Asking the Queen for help after she’d all but thrown me out of her knowe might be rude enough to get me killed. Dying wasn’t part of my plan for solving the case—it was bad enough that it might be the price of failure—and that meant our Lady of the Mists was actually a hindrance, because if I got in her way, I wouldn’t have time to run. There were other courts and nobles I could go to, but only a few had the resources I’d need, and of the choices I did have, only two didn’t leave me cold. I wanted to get out alive, and that ruled out both Blind Michael and the Tarans of the Berkeley Hills. I considered the Luidaeg, but cast that thought aside as quickly as it had come. Some things are worse than dying.
Disclaimer: As of this writing, I have yet to actually meet Seanan McGuire; however, she is part of the group I consider my extended family/tribe, and a more self-centered mind than mine would suspect she went to considerable trouble specifically to get ME to read and love her first novel:
Step 1. Get several of my personal friends whose opinions I respect and admire to participate in her book project and talk up the book.
Step 2. Get friends to actually write songs about the book so that I really have to read it quickly or risk being spoiled at the next convention
Step 3. As a backup plan, arrange for the Good Faeries to deposit a copy of the book in my library as a present.
Step 4. Combine two of my very favorite genres, the noir detective novel and the urban faerie tale. For good measure, set it in San Francisco, which is where I happen to have set the most successful RPGs I’ve run.
Step 5. Read my book posts about other books in similar genres, such as Glen Cook’s Garrett series and Mercedes Lackey’s Diana Tregarde books, and carefully avoid any of the mistakes that have caused me to complain or snark, such as gratingly funny contacts between the mundane and enchanted worlds, or a hero so perfectly powerful as to defeat the possibility of suspense.
Step 6. Make sure you’ve researched not only your Celtic mythology, but your Charles De Lint and your Whitewolf manual as well, and display your source material woven together into a completely new world that feels like one we’ve known since the beginning.
Step 7. Admiral Naismith gets goosebumps and shivers of pleasure and fright reading the book, and raves about it in his bookpost.
Step 8. ?????
Step 9. PROFIT!!!
Rosemary and Rue is about a high spirit, low status changeling with the whimsical name October Daye (her mundane San Francisco friends nod sympathetically and mutter about hippie parents) in a world where changelings have limited fae abilities and the sidhe and other pureblooded fae, many of whom have personal grudges against Daye, are almost powerful enough to kill her by blinking. Daye is outmatched and in mortal danger constantly, and needs to judiciously trade favors with stronger faeries in order to get what she needs to solve the crime and defeat the culprit (In this world, Bad Things happen when you are indebted to someone like, say, the Luidaeg).
Remember the name: October Daye. We’ll be seeing plenty more of her in days and books to come.
The Call of the Wild, by Jack London :
And closely akin to all the visions of the hairy man was the call still sounding in the depths of the forest. It filled him with a great unrest and strange desires. It caused him to feel a vague, sweet gladness, and he was aware of wild yearnings and stirrings for he knew not what. Sometimes he pursued the call into the forest, looking for it as though it were a tangible thing, barking softly or defiantly, as the mood might dictate. He would thrust his nose into the cool wood moss, or into the black soil where long grasses grew, and snort with joy at the fat earth smells; or he would crouch for hours, as if in concealment, behind fungus-covered trunks of fallen trees, wide-eyed and wide-eared to all that moved and sounded about him. It might be. lying thus, that he hoped to surprise this call he could not understand. But he did not know why he did these various things. He was impelled to do them, and did not reason about them at all.
I read this one when I was a kid, and at the time it just washed right over me as a happy dog-adventure. I was surprised, rereading it now, at how savage and Darwinist it is; the story of a domestic dog kidnapped and transported to be sold as a sled-dog, beaten into submission and made to pull heavy loads in the wild tundra where only the strong survive. Our hero is the strong one who learns as he watches the weaker dogs succumb to weather, poor rations, attack by other dogs, by wild wolves, by indians, and who eventually heeds "the call of the wild" and escapes the brutal and civilized trappings of human companionship to live on his own in the Yukon.
It's a much shorter book than London's The Sea Wolf, which I read and blogged in January, but the themes are the same: the helplessness of civilized creatures in the wholly natural environment, and the way we finds out who we really are when faced with something bigger and meaner than we are.
