like it would fit. He never comes clean. He doesn't, to be honest, say much about his father, apart from occasional sermons on how much he misses and loved his father. That's all. There's a very weird vibe there, and I don't usually look for those sorts of things.

The first half of the book keeps Misha in Russia, a place he seems to want to leave but only for America--the one place he cannot go. He is miserable and does dreadful things. He is not, in short, easy to like, easy to care about, easy to really stay interested in.

This is not to say that protagonists have to be likable or good people or any of that rot. I would not wish to argue that. But, likable or not, I need a reason to care about what the protagonist is up to and why I'm bothering to read a story about him. This can work with unlikable people just fine, and is more fun with flawed people--and Misha is these things. But he's not... I don't know, I just couldn't get around to where I really cared about him. He's a difficult character. Shteyngart has won a lot of praise for this book, though, so perhaps I'm missing something.

Once we move from St. Petersburg to Absurdistan, however, things pick up. Yes, the action picks up, which is helpful, but what matters is that Misha picks up as a character, too. For half the book he talks about how he's really a decent person and wants to help, but he doesn't do much of it. Then, as he's on his way to Absurdistan, he finally takes action to demonstrate what he's been claiming--and, once in Absurdistan and when things start to go awry, he demonstrates at least some mettle, and finally I could really identify with him. He wasn't just all talk, he was actually going to try to do something. Nice. Took too long to get there.

Thus the book does reward your patience. Shteyngart does a good job of describing one of these post-Soviet countries where you live and die by the favor of the government and half the budget is made up of U.S. grants. Sort of like Kyrgyzstan, really. Absurdistan has been colonized by KBR--Kellogg, Brown & Root, a former division of Halliburton--and Shteyngart's description of how KBR works is... well, it's dead on accurate, which is pretty scary.

In any event the latter half of the book is well worth the first half, and since I still can't put my finger on exactly why I didn't care for the first half so much... well, maybe you'll like it better than I did. I don't know. But there was one character who so consistently irritated me I can't leave without a mention.

Professor Jerry Shteynfarb. Note the shocking resemblance to the author's own name. Indeed, this is... well, clearly Shteynfarb takes a great deal of his character from the author. Shteynfarb/gart both left Russia at the age of 7 and are American citizens, both teach in New York, both have written books that won them praise. Indeed, Shteyngart seems to have anticipated some of the reviews he'd get--one dust-jacket blurb notes that "No one is more capable of dealing with [the subject] than Shteyngart..." which Misha pointedly argues (persuasively, I might add) is hardly the case. Shteynfarb lets Shteyngart make fun of Shteyngart... but, really, do we need that? The criticism there, of the way a man who left Russia at 7 is treated as the great relater of Russian-ness to the West, that's valid. But is this the tool to use to make the criticism? Makes his reviewers, if not all of his readers, seem a bit daft to me. I don't buy it. Shteyngart's next book supposedly has Shteynfarb as the protagonist. I've been guilty of writing a book where the protagonist is based on me, and I think now I understand better why I never really warmed up to it as much as I thought I would. That book still needs a lot of work, and I probably won't be buying Shteyngart's next one. Take it for what you will.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

I finished it, at last. This is about the longest it's taken me to read a Harry Potter book. But I'm busy.

Obviously I can't give anything away because you might not have read it. But... well, okay, I know Rambling has finished it. And I know Scanime and Mrs. Scanime were reading it, but I don't know if they've both finished it. And I don't know whether the fabulous Mrs. G has had time to read it what with raising the little ones and all. Anybody else? Who else has finished it? I want to talk!

Okay. By way of a review: I liked it. It was certainly gripping. It had the slow patch I've come to expect from Mrs. Rowling but that was less noticeable this time and more broken up. The ending was... it was good. The last three chapters, say, or four, four chapters, very very good. The Epilogue quite nicely put things together without giving unnecessary details, so we are free to fill in the gaps as we wish ourselves. I will note here that my assertion in my review of the previous book that "I now believe nearly the entire story arc of book 7 can be found in the six existing books" was perhaps innaccurate. I'll have to reread the others again with an eye to the Deathly Hallows themselves.

Also, I'd like to note that Severus Snape met my expectations.

There, I don't think I've given anything away.

Resurrection, Inc.

Smittygirl's best friend recommended this book to me, and although it's not normally my genre I always like reading other peoples' favorite books (and I'll lend anybody copies of my favorite books if they want). The book is out of print now but if you click on the cover you'll be taken to BN.com's used book area. At least that's what supposed to happen. Anyway, on to the review!
Having just read Fierce Invalids, I caught something interesting in this book that I might not have picked up on otherwise.

Switters, our fearless hero from Fierce Invalids, has this idea that government and industry combine to keep the great mass of people entertained by meaningless garbage--Jessica Simpson, movie box office totals, the latest tawdry Hollywood affair, sports stars using steroids, even politics presented purely as a horse race--because it keeps them from getting curious about anything else, keeps them too happily occupied to ask questions about what the government or corporations are doing. Thus they can do what they want without much inquiry from thinking people.

