This week's book:
A Look Back
Grade: A
I know it's a trite trope for the year-end, it's the lazy man's journalism, it's participating in the modern list-ification of things, but I think my exercise in A Book A Week needs a summary. A recap. A book-end, if you will. So here are a few questions, and my answers:
Which was your favorite book?
It's hard to say, I read many excellent books. My overall favorite fiction was A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood. But that was published before I was born.
My favorite fiction which was published in the last three years or so... it would have to be a three-way tie, between The Golem and The Jinni by Helene Wecker, The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan, and City of Bohane by Kevin Barry.
My favorite non-fiction was Detroit by Charlie LeDuff. I really liked almost all of the non-fiction I read, though. Almost all.
Was it difficult reading a book a week?
Not at all. Except for a couple of very long books - and a few confusing or enraging ones - I generally finished each book in five or six days. A couple of hours a day is all it takes. Turn off the TV and the clock becomes your friend.
Did you discover anything about your tastes?
Yes. I surprised myself with how easy it was to move beyond what I thought my type of book was. I also learned that a good book is a good book no matter where it's shelved. Same goes for a bad book.
What would you have done differently?
I think I would have planned the first months better. I was just flying by the seat of my pants there, kind of reading anything that crossed my path. After April I tried to look ahead at the lists and see if anything new or exciting was coming out. I liked reading first novels.
Which was your least favorite book?
That one's easy, the hands-down winner. Why I Jump. Pure garbage.
My least favorite fiction was another tie, between Ready Player One and Inferno. Sure, I could have said Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey, but why beat a dead horse? Everyone knows those books are terrible.
Aside from 'Why I Jump,' my non-fiction choices were all pretty good. If I had to pick one least favorite, it's Good To Great.
What did you discover about the business of books?
Popular does not necessarily mean good. Or even passable. And good does not necessarily mean commercially successful. I think if you chase commercial success you might get it, but you almost certainly won't produce anything good or lasting. You really do have to stay true to your vision and yourself, let the weasels and bean-counters worry about commercial. The best books I read were the most honest, the worst were the most obviously commercial.
Would you recommend A Book A Week to others?
Yes. Do it. I bought most of my books, but that's not necessary. Libraries are fantastic places, and librarians are your quiet, subversive advocates. They want you to check books out and read them. They also want you to bring them back on time, deadbeat.
How can I get my kids to read?
Set the example. You need to read. In front of them. If your kids see you reading, they'll get the idea that reading is what people do. If they only see sitting on your ass, watching Access Hollywood or Maury, they'll think that's what people should do. And people really should not.
Which book surprised you the most?
As far as for-real twists and psychodrama in fiction, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. I can usually figure out plots pretty quickly, but not with this one.
For non-fiction it's Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson. Surprisingly insightful.
As far as surprising my expectations, it would have to be The Last Buccaneer by Lynn Erickson. It's a Harlequin Romance, and nothing at all like I expected.
Would you do it again?
Absolutely. Next year I may just post a few more reviews. Not one a week, though. That's work.
Next week:
My Book A Week for a year exercise is over. I think I'm not going to read anything next week. Or maybe I will. Just not on a schedule.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 51: George Washington's Secret Six
This week's book:
George Washington's Secret Six by Brian Kilmeade* with Don Yeager
Grade: B-
I'm no Revolutionary War scholar, but this book brings a new dimension to my understanding of the Founding Fathers and exactly how they won the war.
It's established fact in primary education that the Patriots were outmanned, outgunned, and out-supplied for almost every military engagement of the Revolutionary War. The stories of the privations of Valley Forge, for instance, are common knowledge. And the conventional wisdom - perhaps taught, perhaps not - is that the Patriots just had more pluck, luck, courage, and fortitude than the British. That Americans won their independence through grit and determination more than anything else.
And that may be true. Mostly. But it did always seem to me a very simplistic explanation. Very rarely does the complete underdog overcome the kind of odds the Patriots faced without some kind of secret advantage. Turns out that advantage was spies.