My Family and Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell :
Perhaps the most exciting discovery I made in this multicoloured Liliput to which I had access was an earwig's nest. I had long wanted to find one and had searched everywhere without success, so the joy of stumbling upon one unexpectedly was overwhelming, like suddenly being given a wonderful present. I moved a piece of bark and there beneath it was the nursery, a small hollow in the earth that the insect must have burrowed out for herself. She squatted in the middle of it, shielding underneath her a few white eggs. She crouched over them like a hen, and did not move when the flood of sunlight struck her as I lifted the bark. I could not count the eggs, but there did not seem to be many, so I presumed that she had not yet laid her full complement. Tenderly, I replaced her lid of bark.
From that moment I guarded the nest jealously. I erected a protecting wall of rocks around it, and as an additional precaution, I wrote out a notice in red ink and stuck it on a pole nearby as a warning to the family. The notice read: "BEWAR--EARWIG NEST--QUIAT PLESE." It was only remarkable in that the two correctly spelled words were biological ones. Every hour or so I would subject the mother earwig to ten minutes' close scrutiny. I did not dare examine her more often for fear she might desert her nest. Eventually the pile of eggs beneath her grew, and she seemed to have become accustomed to my lifting off her bark roof. I even decided that she had begun to recognize me, from the friendly way she wiggled her antennae.
The famous naturalist recounts his childhood adventures on a Greek Island with his mother and siblings, in a book reminiscent of Patrick O'Brian's Dr. Maturin and the James Herriott All Creatures Great and Small books. The entire Durrell family is humorously bonkers, as are the lively and irritable Greeks they meet. Wonderful conversations are recounted, as well as the comic mishaps of youth, such as the huge tortoise who doesn't have enough room in the house to move around in, the magpies who ransack the older brother's room looking for valuables, and the matchbox of scorpions that young Gerald leaves lying around to be unfortunately discovered at tea. Most of all, we get Durrell's infectious sense of wonder and discovery over all of his animal friends. Highly recommended.
The Traveller’s Tree, by Patrick Leigh Fermor :
The food in Roseau was pretty bad. After Martinique it was incredible that such disastrous results could be attained with the same raw materials. Terrible pink soups appeared, and potatoes disguised with Daddy's Favourite Sauce, on whose awfulness it would be unpatriotic to enlarge. But the puddings were the most interesting, and as we laboured with them, washing down intractable mouthfuls with Big Tree Burgundy, we invented names for them; a game that, in a perverted fashion, made us look forward to their appearance. Carib Shape and Empire Building Blancmange were followed by other marvels which only the names of Crimean battles seemed to fit: Inkerman Mould, the Redan, Sebastopol Pudding and Balaklava Helmet. These banquets were crowned by coffee that must have been made out of a bedstead which had been hammered to powder.
Island-hopping in the Caribbean. I got this one because winter was starting to bug me and I wanted to revisit a few of the palmy beaches I'd been lucky enough to see during previous winters.
Of course, Fermor visited these islands shortly after WWII, before most of them became tacky tourist resorts, and before some of the political upheavals that rendered Fermor's Haiti and Cuba unrecognizable. Jamaica, however, was already the hideous slum it is now.
Fermor may have been the Sarah Vowell of his generation, with all of the enthusiasm, but without the snarky hipness. He devotes most of his attention to the French-based Islands (Martinique, Guadaloupe and Haiti get multiple chapters, while some of the English, Spanish and Dutch-based island cultures are grouped together in a single chapter. I would have liked to see more on Barbados). The tour of each island intersperses the sights and plant and animal life with lengthy discussions of the history of these islands, mostly consisting of wars between European nations competing for "ownership" of them, mad kings, bloody revolutions, and eccentric white Europeans who set up large plantations for a decade or so and then, having made fortunes, abandon them to return to their native countries as persons of property. Striking for the way it depicts the intermingling of European, African and native cultures into something new, and for the detached bemusement with which Fermor reacts to everything from calypso songs to Hatian art to tales of cannibalism and voodoo. He’s the most imperturable tourist since The Scorpion Fish’s Nicholas Bouvier.