The antihero of Resurrection, Inc., Francois Nathans, believes he is setting humanity free by creating undead Servants to fill menial tasks--and finds out that the majority of people set free in such a manner are bored, incurious about government or industry or, indeed, anything at all. Nathans had hoped they would take up the arts, sciences, anything--give in to natural human curiousity. Instead, they didn't--and Nathans sets out to eliminate them once and for all.

What an interesting perspective. Is Switters right, that without constant entertainment people would actually ask questions about the world around them? I like to think he is--curiosity and a desire to learn are hallmarks of humanity. But what if Kevin Anderson, the author of Resurrection, Inc., is right? What if, deprived not only of constant entertainment but of menial work, many people would just sit bored, turn to crime or riots not out of a need to support themselves but simply because they can't think of anything else to do?

One of the books on my reading list is Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, one of many futurist books set in a post-scarcity world, where the only things that are hard to come by are good seats in restaurants and short lines at theme parks. Post-scarcity worlds have been treated before by science fiction writers (see the Culture cycle by Iain Banks, the Queendom of Sol by Wil McCarthy, and E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops or Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars, though I haven't read any of these; even The Matrix is a sort of post-scarcity society, at least for the machines that control the place), and occasionally there are looks at the world as it struggles to get to that post-scarcity plain. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson shows a society approaching post-scarcity. And Resurrection, Inc. shows one man's attempt to push society in that direction.

Writers are divided on whether post-scarcity is good or not (in Riders of the Purple Wage, Philip Jose Farmer notes that artists, though they are the toast of society, often run out of inspiration for their art because the society is free of conflict). Francois Nathans seems to have believed it would be great. Though his Servant revolution (Servants are recently deceased people who's bodies are preserved and implanted with microprocessors and synthetic fluids to allow to function as androids would--except androids are prohibitively expensive and there's an endless supply of the dead) would not have ushered in true post-scarcity economics, he did create the means for vast improvements in efficiency in most industries and commerce, meaning many people lost their jobs but were supported by bouyant governments and welfare (presumably in turn supported by immensely more profitable industry). Nathans and his company (Resurrection, Inc., of course) might have started the machinery of the post-scarcity age to come.

But what happens when nothing is scarce and thus no one needs to work? In Resurrection, Inc., we see that a lot of people don't even bother to get up in the morning. A version of online gaming (the book was written in 1988 so MUDs existed at the time, but Anderson still made a good guess at where multiplayer online games were headed) occupies many people, and others simply sit around, bored, start riots, or turn to petty crime. In the world of Resurrection, Inc., scarcity matters--without it, people's live become meaningless.

I suppose this is the danger of defining yourself through your work--when you have no work, you have no self-definition, either. Though I doubt that was Anderson's goal in telling this story.

Indeed, this is a pretty ripping yarn all the way through, and I haven't even mentioned any of the main plot points. Bear in mind I referred to Francois Nathans as the antihero--because he's certainly no hero. After all, as wonderful as Servants may be, even if the people they freed from work found constructive things to do, everything wouldn't be quite hunky-dory, now would it? What if, through a quirk of the resurrection process, some Servants retained the memories of their previous life... and death?

Oh what a tangled web we weave.

Good book. You'll probably find it a well-stocked local library.

Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

Verbose, aimless, disorganized, overstuffed, and incredibly delightful. There's just so much going on in Tom Robbins' Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates it's impossible not to like it. My review follows the jump.

If I wanted to, of course, I could find plenty of things wrong with it. Robbins just loves his big words, almost abuses vocabulary. And with a lot of other authors (myself included, probably), that just gets annoying. Here it's generally a pleasure, only occasionally a bother. The book seems barely contained, asides and tangents spring up amid the fertile soil of Robbins' pen and wither on the ground, leaving the reader lost in the garden and desperately trying to catch up. Again, this sort of thing could be annoying, but here... here, it's not.

I've never read Tom Robbins before. I think his best-known work would be Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, which was made into a movie a few years ago. But that book is from another era; Fierce Invalids was written in the late 90's and the world of its main character is clearly recognizable. I had a great time and I'm going to go out looking for his most recent novel, Villa Incognito, but that doesn't mean I'd recommend this book to everyone.

Robbins breaks the fourth wall. He does so in the fourth chapter quite blatantly, and occasionally throughout, though most noticeably (and, I'm afraid, distractingly), right towards the end, and the beginning of Part 4. The book veers dangerously close, at times, to polemic, as Robbins (through his character and mouthpiece, Switters) decries the state of everything, from American society (controlled by a government and corporations that want everyone kept dimwitted and incurious) and foreign policy to organized religion and the nature of life itself.

This could get tedious if readers aren't receptive to this sort of thing. If, for example, you would be offended by Switters' assertion late in the book that "terrorism is the only rational response to American foreign policy," there will be plenty of other things in here you will be so annoyed by that you won't enjoy the book. If, on the other hand, you could care less what Switters thinks about foreign policy (being a fictional character, after all), or you agree with him, then you'll enjoy it.