General Washington was no stranger to a guerilla war, he did fight for the British in the French Indian War. But this book shows how he pressed his advantage, which was the entrenched population of New York, to build a spy network that provided him a strategic and intelligence advantage the British could not overcome. Not that they didn't try, they turned General Benedict Arnold to their side, after all.
This was an enlightening read, and well done. I had to give it a B-, though, because it's classed as an 'historical novel,' whatever that is.
Basically, the author(s) chose to make the narrative more of a story than an account of facts. Which I can't really fault them for, I've read some very dry non-fiction this year. I have to give them a thumbs-up for trying to mix it up to make the facts of the story more appealing to masses.
But the facts suffer for it. There are accounts of conversations, for example, where there is no record of any such conversation existing. Or accounts of the thoughts of real, historical figures without the corresponding backing documents. The book aspires to scholarship, and it does shed light on a previously dark part of American history, but it muddies the academic waters with liberal dramatic license.
* yes, I know he's a Fox News shill. I prefer to treat them better than they treat others, and assume that Mr. Kilmeade may have something to contribute despite his reprehensible day job and my opinion of how he does it.
Next week:
I have no idea what I'll read for the last week of Book a Week. We'll see what Santa brings tomorrow.
George Washington's Secret Six by Brian Kilmeade* with Don Yeager
Grade: B-
I'm no Revolutionary War scholar, but this book brings a new dimension to my understanding of the Founding Fathers and exactly how they won the war.
It's established fact in primary education that the Patriots were outmanned, outgunned, and out-supplied for almost every military engagement of the Revolutionary War. The stories of the privations of Valley Forge, for instance, are common knowledge. And the conventional wisdom - perhaps taught, perhaps not - is that the Patriots just had more pluck, luck, courage, and fortitude than the British. That Americans won their independence through grit and determination more than anything else.
And that may be true. Mostly. But it did always seem to me a very simplistic explanation. Very rarely does the complete underdog overcome the kind of odds the Patriots faced without some kind of secret advantage. Turns out that advantage was spies.
General Washington was no stranger to a guerilla war, he did fight for the British in the French Indian War. But this book shows how he pressed his advantage, which was the entrenched population of New York, to build a spy network that provided him a strategic and intelligence advantage the British could not overcome. Not that they didn't try, they turned General Benedict Arnold to their side, after all.
This was an enlightening read, and well done. I had to give it a B-, though, because it's classed as an 'historical novel,' whatever that is.
Basically, the author(s) chose to make the narrative more of a story than an account of facts. Which I can't really fault them for, I've read some very dry non-fiction this year. I have to give them a thumbs-up for trying to mix it up to make the facts of the story more appealing to masses.
But the facts suffer for it. There are accounts of conversations, for example, where there is no record of any such conversation existing. Or accounts of the thoughts of real, historical figures without the corresponding backing documents. The book aspires to scholarship, and it does shed light on a previously dark part of American history, but it muddies the academic waters with liberal dramatic license.
* yes, I know he's a Fox News shill. I prefer to treat them better than they treat others, and assume that Mr. Kilmeade may have something to contribute despite his reprehensible day job and my opinion of how he does it.
Next week:
I have no idea what I'll read for the last week of Book a Week. We'll see what Santa brings tomorrow.
Too Little, Much Too Late
As of today, Christmas Eve, 2013, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II granted a pardon to Alan Turing.
His crime? Being gay in Britain in the 1950's.
Yes, in the 20th Century Mr. Turing was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to be chemically castrated. The British government forced him to take estrogen in order to curb his baser animal urges. You know, because he was rampaging around the English countryside gay-raping everyone he could get his hands on.*
While I appreciate the effort and the sentiment, pardoning Mr. Turing for a 'crime' that was as much an offense as me being brown-eyed or right-handed sends the wrong message. The message is that the authorities weren't wrong in the first place when they convicted Mr. Turing of being gay. They were nothing but wrong, and a pardon - even an extremely rare one from the Queen herself - is not justice. The only justice would be to commute the sentence, or vacate it, or whatever they call it over in England when the judiciary realizes they've been party to a gross miscarriage of justice and they need to make it right.