Bright Sided, by Barbara Ehrenreich :
In a workplace environment where employees have few if any rights, some companies resort to motivating their salespeople in ways that are cruel or even kinky. Alarm One, for example, a California-based home security company, was sued in 2006 by a saleswoman for subjecting her to what could be called motivational spankings. The spankings, usually administered with the metal yard signs of competing companies, were meant to spur competition between teams of salespersons. As one salesman testified, "Basically, you'd get up in front of the room, put your hands on the wall, bend over, and get hit with the sign." Other punishments for underperforming salespersons included having eggs broken on their heads or whipped cream sprayed on their faces and being forced to wear diapers. (Since both men and women were subjected to them, the spankings did not qualify as sex discrimination, and the woman lost her suit.)
An even more disturbing case comes from Prosper, Inc., in Provo, Utah, where in May 2007 a supervisor subjected an employee to waterboarding as part of a "motivational exercise." The employee, who had volunteered for the experience without knowing what was involved, was taken outside, told to lie down with his head pointed downhill, and held in place by fellow employees while the supervisor poured water into his nose and mouth. "You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there," the supervisor reportedly told the sales team. "I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales."
Since the passing of Molly Ivins, there hasn’t been much doubt in my mind as to who is the wisest living journalist. Ehrenreich’s books, like Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, usually bring me mingled feelings of joyful recognition of common sense and frustration that such things need to be said and are often ignored or opposed even then.
Bright Sided digs deeply into one of the themes from Bait and Switch, which spotlighted the bizarre industry of motivational seminars, training workshops and self-improvement courses in which well-dressed hucksters who smile with all 32 teeth showing and almost wrench peoples’ arms off with the force of their handshakes are paid to tell the desperately unemployed downwardly mobile middle class that failure is caused by negative attitudes and that the only thing needed for success is to want it enough. Here, Ehrenreich documents the pervasiveness of manic positiveness in American government, business, religion, education, and society in general, along with the self-absorption, victim-blaming and foolhardy risks that led America happily over the cliff into speculative financial bubbles, upside down mortgages and pre-emptive war financed by tax cuts.
I was aware of the traveling Tony Robbins/Zig Ziglar/”The Secret”/etc. workshops and the Christian denominations that preach, with apparently no Biblical basis, that God and Jesus want to make you rich. I had not been aware of the extent to which the biggest corporations shell out big bucks to send their employees to the teamwork obstacle course, the leadership camp, the Seven Habits workshop, the salesmanship church and the Pin the Tail on Your Inner Donkey motivational weekend in the Ozarks. They could have given some serious bonuses to the employees with that money, and probably done more to make them happy and productive that way.
I was also surprised to see George W. Bush, the President who spent eight years soiling America’s britches with fear of terrorists, illegal aliens, secularists and married gay people, described as the quintessential positive thinker. Ehrenreich means the Administration’s apparent blind faith that they could do whatever they wanted, but it seemed to me that the Bush League didn’t foolishly expect positive outcomes so much as, they just didn’t care who they hurt.
Bright Sided is a brilliant and necessary call for Americans to think with their heads instead of their hearts, and to focus as much on taking positive action as on thinking positive thoughts. Very highly recommended.
Promise Not To Tell, by Jennifer McMahon :
She glanced one more time at the body. The other girl looked like a plastic mannequin, splayed out on the forest floor. It wasn't possible that this was the same girl who had just bitched her out hours ago for wrecking the cross-country jacket. The girl who refused to believe in ghosts.
Opal felt as if she were being watched, not by the blank staring eyes of her dead friend, but by someone else. Something else. Slowly, reluctantly, she turned.
And then she caught a glimpse of it: a small pale figure in a long dress behind a tree not twenty feet away. Opal watched as it backed away from her, zigzagging through the maples, floating off into the dark heart of the woods before disappearing altogether.
This is the story of two child-murders three decades apart. The narrator returns to her New England hometown just in time for the second murder, the primary suspect of which is the ghost of the first victim, who has achieved urban legend status among the locals as the "potato girl" Who Will Get You If You Don't Watch Out. The best part of Promise not to Tell is that it keeps you guessing as to how real the "ghost" is. Until the end, I wasn't sure if the book would end with the Revenge of the Creepy Dead Girl, or with just a mundane villain pulling off a potato girl mask while grumbling about those meddling kids, or maybe with the bloody-handed, delusional narrator being led off in a strait jacket, still insisting that she didn't do it, it was the potato girl.