There's no question but that Robbins' phrases are wonderful. In this one book you'll come across so many fascinating new metaphors you'll wonder why anyone ever resorts to cliche (well, not everyone is blessed with so fecund a mind as Mr. Robbins). Read it for the words, for the joy of reading, as much as anything.

But it's actually about something, too. And that's where it gets fun. Our hero, Switters, is a man of contrast, of inner contradictions--as, says Robbins, are we all. But unlike most of us, Switters is not concerned about taking one side in his inner life. He takes both. He loves his 16-year-old virgin stepsister, and a 46-year-old nun at the same time. And even to the last page he's trying to figure out how to have them both. Switters' message to is to embrace our inner contradictions, for to do otherwise is a betrayal of both our beliefs and ourselves. At one point he points out that being willing to lie to protect a belief is just one step away from being willing to kill for the same purpose. And much, if not all, of the world's suffering has stemmed from that very evil. Better to embrace our own inner contradictions first, thus be ready to accept the contradictions thrust upon us and our beliefs by the outside world.

All this is somewhat lost in the mysterious coda, however. The last several paragraphs take Switters to Thailand, and while I don't suppose they detract from Switters' character or our understanding, I don't see how they add anything to the story. Oh well. Nothing, and no one, is perfect.

Snow Crash

I hadn't read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash in quite some time so I decided to pick it up a while back and go through it again.
It took me longer to read this book this time around than it ever has before, by about a month. Shocking, really.

You might think that means I didn't enjoy it as much this time, but that could hardly be less true. I love this book. I truly do. It's one of the best I've ever read and it still holds up. In fact, I'm not even going to bother reviewing it because there's no way I could give it a neutral review, or even pretend to. If you haven't already read it, I'll lend you my copy. Actually, I'll just give you my copy since I need a new one anyway. This book turned me on to cyberpunk, and it's still the best of the genre as far as I'm concerned.

On the Road

I've had this on my bookshelf for so long I don't even remember when I got it or if it's even actually mine and not one I snagged from a friend. I've been meaning to read it forever but other things kept coming up. I brought it along on safari because it seemed like the right sort of book for that. It wasn't. That's not to say it was the wrong book, but Facing the Congo would have been much better for safari.

I have one important comment up front: reading this book is like taking a dose of Benzedrine. You don't need any uppers for at least the next half hour after you're done reading. They say Kerouac wrote the thing in three weeks (to which some eminence, Tom Wolfe I think, said, "That's not writing, that's typing.") and that manic energy flows off the page and directly into your brainstem as you read. I even talked faster after I'd read a few pages. People remarked on it. This may not happen to you but be forewarned.

The book is divided up into five parts. The fifth is just a few pages of summary. The fourth is about a trip to Mexico. The first three are… well, frankly, they're all the same. And that really bogged me down. Took me three weeks to get through part three (didn't finish the book until I was home for Christmas, and by then it felt like work).

I don't know why this bothered me so much. I really expected to like this book; people who've read it and who know me, said I'd really like it. And the truth is I absolutely loved part one. Loved it. I felt like I could read it three more times and it would be just as great… and then I did. The rest of the book was basically part one again, with minor changes in setting and tertiary characters.

For such a slim novel to seem so repetitive, so devoid of new material, seems odd, but the plot is as thin as an old dress sock: a couple guys get on the road and beat around the country bumming rides and money and working odd jobs. Towards the end I was starting to think Kerouac wrote it in three weeks because his memory was hazy and he just kept writing the same thing over and over.

But that's not fair, because it's not the same thing over and over. It's incredibly similar things, broken up by some really awesome description. And that's, ultimately, what has to carry you through the later chapters. In part one I was thrilled by the newness of the concept, awed by the vitality of Kerouac's words and sentences, and caught up in the excitement of the characters—the characters' own excitement about America, about going out and seeing it, really experiencing it, their absolute joy of and love for this country and its freedoms.

In part two I was still excited about reading the book, but I realized that the characters were not different than they had been in part one. Dean, I'm sorry to say, is a jackass. Sal comes across as a little dimwitted, although I don't think that's really the case. I think really he's just along for the ride, for whatever the ride may be. That's the point, after all, the point of the book—life is about the experience, about going out and seeing and doing and trying and learning and failing and living. This was a reaction to the notion that life is a certain specific thing, that you are supposed to live a certain way, do certain things. Nah. That's not life. This is life, hitchhiking across the country, working at different jobs, scrumming for your dinner, trying to figure out how to get by on wits alone and still have enough left over to go out, to experience what's out there.

I had a very strong connection to Sal Paradise throughout the book. Sal is the somewhat older, somewhat wiser guy (only somewhat), and he doesn't always initiate the travels so much as he has a yen to do them but needs someone to provide him with a destination or an excuse. Dean Moriarty does both, but as I said he's a jackass. Far be it from me to criticize someone else's lifestyle (except for all those times when I do), but you can't have three wives and five kids and not be able to support a one of them. There's a line somewhere between going out and experiencing all the weirdness life has to offer, and being an irresponsible shitheel. Both are equally fun but only one is remotely honorable.