So, thanks, Your Majesty, for at least giving it a go. But you needed to do better.
Who was Alan Turing? A towering genius, a truly remarkable man whose achievements led to the very device you're using to read this blog right now. Essentially, he invented the idea of electronic computers, along with the methods for programming them. Without him the modern world would be a very, very, different place. If you don't already know who he was, you need to find out right now. It'll make you appreciate the difference one man can truly make, and what happens when small minds and petty bureaucracies interfere.
Wikipedia is a good place to start.
* for the sarcasm-impaired, this is sarcasm
His crime? Being gay in Britain in the 1950's.
Yes, in the 20th Century Mr. Turing was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to be chemically castrated. The British government forced him to take estrogen in order to curb his baser animal urges. You know, because he was rampaging around the English countryside gay-raping everyone he could get his hands on.*
While I appreciate the effort and the sentiment, pardoning Mr. Turing for a 'crime' that was as much an offense as me being brown-eyed or right-handed sends the wrong message. The message is that the authorities weren't wrong in the first place when they convicted Mr. Turing of being gay. They were nothing but wrong, and a pardon - even an extremely rare one from the Queen herself - is not justice. The only justice would be to commute the sentence, or vacate it, or whatever they call it over in England when the judiciary realizes they've been party to a gross miscarriage of justice and they need to make it right.
So, thanks, Your Majesty, for at least giving it a go. But you needed to do better.
Who was Alan Turing? A towering genius, a truly remarkable man whose achievements led to the very device you're using to read this blog right now. Essentially, he invented the idea of electronic computers, along with the methods for programming them. Without him the modern world would be a very, very, different place. If you don't already know who he was, you need to find out right now. It'll make you appreciate the difference one man can truly make, and what happens when small minds and petty bureaucracies interfere.
Wikipedia is a good place to start.
* for the sarcasm-impaired, this is sarcasm
Monday, December 16, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 50: Brown Dog
This week's book:
Brown Dog by Jim Harrison
Grade: A
I've said before that I like my fiction to be muscular, to have a mustache and whiskey breath and know how to change a tire and fell a tree. Well, I found my kind of story with Brown Dog.
This book is actually a collection of short stories published from the 90's to 2010, though they're set even earlier, in the 70's. Brown Dog is the main character, a man who never quite grew up or settled down. You might think from the name that Brown Dog is Native American, but he isn't, not even a little bit. But that doesn't stop him from taking advantage of the misunderstanding when it suits him.
I've been trying to think of an adjective to describe both the character of Brown Dog and the quality of the narrative, because they're echoes of one another. 'Charming' isn't even close to right, 'engaging' sounds too pleasant, and 'captivating' is far too fey.
Rakish.
That's what the narrative is, and that's what Brown Dog is. Rakish. Brown Dog lives in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, he's constantly broke, falling in love or having his heart broken, and getting in trouble because he only nurtures his baser urges. Everyone knows a guy like Brown Dog, except in real life their misspent lives usually come back on them. Brown Dog lives in the moment, and he's getting by all right.
The prose is rakish too, and I loved reading it. If Brown Dog makes no apologies, then neither does Mr. Harrison. His hero is flawed, and weak, and noble, and all too human, and the words reflect that. This is prose the way prose was meant to be, evocative, startling, and familiar all at once. The first story is written in first-person but the rest are third-person. I think it's a suitable intro to the character and Mr. Harrison's style.
Honestly, I was reminded of Hemingway when I read this. Not so much for the spare prose, but for the brawny way the author wrestles with his words. Plus, I don't really care for Hemingway and I like Mr. Harrison's writing a lot. But with Mr. Harrison, just like with Hemingway, you get the sense that the man writing those words knows how to do things, other than sit at a keyboard and tap out stories, that he's not all that far removed from his main character.