The worst part is that, with the exception of Opal the incipient young stuntwoman, there's nobody to like in the book. The narrator spends most of the book reminiscing about her shameful actions in the past while committing acts of stupidity in the present. Her basic social circle consists of a dysfunctional hippie commune whose primary principles appear to be infidelity and iresponsibility. The first dead girl is part of a dirt-poor, inbred, abusive farm clan straight out of Deliverance, and the rest of the town consists of bratty school bullies and close-minded, gullible gossipmongers.
The book suffers from overhyped blurbs that raise expectations. Yes, I was able to put it down, and no I did not keep looking over my shoulder for the potato girl for days afterwards (in fact, despite McMahon's interruption, I'm still looking over my shoulder for Margo Roth Spiegelman from last month's Paper Towns instead). For all the spooked B-movie townspeople, Potato Girl, to the extent she exists, is about as scary as Casper the Friendly Ghost.
A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess :
”It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? Deep and hard questions, little 6655321. But all I want to say to you now is this: if at any time in the future you look back to these times and remember me, the lowest and humblest of all God’s servitors, do not, I pray, think evil ov me in your heart, thinking me in any way involved in what is now about to happen to you. And now, talking of praying, I realize sadly there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer. A terrible terrible thing to consider. And yet, in a sense, in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good. So I shall like to think. So, God help us all, 6655321, I shall like to think.” And he began to cry. But I didn’t really take much notice of that, brothers, only having a bit of a quiet smeck inside, because you could viddy that he had been peeting away at the old whisky, and now he took a bottle from a cupboard in his desk and started to pour himself a real horrorshow bolshy slog into a very greasy and grahzny glass. He downed it and then said: “All may be well, who knows? God works in a mysterious way.” Then he began to sing away at a hymn in a real loud rich goloss. Then the door opened and the chassos came in to tolchock me back to my vonny cell, but the old charles still went on singing this hymn.
I was a bit shocked to find this one in the YA section of the library, before I remembered that I had first read it and seen the Kubrick movie at about age 12, with full parental approval. Only with the 20/20 blindsight of adulthood do we wonder whether teens need to be protected from even fiction about the ol’ ultraviolence.
The story of Alex, the exuberant young bon vivant and monstrously sadistic hooligan before, during and after the corrections system “rehabilitates” him through extreme aversion therapy into being incapable of violence (or self defense), was made an instant cult classic by Malcolm MacDowell’s performance. It is known for the intense exploration of the ethics of human conditioning for good, and for the use of a hybrid English-Russian street language used by the teen gangs. Burgess, according to his forward, hated the movie for leaving out an extremely important episode at the end of the book, one which leaves the reader with a far different sense of the ending than does the movie’s final line, “I was cured, all right.” Recommended as an essential modern classic, with the caveat warning that there are potentially triggering descriptions of beatings, rapes and other violent crimes.
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison :
”The idea is to open each bucket and put in ten drops of this stuff”, he said. “Then you stir it till it disappears. After it’s mixed, you take this brush and paint out a sample on one of these.” He produced a number of small rectangular boards and a small brush from his jacket pocket. “You understand?”
“Yes, sir.” But when I looked into the white graduate, I hesitated; the liquid inside was dead black. Was he trying to kid me?
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know, sir...I mean. Well, I don’t want to start by asking a lot of stupid questions, but do you know what’s in this graduate?”
His eyes snapped. “You’re damn right I know,” he said. “You just do what you’re told.”
“I just wanted to make sure, sir,” I said.
“Look”, he said, drawing in his breath with an exaggerated show of patience. “Take the dropper and fill it full...Go on, do it!”
I filled it.
“Now measure ten drops into the paint...there, that’s it, not too goddam fast. Now. You want no more than ten, and no less.”
Slowly, I measured the glistening black drops, seeing them settle upon the surface and become blacker still, spreading suddenly out to the edges.
“That’s it. That’s all you have to do,” he said. “Never mind how it looks. That’s my worry. When you’ve done...it’s the purest white that can be found. Nobody makes a paint any whiter. This batch right here is heading for a national monument!”
This one pleasantly surprised me. I had been expecting a stark, moralistic book full of racist white assholes picking on dark-skinned people or, as the title implies, just not acknowledging their existence. Instead, Invisible Man is a literary gourmet meal full of unforgettable scenes that border on the surreal, and in which most of the conflict is about relationships and power struggles within various black communities. Metaphors like the purest white paint made with drops of black liquid, where only the narrator notices the resulting slight gray tinge to it, are everywhere. So are insane people who speak the truths sane people won’t. The narrator’s gradual acclimatization to a crazy, surreal world is the kind of tale that usually pisses me off, but Ellison manages to pull it off in a way that intrigued me and made me think. Very well done.