The other characters apart from Sal and Dean are sketches. We spend some time with them, but what separates them? One has a wife he leaves. One lives in New Orleans and does a lot of drugs. One lives in San Francisco and Sal manages to piss him off but good. But really, what's different about them, one from the next? What do they matter? I'm not sure. They're pretty much the same people from one scene to the next, one voyage to the next, and at the end I'm not real sure they'd changed much. But they were real people, and Sal and Dean really went out there and really met them and hung with them and experienced them, really dug them, grooved with them, whatever sort of beat phrase you want to do. That's what it's all about, is getting out and really digging a guy, you know?

All well and good, but by book three I was just damn tired of the whole thing. There was no change, no real difference in the characters, nothing new. The point—get out and see what's out there, you know, hit the road--was already made, the beast was cooked, the horse was beat. Man, that was a beat horse…

At least in the fourth act we got to go to Mexico, and it felt sort of new again, but only sort of, and Dean was still a jackass. I was tired by then. I was beat. Beat, man. Beat.

But throughout the book there was description, the kind of description that wraps itself around your brain stem and beats itself into you and makes your eyes water and your hair burn and your teeth rattle around in your mouth from the sheer presence of it, the very nearness and certainty and clarity. Awesome stuff. Early on you notice the place descriptions, towns and cities and houses and farms and the road, just the road itself. Later on the descriptions are of people and what they're doing, of jazz music and jazz musicians. Even in the depths of part three when I was sick of the whole damn thing there would come along this amazing, fascinating description of these jazzmen and their tunes. I'd put in some passages but man it doesn't work unless you've already been reading for five minutes and you've got the cadences and the spirit and the feel, man, just the whole beat language and rhythm, rhythms like the jazz that so exulted Sal and Dean, and Jack and Neal in real life. It's amazing.

Sorta sounds like I really dug the book, you know? Only I didn't. Except when I did. It was like that.

But I gotta tell you this, man. I don't get it, you know what I mean? Here was this great piece of American literature, and it was cool, and it was beat, and I liked parts of it, and I just don't feel like I really got it. Why? Why was it so great? As a chronicle? As philosophy? As the new American writing par exemplance? I don't know. Was this supposed to change my life? Affirm it? Transport to a land of ecstasy? Or just, you know, was it just supposed to be a good read? I have to admit it came closer to some of the former than it did the latter.

Have you read On the Road? What did you think?

Knight Life

I finished Peter David's Knight Life and One Knight Only while on safari. These had been mailed to me by the incomparable Lucky Bob, who has already reviewed both of them. His reviews are better, so the links above just send you straight over to him for the full story. Suffice to say I enjoyed both of these, as you might suspect being sort of a political junkie with a slight affinity for the truth. The notion of King Arthur returning in the present day to run for office and what that might entail… it's a gold mine.

I will say that, Peter David being a fantasy writer and not a political writer, the books—in particular One Knight Only, tended much more toward fantasy than political fiction usually does. Had I written them they would have gone off in an entirely different direction, and readers like me who don't do a lot of fantasy literature might wish Mr. David had spent more time considering how King Arthur reacts to modern politics and less time on the dirty doings of Morgan le Fey and Gilgamesh. But that's just me. I still had a good time.

O Pioneers!

I bought this book, along with Goodnight, Nebraska, earlier this year when I was planning a long trip to Nebraska and wanted some background reading. That trip—the Nebraska Hedonism Tour, which was to begin with an old friend's wedding and included stops at nearly all of the state's dozen wineries and which I was greatly looking forward to—fell through when the trip I'm currently on came up. Consequently O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather, languished on my bookshelf for a while. It being a bit of Classic American Literature such as you might read in high school, it might have languished there for a long time (high school literature and I have had a bad relationship ever since Mrs. Foust's interpretation of Silas Marner), so before I left home I placed it among a pile of books to have my folks send me out here when I ran out of other reading material.

I've never read Willa Cather before. She was apparently quite the interesting character in her own right. O Pioneers! follows, in bits and pieces, the life of Alexandra Bergson of Nebraska and her family, of how the high plains were tamed by the hand of man and the plow. Actually, in this case, it's the hand of woman that does much of the work. Cather's Alexandra is a strong-willed woman who makes her way by her own wits. She may not get her hands dirty with the farm work, but she is one of the first large-farm managers in history and in an era when women weren't expected to manage anything and even their rights to property were suspect. Parts of the critical commentary that lead off the book—as it must lead off all "classic" literature as if readers cared what some literary critic has to say about a book who's value is adequately proved by its staying power—describe it as one of the first important pieces of feminist literature, as if somehow O Pioneers! is less about the strength of ingenuity, the American spirit, the truth that all individuals have power and worth, and instead is some sort of proto-chick lit, Bridget Jones on the High Plains.

But I digress. Had I read O Pioneers! in high school I might have hated it, because it is somewhat slow. Cather's narrative jumps years at a time, sixteen years at one point, and glosses over the most interesting bits, the specifics of how Alexandra and her wit and her brothers and their work managed to make something out of the harsh terrain of the Nebraska plains: one chapter ends with Alexandra convincing her brothers to go along with her scheme, and the next begins with the statement that the scheme has worked brilliantly.