I think I found a soft spot when, in one of the stories, Brown Dog owns a '72 Chevelle. My first car was a '72 Chevelle, a genuine POS that I loved more than life itself, and that I miss to this day. I like to think that, because of that car, the fictional Brown Dog and I have at least one little thing in common.
Next week:
George Washington's Secret Six by Brian Kilmeade
Even though this sounds like a really great comic book, this is non-fiction. It's about spies during the Revolutionary War.
Brown Dog by Jim Harrison
Grade: A
I've said before that I like my fiction to be muscular, to have a mustache and whiskey breath and know how to change a tire and fell a tree. Well, I found my kind of story with Brown Dog.
This book is actually a collection of short stories published from the 90's to 2010, though they're set even earlier, in the 70's. Brown Dog is the main character, a man who never quite grew up or settled down. You might think from the name that Brown Dog is Native American, but he isn't, not even a little bit. But that doesn't stop him from taking advantage of the misunderstanding when it suits him.
I've been trying to think of an adjective to describe both the character of Brown Dog and the quality of the narrative, because they're echoes of one another. 'Charming' isn't even close to right, 'engaging' sounds too pleasant, and 'captivating' is far too fey.
Rakish.
That's what the narrative is, and that's what Brown Dog is. Rakish. Brown Dog lives in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, he's constantly broke, falling in love or having his heart broken, and getting in trouble because he only nurtures his baser urges. Everyone knows a guy like Brown Dog, except in real life their misspent lives usually come back on them. Brown Dog lives in the moment, and he's getting by all right.
The prose is rakish too, and I loved reading it. If Brown Dog makes no apologies, then neither does Mr. Harrison. His hero is flawed, and weak, and noble, and all too human, and the words reflect that. This is prose the way prose was meant to be, evocative, startling, and familiar all at once. The first story is written in first-person but the rest are third-person. I think it's a suitable intro to the character and Mr. Harrison's style.
Honestly, I was reminded of Hemingway when I read this. Not so much for the spare prose, but for the brawny way the author wrestles with his words. Plus, I don't really care for Hemingway and I like Mr. Harrison's writing a lot. But with Mr. Harrison, just like with Hemingway, you get the sense that the man writing those words knows how to do things, other than sit at a keyboard and tap out stories, that he's not all that far removed from his main character.
I think I found a soft spot when, in one of the stories, Brown Dog owns a '72 Chevelle. My first car was a '72 Chevelle, a genuine POS that I loved more than life itself, and that I miss to this day. I like to think that, because of that car, the fictional Brown Dog and I have at least one little thing in common.
Next week:
George Washington's Secret Six by Brian Kilmeade
Even though this sounds like a really great comic book, this is non-fiction. It's about spies during the Revolutionary War.
Sunday, December 8, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 49: A Single Man
This week's book:
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
Grade: 100
I'm glad I found this book on week 49 of my Book a Week, because if I'd found it earlier I'm not sure I would have continued.
Yes, it's that good. I could say I loved this book, but that's not nearly enough. Let me try again.
I've read forty-eight other books this year, and with each of them I thought that I could do just as good as the author and in some cases much, much better. Not once did I read a book and think 'man... I'm not sure I could do this.' Until I read 'A Single Man.' That's how good this book is.
This book is almost fifty years old, published in 1964. Christopher Isherwood, the author, died back in 1986. But this book could have been written now, it's that relevant and that timeless. Mr. Isherwood was a British expat, gay, living in Los Angeles, and teaching writing at CSULA. His protagonist George is a British expat, gay, living in Los Angeles, and teaches writing at a university. The story is a day in George's life, which the author slowly reveals to be both less than what George wants and more than he expects. George is trying to keep going after his partner, Jim, has been killed in a traffic accident. In today's terms George is depressed, and doesn't realize it. Or doesn't care. He goes through his life with little relish, aside from what small amount of joy he gets from being around the young people he teaches.