I Am America (and so can you!), by Stephen Colbert :
Look what I found in the Colbert attic archives. Couldn’t have been more than seven when I wrote it:
Dear Grandpa,
Thank you for the baseball glove. I will rub it with oil and put it under my mattress until it gets soft like you said. Thank you for coming to my birthday party. I likes your funny jokes. I was wondering. Where did you get the money to buy my glove since you don’t work anymore? Mom says you got it from the government and from your old job. But why do they give you money if you don’t work for them? I don’t think you should get any money for doing nothing. So I wrote to President Nixon to tell him to stop paying all the grandpas who don’t work anymore. Don’t worry, you won’t be poor. Because you can come work for me! You can sleep on the floor next to my bed and when I’m at school you can do my chores! I’ll give you some of my allowance. But not enough to buy baseball gloves.
Love,
Stephen J. Colbert
Colbert’s schtick on TV is to take fringe-right talk show rhetoric and talking points to their illogical conclusions in his persona as the most relentlessly self-promoting, self-centered, mix of fringe libertarian, fringe religious right and privileged, aggressively unthinking white fascist. An entire book of The Colbert Report gets kinda old kinda fast and is probably best read in smaller doses over a long period of time. For one thing, with the actual fringe right bringing us people like Glen Beck and Sarah Palin and teabaggers, it’s becoming almost impossible to parody them. There is almost nothing Colbert can say that hasn’t actually been said and meant by an actual Republican who *proudly* wears ignorance, chauvinism and bad taste as a badge of honor against what they see as ivory tower intellectuals, politically correct busybodies, and snooty cultural elitists. For another thing, humor based on displaying an unlikable personality only goes so far before turning me off. Unless you actually consider Colbert a superstar celebrity, why would you want to spend a long time paying attention to him talk about himself like one?
The book does have a lot of comedic gold nuggets, such as Colbert’s explanations why specific animal species are endangered because they pissed off God (The Florida Cougar is lazy. Where’s the challenge in hunting slow, elderly prey?), and his proposal to police the border by building a 2,000 mile-long front porch lined with grumpy old people (Get off my country! I just seeded!), and he uses margin comments to create the effect of “The Word”, usually the funniest part of his show. Just....read it in small doses.
Meditations on Violence, by Sgt. Rory Miller :
Every so often we play a game in my class. We set out a bench as a bus seat and have the new students one by one sit in the seat. I’ll put on the slimiest attitude I can fake and slowly approach the sitting student, ogling her (or him, it creeps guys out too) then slowly drawing my hand across their shoulders.
It’s a martial arts class doing a scenario. Most students push my hand away and give me a ferocious stare. They are dealing with the action, being assertive but not aggressive—all good stuff.
I then have Roz, a more senior student, take the chair as one of the new students gets to role-play the slimy bad guy. As the new student touches her shoulder, Roz shrieks, “Get your hands off me you filthy pervert!” and the new student jerks away, stunned.
With voice alone, Roz attacked the context. Certain types of predators are like cockroaches—they don’t like light. They don’t like attention. On the bus or train, every eye would suddenly be riveted to this guy. Often, one or two men will start moving forward (I’ve seen this in real encounters; but to be fair, I was always one of the people moving forward; perhaps there would have been no action without me starting).
The threat was looking for a world where people are polite even to assholes, and if he got lucky and found someone too meek to even meet his eyes, he might have found his victim. He does not want to be seen and remembered by dozens of witnesses.
I was a karate nerd in college, and while I wasn’t bad at it, I always had the suspicion that all the training the Fist-of-Death Kung fu Academy had to offer wouldn’t do me much good if I got jumped by a crackhead some night. According to Miller, I was right, and Meditations on Violence explains why and offers some advice on what to do about it. It may well be the single most useful thing I’ve read since I started posting book diaries.