Of course I may be interested in how they got from A to B, but Cather knows better that the story doesn't hang on how exactly the transition occurred, only that it did, and how it affected the characters and the country and the people around them. This doesn't mean the narrative is fast paced. But the book is short and it moves along, the characters are well-drawn if always somehow a bit distant, and the writing is not heavy or difficult (the book was written in 1913). I read the whole book in about four days without spending undue time doing so.

The editor's occasional footnotes and endnotes can be annoying, and seem entirely random. One page has four footnotes, elaborating on the local flora Mrs. Cather names without description. Another page has more local flora treated in the same way by the author, but without the footnotes, as if the editor though we poor readers would be flailing about wondering what a snow-lily was but wouldn't be bothered by the mysterious marsh-trumpet. None of the footnotes add a thing to the story and their inconsistency is more annoying than anything. When possible, it's best to find copies of classic literature that are simply presented as they are and not beaten into submission by editors and critics; this is not always possible when purchasing books online, which is why bookstores are still so much more fun.

Ultimately the book brought to mind the truth that we have no more real frontiers in America, and that being in such control of the land as we are we as a people tend to forget what it took to get us to where we are. Alexandra Bergson's America was not a global Colossus bestriding the seven seas, and the simple questions of existence, of food and shelter and survival, were much more in her mind and the minds of her fellow Americans than they are in ours today; reading the book reminds us of that. For that reason if for no other O Pioneers! deserves a wider audience.

Memoirs of a Geisha

I wasn't sure whether I was going to like this book. I don't know why I wasn't sure, I just wasn't. But it was insanely popular and they made a movie out of it. Arthur Golden is no doubt a reasonably wealthy author now (he should help out his brother Al with that Temple football program...) and he managed it by completely ignoring that old saw "write what you know."

So of course I was interested in what the book was like, but as I said I wasn't sure I'd like it.
And the truth is were it not for the stationary bikes in the gym I might not have gotten past the first ten chapters or so. It was the only thing I had that I could read there (the rest of my books at the time were all larger format) so I read it.

It does start a bit slow, at least to me. This is the problem I'm having with Lauderdale right now, in fact, is figuring out how to increase the pacing in the early part of the book without sacrificing the myriad setups to later events. I'm actually rather happy to see that Memoirs has a bit of the same problem, but it seems that millions of Americans were willing to keep reading without benefit of a stationary bicycle, so perhaps there's hope for Lauderdale, too. Not that I'm done working on it, of course.

After the first fifty pages or so, however, I was sufficiently absorbed by the characters that I was quite happy to continue reading. This is true skill, taking characters with whom most readers have nothing in common and making them not just interesting (of course they'll be interesting), but sympathetic as well.

Truth is, I rather enjoyed the book. I'm still a little confused by that. Not much actually happened; there was very little action. I had an inkling what certain of the characters were going to do before they did it, sometimes quite some ways out. But that didn't make the book any less enjoyable.

I'll be putting the movie on my Netflix queue, if only to see how the filmmaker portrays Gion. But the book was good. It was well worth the read; I'm glad I picked it up, and glad I set aside my doubts.
But I'm also glad for the stationary bike.

Plainsong

I picked up Plainsong from the local library. I was attracted by the pretty picture of stormclouds on the front and the fact that it been nominated for but not won an award (I have nothing against awards, and would like to win one myself some day, but as a general rule I find that I don't enjoy award winning books, especially Pulitzer winners, so I don't generally pick those up). One ought not to judge a book by its cover, of course, but books contain lots and lots of words and the only way to know if one is any good is to read the whole thing, which is untenable, standing there in the library. So yes, I buy books based on whether I like the cover or not. Of course I buy books for other reasons, but I daresay a huge majority of people sometimes buy books because they like the covers.

The picture of the author, Kent Haruf, on the second page makes Mr. Haruf look almost exactly like one of the people I work with. Scary, actually. Anyway, that's beside the point.

The point being that this book was outstanding. And I'm almost surprised I can say that. Mr. Haruf has a very particular writing style, very spare and simple (almost no adverbs at all, which you may have noticed I use rather a lot), never a longer word where a shorter one will do, hardly a comma to be found, sentences that might be called run-on if you were in fourth grade. For example:

He went out into the hall again past the closed door and on into the bathroom and shaved and rinsed his face and went back to the bedroom at the front of the house whose high windows overlooked Railroad Street and brought out shirt and pants from the closet and laid them out on the bed and took off his robe and got dressed.

I could never write a sentence like that. Not because I wouldn't deign to run a sentence on so (this one here is going to be plenty long), not because I would be afraid of neglecting my friend the comma, but because I simply couldn't pull it off; I'm not good enough. Maybe someday.