Sounds boring? Far, far, from it. This is prose the way prose should be. Always. The author has an eye for detail and interpretation that make his words pop. And his insights are genuine. Every page has an amazing tidbit. Every single page. Let me share one or two:
I wish every English major would read this book. I wish every writer would read this book. I wish you would read this book. Right now.
It was Hemingway who said 'All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.'
'A Single Man' is a book made up entirely of true sentences.
Next week:
Brown Dog by Jim Harrison
I hope I am not doing a disservice to Mr. Harrison by reading his book after 'A Single Man.' I'll keep an open mind.
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
Grade: 100
I'm glad I found this book on week 49 of my Book a Week, because if I'd found it earlier I'm not sure I would have continued.
Yes, it's that good. I could say I loved this book, but that's not nearly enough. Let me try again.
I've read forty-eight other books this year, and with each of them I thought that I could do just as good as the author and in some cases much, much better. Not once did I read a book and think 'man... I'm not sure I could do this.' Until I read 'A Single Man.' That's how good this book is.
This book is almost fifty years old, published in 1964. Christopher Isherwood, the author, died back in 1986. But this book could have been written now, it's that relevant and that timeless. Mr. Isherwood was a British expat, gay, living in Los Angeles, and teaching writing at CSULA. His protagonist George is a British expat, gay, living in Los Angeles, and teaches writing at a university. The story is a day in George's life, which the author slowly reveals to be both less than what George wants and more than he expects. George is trying to keep going after his partner, Jim, has been killed in a traffic accident. In today's terms George is depressed, and doesn't realize it. Or doesn't care. He goes through his life with little relish, aside from what small amount of joy he gets from being around the young people he teaches.
Sounds boring? Far, far, from it. This is prose the way prose should be. Always. The author has an eye for detail and interpretation that make his words pop. And his insights are genuine. Every page has an amazing tidbit. Every single page. Let me share one or two:
- It's just that George is like a man trying to sell a real diamond for a nickel on the street. The diamond is protected from all but a precious few, because the great hurrying majority can never dare stop to believe that it could conceivably be real.
- All the middleman wants are its products, its practical applications. These professors are suckers, he says. What's the use of knowing something if you can't make money out of it? And the glum ones more than half agree with him and feel privately ashamed of not being smart and crooked.
- Oh, the bloody battles and sidewalk vomitings! The punches flying wide, the heads crashing backwards against the fenders of parked cars! Huge diesel-dikes slugging it out, far grimmer than the men. The siren-wailing of the police; the sudden swoopings of the shore patrol.
I wish every English major would read this book. I wish every writer would read this book. I wish you would read this book. Right now.
It was Hemingway who said 'All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.'
'A Single Man' is a book made up entirely of true sentences.
Next week:
Brown Dog by Jim Harrison
I hope I am not doing a disservice to Mr. Harrison by reading his book after 'A Single Man.' I'll keep an open mind.
Sunday, December 1, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 48: A Modern Family
This week's book:
A Modern Family by Socrates Adams
Grade: A-
Lots of interesting fiction coming out of England and Ireland lately, and this one is no exception.
Much like City of Bohane, I can guarantee you have not read this kind of novel before. Much like The Panopticon, this novel is uniquely British.
Pink Floyd - requoting Thoreau - said 'hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way' and this novel is all about that hanging on. I liked it.
The story is about an upper-class English family, and how they don't really function much like a family at all. The father is a television presenter - he is the only one never given a real name* - who hates his job but isn't really smart enough or motivated enough to do anything else. His wife, Prudence, used to be a television producer but hasn't worked for over a decade. She feels she should be closer to her family than she is, but she takes none of the responsibility for their failures. The daughter, Ellen, is disconnected from everyone but her friend Tracy, who she thinks she may be in love with. The son, Bobby, sells pages out of dirty magazines in school to feed his World of Warcraft habit. He can't really hold a conversation with anyone and never looks anyone in the eye.