Miller explains the “monkey dance” by which many young men start fights; the chemical cocktail in which a sudden attack releases hormones that can cause even highly trained fighters to freeze up while taking damage; some insights into the minds of “hustlers” (regular career criminals) and “predators” (the really dangerous ones); some things to consider about what law enforcement officers are thinking during a conflict; what happens psychologically to the survivors of violent attack; and yes, some self-defense---although “self-defense” includes avoidance, flight and de-escalation as better alternatives to fighting. Miller also puts words to a lot of things many people have seen in the abstract without really considering. Highest recommendations to martial artists, people who have contact with police or criminals, and for anyone who has worried about being a victim of violence and what to do about it.
The War of the Buttons, by Louis Pergaud :
To lose a handkerchief, forget a cap, split a sabot, or knot a pair of laces—that was all right; it happened every day and might cost a slap or two, and even then, if the things were old...but to lose a pair of pants, no matter what anyone said—it was something that didn’t happen very often.
“I sure wouldn’t want to be him tonight!”
“It will teach him a lesson,” affirmed Tintin, whose pockets, bulging with spoils, testified to the ample booty.
“Another two or three catches like this,” he said, striking his sides, and we won’t have to pay any more war assessment. We can use the money to have a celebration.”
“But what are we going to do with these pants?”
“The pants”, settled Lebrac, “can be left in the hollow of the linden tree—I’ll take care of them. You’ll see tomorrow. The only thing is, you can’t go around babbling about it, right? After all, you’re not a bunch of old washerwomen—try to keep your mouths shut. Tomorrow morning I’ll show you something that will give you a good laugh. But if the cure finds out that it was me, he won’t let me take my first communion, just like last year when I washed my inkwell in the holy water fount.”
A delightful romp straight into the blackberry bush. Pergaud tells a wonderful story of French schoolboys taunting and fighting each other in the Rabelasian style where fart jokes somehow manage to get credit as high literature. Rival groups of boys (I’d almost call them “gangs” except they’re kinda young and unsophisticated to be compared to Jets and Sharks) with names like “Big-Ass Squinty” have a series of scuffles, which are described in the same tone as Homeric epic battles, and any boy taken prisoner has all the buttons cut off his clothes as trophies, followed by a rowdy, flatulent, over the top victory dance. Over time, the violence of the fights escalates to the point of no longer being quite so funny, but it stops well short of Lord of the Flies behavior. Maybe Minor Cleric of the Flies. The joke, and what passes for the serious side, is that the children’s immature, foolish, risky antics are in imitation of what the “wise” grownups do all the time. As a passionate admirer of Rabelais, I highly recommend the book, with maybe a caution for vulgar language and unsettling violence.
An Abundance of Katherines, by John Green :
"Listen, kafir. Seriously. Lay off about me going to school. Let me be happy, I'll let you be happy. Giving each other shit is fine, but there comes a point."
"Sorry. I didn't know the point had come."
"Well, you've brought it up like 284 consecutive days."
"Maybe we should have a word," Colin said. "For when it's gone too far. Like, just a random word and then we'll know to back off."
Standing there in his towel, Hassan looked up at the ceiling and said, "Dingleberries."
"Dingleberries." Colin agreed, annagramming in his head. Dingleberries was an anagrammatic jackpot: See inbred girl; lie breeds grin; leering debris; greed be nil; Sir, be idle re: rings; ringside rebel; residing rebel...
"You're anagramming, aren't you, mutherfugger?" asked Hassan.
"Yeah," Colin answered.
"Maybe that's why she dumped you. Always anagramming, never listening."
"Dingleberries", said Colin.
"Just wanted to give you a chance to use it."
I read this one because it’s popped up a lot on a couple of book forums I read, and because Green’s Paper Towns (last month’s bookpost) kicked ass. An Abundance of Katherines tries really hard to kick ass but only manages to nail you in the shins a little.
The high-IQ, socially inept main character, Colin, reminded me a little of the kid in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time with maybe 1/8 of the autism. He functions in society, but his habits are annoying and he doesn’t get a lot. He spends most of the book trying to reduce relationships to a mathematical formula that would explain why girls named Katherine always dump him. The action, such as it is, takes place in Bumblefug, Tennessee, where the chief claims to fame are a dying textile mill and the final resting place of Archduke Ferdinand (the town apparently bought his remains after WWI in the hopes that it would make a good plot device).