Plainsong is written like that. Haruf tells you plainly what his characters did. And, he tells you what they said. That's a key point—the narrator here tells you what characters said. The characters don't say these things themselves, not in the immediate sense. Of course you have no doubt as to the narrator's veracity; it's just that there's no proper dialogue. Such as like here:

…Presently she stopped cranking the machine and put in another master.
What brings you here so early? she said.
Crowder wanted to talk to me.
What about?
Russell Beckman.
That little shit. What'd he do now?
Nothing. But he's going to if he wants to get out of American history.
Good luck, she said. She cranked the machine once and looked at the paper. Is that all that's bothering you?
Nothing's bothering me.
Like hell it isn't. I can see something is. She looked into his face, and he looked back without expression and sat smoking. Is it at home? she said.
He didn't answer but shrugged again and smoked.

I don't know how to tell you how amazed I am that I liked this. Loved it.

I set down and stopped reading The Shipping News because I didn't like the writing style Annie Proulx used in the book. The Shipping News won the Pulitzer. It was a great book, loved by millions. I didn't get past chapter two. Haruf's conventions in the writing of Plainsong are no less idiosyncratic and certainly I would have expected not to tolerate them. Instead I loved them. But for the fact that it's been done I'd try it myself. I don't know how or why, but this spare writing makes the book that much more beautiful.

And that's what the book is, beautiful. There are not many characters, not many important ones anyway. They all lead their own lives; none is central. Of course the story would hardly work if they didn't all connect, and they assuredly do. One of the advantages of setting a book in a place like Holt, Colorado (a town not at all unlike Goodnight, Nebraska) is that characters are plausibly all connected one to the next, because the town is just that small. Of course Victoria and Guthrie will intersect. How can any two people in the town not?

The story is itself beautiful. It's also hard; the characters do not have it easy. Things get worse before they get better. People hurt one another, not meaning to. And other people do mean to hurt one another, and succeed, and in the succeeding betray their own worst impulses and hurt themselves. But amidst the hardship and hurt there is love, there is the discovery of new relationships. People grow up. Some people change in ways they never thought they would, or would have to.

What Haruf has done here is no small feat: he's gotten everything right. The whole book feels right, the setting, the characters, their trials—it all smacks of life and it draws you in. And he did it while ignoring one of the most common writing conventions. I still don't know how he pulled it off, but I'm glad he did. This is one of the best books I've read this year.

Business

I read two different books, very different, having nothing whatsoever to do with one another and concerning entirely different topics. I'm going to try to relate them here because it amuses me to do so. The first was The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. This book showed up in the library and it had a pretty picture on the cover and was fairly thin, and those were both important at the time so I took it home. I've been reading it for some time, though it is not only thin but has huge margins and double spaced text. The cover gush says that this is the sort of book that "changes the lives of its readers forever."

Of course right now I'd accept the small change of being able to sleep through the night. But that's beside the point.

Incidentally, for those who feel they might like to read The Alchemist at some point, this post is laden with spoilers and gives away the ending, so you should skip it.

This is a nice little tale, magical realism and all that, about prophetic dreams, fulfilling your destiny, and finding the fullness of your life along the way. It's all well and good. Listen to your dreams. Believe in omens. Follow your path and you'll be satisfied in life.

Who sets the path, though? Is there but one path for each of us? If the only way to find satisfaction is to do precisely what fate has laid out for you, then why bother living? Fatalism makes life into little more than a board game; what point is living each day if you have only to follow the signs to happiness? Why not just condense life down into a simple choice, presented to your soul the day you are born: will you live the life of fate, or not?

I don't think this was Coelho's point, but talk of fate and destiny always raises in me these questions. What point is free will if every choice but one is wrong, every path but one a dead end road to failure? This reduces all of creation to a grand experiment, the Earth to an infinitely complex maze with us as rats. Navigate each turn correctly and you get the cheese; otherwise you're damned. How does Grace enter into such an experiment? Why should it?

I'm not much for fate or destiny. God may have a plan for us, but I don't believe He damns us for failing to get it right. If so, well, I'll be… you know.

The Art of Headless Chicken Management, by Elly Brewer, was intended to be a funny look at inept managers, at how some people escape the peter principle and rise far above the level of their incompetence. It was amusing, of course. All who've worked in the business world—and make no mistake, the AF is the business world in nearly every respect, save the need for profit—will recognize the Headless Chicken Manager and can surely point to at least one example thereof. So it goes.

Are the Headless Chicken Managers (HCM) following their destiny? Are incompetent boobs who succeed in spite of themselves while making life more miserable for their colleagues and subordinates really doing the right thing? They seem to be happy. They seem to be quite full of themselves, in fact. So they must be following their destiny to be so happy.

That, or all us underlings are not in our correct path and need to listen harder to the omens. This seems a bit of a stretch; there are far more underlings in the world than managers, Headless Chicken or otherwise.

Thinking on this I considered that I've no desire whatever to be the sort of person, ten years from know, who would understand the jokes in The Art of Headless Chicken Management. I'd rather have left that world far, far behind, a distant memory of a dark period. I don't honestly care how I manage this.

Oh, I know. Every field has its HCMs. Every job has a boss and every boss, being just as dumb as you are, seems even dumber (the peter principle again). This sounds to me suspiciously like fate: you can't escape this horrible plight, so why bother trying? In fact, this sounds worse than fate. At least with fate, you get one correct path to happiness, one slim source of hope; the "it's like that everywhere" mantra offers none. I reject that notion, too.