A pretty disreputable lot, right? Surprisingly, at least it surprised me, the author makes then very sympathetic. I know in my head I should hate them all, I should be disgusted by the way they limp through their privileged lives, accomplishing nothing. Feeling nothing. But I can't help but hope for the best for them. I want it all to turn out okay.
I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying it doesn't.
This novel is short, 122 pages on my iPad, which is good, but also necessary. I don't think this kind of format could sustain a much longer narrative. It's written in third-person omniscient point of view, which is very, very, very hard to pull off even remotely well, let alone convincingly. The author makes it shine. You feel the family's disconnectedness, you hurt for them when they're not able to hurt for themselves, and you want to grab each of them and shake some sense into them in practically every scene.
I said earlier that you have not read a novel like this. I'd like to amend that to 'you have not read a modern novel like this.' The more I think about it, the more this resembles a novel of manners, done up in Twenty-First Century clothes, with modern problems and sensibilities.
I think, like a novel of manners - think 'Pride and Prejudice' - the lack of any clear objective might put some people off. Particularly Americans, who prefer a prize to aim for. But I also think that, like a novel of manners, the journey is the point here, not the destination. It's a peek into the lives of people the author clearly pities, and wishes would do better by themselves and their relatives, but who, for social and cultural reasons, aren't able to get past their own circumstances.
If you prefer plots with a 'football,' that is, a thing that the characters are after, like a Maltese Falcon or revenge or a new home, you may not like this book. If you like plots that wrap up and characters who grow, you might not like this book, but then again you might. If you like reading something new, you will absolutely like this book.
* given the character's job and colleagues, it's pretty clear he's supposed to be James May. If you don't know him, look him up.
Next week:
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
Another book not in my genre comfort zone. But it's set in 1960s LA, which is always good for mood and tone.
A Modern Family by Socrates Adams
Grade: A-
Lots of interesting fiction coming out of England and Ireland lately, and this one is no exception.
Much like City of Bohane, I can guarantee you have not read this kind of novel before. Much like The Panopticon, this novel is uniquely British.
Pink Floyd - requoting Thoreau - said 'hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way' and this novel is all about that hanging on. I liked it.
The story is about an upper-class English family, and how they don't really function much like a family at all. The father is a television presenter - he is the only one never given a real name* - who hates his job but isn't really smart enough or motivated enough to do anything else. His wife, Prudence, used to be a television producer but hasn't worked for over a decade. She feels she should be closer to her family than she is, but she takes none of the responsibility for their failures. The daughter, Ellen, is disconnected from everyone but her friend Tracy, who she thinks she may be in love with. The son, Bobby, sells pages out of dirty magazines in school to feed his World of Warcraft habit. He can't really hold a conversation with anyone and never looks anyone in the eye.
A pretty disreputable lot, right? Surprisingly, at least it surprised me, the author makes then very sympathetic. I know in my head I should hate them all, I should be disgusted by the way they limp through their privileged lives, accomplishing nothing. Feeling nothing. But I can't help but hope for the best for them. I want it all to turn out okay.
I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying it doesn't.
This novel is short, 122 pages on my iPad, which is good, but also necessary. I don't think this kind of format could sustain a much longer narrative. It's written in third-person omniscient point of view, which is very, very, very hard to pull off even remotely well, let alone convincingly. The author makes it shine. You feel the family's disconnectedness, you hurt for them when they're not able to hurt for themselves, and you want to grab each of them and shake some sense into them in practically every scene.
I said earlier that you have not read a novel like this. I'd like to amend that to 'you have not read a modern novel like this.' The more I think about it, the more this resembles a novel of manners, done up in Twenty-First Century clothes, with modern problems and sensibilities.