The one who steals the show is Hassan, the obligatory protagonist’s buddy. Green pretty much took Hurley from Lost, made him a muslim exchange student, and let him loose to do his thing. That much works like a charm. The rest of it reads like a rough draft for the Awesome of Paper Towns. Green has one more book, a Printz Award winner, and I’ll probably read that one too...but not for several months. Give the formula evident in the other two a chance to dissipate and all.
Bad News, by Donald E. Westlake :
John Dortmunder was a man on whom the sun shone only when he needed darkness. Now, like an excessively starry sky, a thousand thousand fluorescent lights in great rows under the metal roof of this huge barnlike store building came flickering and buzzing and sqlurping on, throwing a great glare over all the goods below, and over Dortmunder too, and yet he knew this vast Speedshop discount store in this vast blacktop shopping mall in deepest New Jersey, very near Mordor, did not open at ten minutes past two in the morning. That’s why he was here.
This is the book I chose to have fun with on Christmas Day, just as I picked the previous Dortmunder book last year. Westlake’s was the first of several bummer celebrity deaths of 2009, just at the time when I was deciding I wanted to make the Christmas Dortmunder a perverse tradition of mine. Oh well, there’s about five more in the series for me to enjoy before they’re all gone.
It’s not as if Dortmunder, the master criminal for whom everything goes wrong at the worst possible moment, is inherently appropriate for Christmas. It’s just that the series is just about guaranteed to make me laugh out loud and read passages to whoever I’m with until they beg me to stop. Dortmunder, his sidekick Andy Kelp, Tiny Bulcher (the muscle; a man mountain with a body like an oil truck and a head like an unexploded bomb, he mostly looked like a fairy tale character that eats villages), and the unnamed regulars at the OJ Bar & Grill with the language-bending malaproptic arguments about (this time) the names of Santa’s Reindeer are all present, along with a couple of new crooks that Andy met on the Internet (”No, no, he’s okay. As soon as he understood the situation, he stopped scamming me”), all involved in another hilarious caper the nature of which I won’t discuss because, as usual, it has numerous plot twists and revelations that you just need to encounter to enjoy. Highly recommended, as with all Dortmunder.
Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis :
Dixon ran his eye along the lines of black dots, which seemed to go up and down a good deal, and was able to assure himself that everyone was going to have to sing all the time. He’d had a bad setback twenty minutes ago in some Brahms rubbish which began with ten seconds or so of unsupported tenor—more accurately, of unsupported Goldsmith, who’d twice dried up in the face of a tricky interval and left him opening and closing his mouth in silence. He now cautiously reproduced the note Goldsmith was humming and found the effect pleasing rather than the reverse. Why hadn’t they had the decency to ask him if he’d like to join in, instead of driving him up onto this platform arrangement and forcing sheets of paper into his hand?
My last book of 2009 was one of the oddest. It was billed as a classic English comedy along the lines of PG Wodehouse and Jerome K Jerome, good for an evening or two of giggles. Aside from a few well turned phrases here and there ("Things are very difficult, very difficult", Caton said. Dixon gabbled into the phone, then mentioned a few difficult things which occurred to him as suitable tasks for Dr. Caton to have a go at.), I didn't find most of it funny. Maybe it wasn't my kind of humor.
The book reminded me of a "funny" Ben Stiller movie where the hero is forced into the company of a bunch of horrible people to whom he has to suck up and pretend to enjoy all sorts of "funny" embarrassing situations. Lucky Jim is a beginning lecturer begging for prestige crumbs in a tweedy college full of pretentious academic jerks, their hideous families, and predatory women. I kept expecting Jim's imperturable manservant to pop up and extricate him from bad situations by humiliating him in public, except that Jim, unlike the pretentious academics, isn't part of the British manservant-having class, and is treated contemptibly for it. Which is part of why the humor doesn't work for me. Bertie Wooster's situations are funny because he's an upper class twit whose pride is usually all that suffers; Dixon just gets stepped on. It's a lot funnier when the Emperor has no clothes than when the homeless have no clothes. Similarly, the Dortmunder gang get into funny jams through criminal activity, while Dixon is (mostly) an innocent. It was also jarring to see professors depicted as idle rich; most of the higher ed people I know are neither rich nor rude nor stupid. Worth reading, but it's not something I'll be coming back to any time soon.
Unless someone objects, I may follow the herd and post all twelve book posts of the year as one entry hear, as a "What I read in 2009" diary.