Given the choice between destiny and hopeless misery, I, like the hero in The Alchemist, would choose destiny. In following said destiny our hero undergoes terrible hardship. When he seems to be just at the end of his journey, he is set upon, robbed, and beaten. The robber leaves him with naught but a few sentences to chew on: Don't be so stupid. I had a prophetic dream once, but I wasn't dumb enough to follow it across deserts and oceans. Look where it got you. And in that sentence the robber tells our hero about his prophetic dream, and the hero realizes that his fortune, his destiny, all along lay right where he came from, under the very tree he'd been sleeping at when he had his own dream.

So. I may not buy into the fate thing, but sometimes there's meaning in the words of others that they didn't intend. Life is hard. It isn't fair, and sometimes you get robbed blind and beaten up just trying to make your way. But if you keep your head on, you may find something valuable even in the beating. Strength and wisdom come through hardship, not a life of ease (a life of ease may grant you bullheaded stupidity, which can look like strength or wisdom and is enough to get you elected, but it's a pyrrhic victory). And strength and wisdom are what help you to make wise choices and good decisions. Wise choices and good decisions will get you far enough in life to have the opportunity to think about fate, and destiny, and God's chosen path. And once you have the capacity to do that, what does fate matter?

So Many Books

It occurs to me that there are several books over there on the right that I have not reviewed. Before they get any farther down the list I thought I’d give them each a quick review.

I'll starting with V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. This is the comic book series (graphic novel, if you prefer; this format is a collection of several comic books into a book-length narrative) on which the recent movie (that I dearly loved) was based, and of course I was intrigued and wanted to read the comic. It’s pretty darn good. It’s also pretty darn different from the movie in a number of ways, not least the fact that V, in the book, is very much an anarchist, rather than simply a liberator of a captive populace, although the regime against which he’s fighting is equally oppressive. Most of the key events from the book made it into the movie. V is an altogether more difficult character in the book, though, a more complex protagonist. I enjoyed this but unless you are a comic book fan or a fan of the movie it’s probably not worth your time.

Next up, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’m not going to review this book because you should already know what it’s about, and that it’s very good. And if you haven’t read it I will track you down and make you do so; ask Smittygirl if you don’t believe me.

Then we have Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, which I picked up a while ago in the bookstore on a whim. I really enjoyed reading this book, but it wasn’t an easy read. No book that encourages you to ask questions about where you’ve been, to search for patterns in your life and identify the myriad ways you’ve been reacting to your life the way you did when you were a child. FMSHL argues that we react to most events in life based on the way we saw the world as children, and we have to learn to break away from our habits and our childhood understanding to really live as adults. The book is targeted at the midlife-crisis crowd, but I found that much of the book had a lot to say to me.
Frankly, this book deserves a longer review and some discussion. It’s not the sort of thing I can recommend without knowing whether you need to read it or not. But I found it a thoroughly engrossing read.

A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson, was outstanding. It’s my favorite of Bryson’s books, at least of the books I’ve read. Any outdoorsy person should read it, especially if you’ve ever considered hiking any part of the Appalachian Trail. I’ve hiked on perhaps as much as a mile of AT over the course of my life and probably will never attempt any significant stretch of it, mainly because as Bryson points out much of the trail is not especially scenic and there are lots of other scenic hiking trails to go on. But you have to admire what the man attempted to do, and this book is a fascinating and at times hilarious read. This one’s very highly recommended.


Basket Case is one of Carl Hiaasen’s more recent novels, and he’s as funny and entertaining and off-the-wall as ever. Hiaasen is my favorite Florida crime author by a wide margin (a club that includes John D. MacDonald, Elmore Leonard, Tim Dorsey, Randy Wayne White, and a few others) and this book is in keeping with my expectations. But there’s an upsetting difference between this and nearly every one of Hiaasen’s earlier books (apart from Stormy Weather): this one doesn’t take place in the real world. Hiaasen skewers south Florida most effectively when his characters operate in a real city; Basket Case, though it manages a good satire of south Florida, is weaker for taking place in some ill-defined mythical town.

The Sir Apropos of Nothing series was a lot of fun. You can read reviews of the Peter David series from the esteemed Lucky Bob here, here, and here. On his recommendation I decided to bring the series out to Africa with me to read. I’m glad I did. I don’t usually read fantasy literature. Actually, apart from Harry Potter, I don’t read any fantasy literature at all. I’ve never even read The Lord of Rings trilogy (although I did enjoy the movies). You have to wonder about a person whose introduction to an entire genre of literature comes from a series of books that satirize the genre. I like to think the eponymous hero of the series would rather appreciate that.
I’m not likely to start reading fantasy literature any time soon. I don’t dislike it, it’s just not my thing. But this was an excellent series, and I went through the books pretty quickly. They are all quite funny, though I think the first book is funniest because it’s newest. The third book might have had the most laugh-out-loud moments, though, in particular the exchange about Ho, and Who Ho is. Had a good laugh at that; actually, had to go look up the whole Who’s on First routine for another good laugh.