I think, like a novel of manners - think 'Pride and Prejudice' - the lack of any clear objective might put some people off. Particularly Americans, who prefer a prize to aim for. But I also think that, like a novel of manners, the journey is the point here, not the destination. It's a peek into the lives of people the author clearly pities, and wishes would do better by themselves and their relatives, but who, for social and cultural reasons, aren't able to get past their own circumstances.
If you prefer plots with a 'football,' that is, a thing that the characters are after, like a Maltese Falcon or revenge or a new home, you may not like this book. If you like plots that wrap up and characters who grow, you might not like this book, but then again you might. If you like reading something new, you will absolutely like this book.
* given the character's job and colleagues, it's pretty clear he's supposed to be James May. If you don't know him, look him up.
Next week:
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
Another book not in my genre comfort zone. But it's set in 1960s LA, which is always good for mood and tone.
Monday, November 25, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 47: Heart of Darkness
This week's book:
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Grade: A+
Well... this one will make you think. That's a good thing.
First off, this book is over 100 years old. I had no idea. It was first published in 1899. Which means it has the kind of sensibility, format, and style that you would expect from a 19th Century novel. Which is not to say it's bad, it's just dated. Vintage, if you were to think of it as clothes.
The framing device is the narrator, Marlow, telling his sailing companions on the Thames River of the adventure he had when he took a job on the Dark Continent - Africa - as Captain of a riverboat for The Company.
Seems simple enough, right? Marlow, who has always wanted to travel and explore and accomplish great things, gets the chance to do so. Remember this was written during the waning years of global imperialism, when there were still small pockets of the globe available for Western powers to claim. It was before World War I, when the old national paradigms came crashing down into the fog of mustard gas. It was when the promise of imperialism still seemed benign. The author puts the lie to that notion.
Reading it now, Marlow's voyage up the river, searching for Mr. Kurtz, a Company man more accomplished than all the other Company men, is an allegory for corporate America. Yes, at the time it was an indictment of the imperial system, as Marlow is confronted with the awful reality of colonial life under imperial rule. But the malaise of incompetent Company men, each out for only themselves but not up to the task of doing it well, combined with the hopelessness of the natives who can only suffer and die, sounds an awful lot to me like the way public companies are run today. The fatalistic, morally resigned underlings led by horrible human beings who aren't worthy of the positions they hold.
No, I do not think I'm reading too much into it.
Marlow does find Kurtz, of course, who has made himself into a god (maybe, maybe not) for the local people. Kurtz is clearly insane, and even though he's a Company man, insists that what he's done he's accomplished on his own, even though he's done it for the Company and with Company resources, with the hope - as all Company men have - of rising higher and higher in the Company hierarchy.
Yee-ow. It's like Mr. Conrad was peering through a crystal ball across 100 years. Spooky.
I loved reading this book. Makes me kind of wish I'd read it when I was supposed to, back in High School. Of course I wouldn't have appreciated it then.
As I mentioned, the execution is dated. The narrative is one man telling the others what happened to him through extended dialogue, which is something that would never fly today.
But the language is evocative, if at times a little florid. Marlow as narrator veers into introspection a lot, as books of the time did, but it never seems gratuitous, it never seems like the author filling a page count.
And the themes... the themes... When I can read a book and recognize the indictment of the political structure of the author's times, and at the same time find an indictment of my own time and the prevailing political structure now, I know I've found something special.
You have to read this book, not only because you should have years ago and never did, but because it will make you think about how you live your life right now.
Next week:
A Modern Family by Socrates Adams
New fiction from a small press. I've had luck so far, this could turn out pretty good.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Grade: A+
Well... this one will make you think. That's a good thing.
First off, this book is over 100 years old. I had no idea. It was first published in 1899. Which means it has the kind of sensibility, format, and style that you would expect from a 19th Century novel. Which is not to say it's bad, it's just dated. Vintage, if you were to think of it as clothes.
The framing device is the narrator, Marlow, telling his sailing companions on the Thames River of the adventure he had when he took a job on the Dark Continent - Africa - as Captain of a riverboat for The Company.