These books were more than just simple fantasy, though, because the protagonist is quite the introspective fellow at times, and we are treated to some very interesting viewpoints on the notion of heroics and chivalry and fate, and when Apropos descends to darkness it’s not hard to see just about any of us doing the same thing. Absolute power indeed.
This was a fun series of books, and while as I said I’m not going to start reading a bunch of fantasy novels now, I would encourage anyone who wants something unique and humorous that’s not completely throw-away to give these books a look. You'll certainly enjoy yourself. As for me, I'm sort of hoping the adventures of Apropos aren't yet over.

Pattern Recognition

I finished reading a book. It feels like it's been a while since I did that; I guess it has been about three weeks.


Since the book I'd been expecting to read was still in transit to me when I finished the last one, I borrowed one from the library here. The library has lots of romance novels, and crime novels, and spy thrillers, and military thrillers. None of which I'm much interested in. But I happened to spy a book by William Gibson, he of Neuromancer, called Pattern Recognition, which I decided to pick up and read.

I had to go back and reread my review of Neuromancer, because I liked Pattern Recognition somewhat and wondered what was different, since I recall not liking the earlier book as much.

I think in large measure Neuromancer suffers from my tendency to compare it to Snow Crash, which was written later but is, as far as I'm concerned, far superior in most respects. That and characterization was lousy.

That was not the case with Pattern Recognition. The book is helped by having a cast of characters whose motivations are much more clearly understood than those in Neuromancer; I found it much easier to care about Cayce Pollard than I ever did about Case or Molly.

I still have trouble with some aspect of Gibson's place descriptions. I don't mean to say his setting descriptions, which are nothing if not evocative; I mean his description of geographic space, of the relation of one neighborhood or place to another. I don't know what it is and I don't know how to describe it; it may just be me, or it may be something genuinely odd about Gibson's writing. In either case it's unsettling.

I don't have much of a review. It's Gibson's first "present day" work, which is interesting, but moreso to his fans than to the rest of us. It has been criticized for its frequent "tangential interruptions," to quote one reviewer, which surprises me because Neuromancer was the same way. I guess when Gibson goes off on a tangent about a near-future world of his own creation that's okay, but when he does so about the present world it's a tiresome interruption. I don't understand why that would be so and frankly like the fact that the story wanders a bit. Life wanders a bit, and Gibson's wanderings are interesting.

There are some conceits here; the protagonist is a little... unusual. She has some quirks I guarantee you've never imagined before, and that can take some getting used to. I suppose Gibson likes characters who are a little off the scale; in this case all of them are. If you can get past that, this is an enjoyable read.

Straight Man

I've been going through life for quite some time thinking Snow Crash was my favorite novel, and I've read it enough times that I need to purchase a new copy. Among the top several I've long included Straight Man by Richard Russo, which I picked up again on Friday because after the wretched disappointment of Charlotte Simmons I wanted to read something very good.

So it is an amusing coincidence that after this second read, Straight Man has replaced Snow Crash at the top of my list of favorites, and I need to purchase new copies of both.

The first several pages of my copy of Straight Man are now forever affixed to one another with two-ton epoxy. The chair for which I bought the epoxy remains broken and probably needs to be replaced. The sequence of events that brought this about were absurd, but of course anyone who knows me would have been able to predict what would happen as soon as I cut open the tube. At least the cat didn't step in it, which had been my biggest fear going in.

Anyway. Why do I like this book so much? Is it just a case of comparison against a very bad book? I don't think so; on Saturday morning I reread The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for the umpteenth time after watching the movie, so I had a good book in between Charlotte and this one. I think it's something more.

For starters, Richard Russo has a gift for marrying melancholy with farce that no other writer I know of can match. It's not enough simply to have a melancholy scene followed by a funny one; at the heart of Russo's funniest moments is a touch of sadness, a feeling that the characters know exactly what they're doing and that it won't end well, but can't stop themselves nonetheless. Fatalism is a very melancholy attitude. And, too, some of the saddest and most affecting moments in this book coexist with an ironic humor born of the characters' ability to step back and see their lives for what they are—no matter how much it may seem that fate has intervened, that something was inevitable, there is always the knowledge that in fact it isn't fate at all, that every moment is put in place by some earlier action.

We should all be so gifted as to see—or even have shown to us—the chain of choices that bring us to our greatest sadness or greatest joy. But we aren't. This is what literature gives us.

In thinking about the contrast between Straight Man and Charlotte Simmons I was struck by how few times—exactly once—in this book I felt a character did or said something that didn't connect, didn't make any sense. Comparatively I was constantly jarred by the bizarre characterizations in Charlotte Simmons. I couldn't even what it was that bothered me in this book, when I went to find it just now. It must not have been important.

And I like that. That's good writing. The fact that the book is an uproarious scream and a sad introspection at the same time is good writing, and entertaining, too. That our narrator, Hank Devereaux, is undergoing a midlife crisis so easily recognizeable to things in my own life just makes the story better.

I can't wait to go buy a new copy and read it all over again.