Seems simple enough, right? Marlow, who has always wanted to travel and explore and accomplish great things, gets the chance to do so. Remember this was written during the waning years of global imperialism, when there were still small pockets of the globe available for Western powers to claim. It was before World War I, when the old national paradigms came crashing down into the fog of mustard gas. It was when the promise of imperialism still seemed benign. The author puts the lie to that notion.
Reading it now, Marlow's voyage up the river, searching for Mr. Kurtz, a Company man more accomplished than all the other Company men, is an allegory for corporate America. Yes, at the time it was an indictment of the imperial system, as Marlow is confronted with the awful reality of colonial life under imperial rule. But the malaise of incompetent Company men, each out for only themselves but not up to the task of doing it well, combined with the hopelessness of the natives who can only suffer and die, sounds an awful lot to me like the way public companies are run today. The fatalistic, morally resigned underlings led by horrible human beings who aren't worthy of the positions they hold.
No, I do not think I'm reading too much into it.
Marlow does find Kurtz, of course, who has made himself into a god (maybe, maybe not) for the local people. Kurtz is clearly insane, and even though he's a Company man, insists that what he's done he's accomplished on his own, even though he's done it for the Company and with Company resources, with the hope - as all Company men have - of rising higher and higher in the Company hierarchy.
Yee-ow. It's like Mr. Conrad was peering through a crystal ball across 100 years. Spooky.
I loved reading this book. Makes me kind of wish I'd read it when I was supposed to, back in High School. Of course I wouldn't have appreciated it then.
As I mentioned, the execution is dated. The narrative is one man telling the others what happened to him through extended dialogue, which is something that would never fly today.
But the language is evocative, if at times a little florid. Marlow as narrator veers into introspection a lot, as books of the time did, but it never seems gratuitous, it never seems like the author filling a page count.
And the themes... the themes... When I can read a book and recognize the indictment of the political structure of the author's times, and at the same time find an indictment of my own time and the prevailing political structure now, I know I've found something special.
You have to read this book, not only because you should have years ago and never did, but because it will make you think about how you live your life right now.
Next week:
A Modern Family by Socrates Adams
New fiction from a small press. I've had luck so far, this could turn out pretty good.
Friday, November 22, 2013
Bothered By Bitcoin
Bitcoin has been in the news recently, especially as the Federal Election Commission considers allowing Bitcoin donations to political campaigns. Which is, of course, a colossally stupid idea, but almost anything dealing with US election funding these days is a colossally stupid idea, so they’re not really treading new ground. But this prompts the question: what is Bitcoin and why should I care about it?
Bitcoin is a virtual currency. What’s that? It’s online money. That is, money not backed by the full faith and credit of any government. Bitcoin was made up by an anonymous developer and only has value in so much as people are willing to accept it as currency.
Which, at first glance, is not so different from any modern currency. Since the US went completely off the gold standard in the early 70’s, the Dollar is representative of the idea of money, rather than money itself. It’s the same thing for any modern currency, the Euro, the Yen, the Yuan, none of them backed by anything other than their respective governments claiming they’re worth something.
Bitcoin is kind of the same thing. Each Bitcoin only has as much value as two sides of a business transaction place on it. If I think one Bitcoin can buy an apple and you think one Bitcoin can buy an apple there’s no problem. If I think one Bitcoin can buy an apple and you think one Bitcoin can buy a Ferrari there’s a huge problem. This mismatch is what governments who centrally control currency manage. In the US, the Federal Reserve sets that value, saying (in essence) that one dollar can buy an apple but it takes half a million dollars to buy a Ferrari. Uncle Sam steps in to resolve what is, at its heart, a barter dispute.
The problem with Bitcoin is it has no Federal Reserve. It’s a peer-to-peer system, designed from the beginning to be decentralized. There is no Bitcoin monetary policy, the number of Bitcoins doesn’t come from anything other than the one guy who created it deciding there should be more or less Bitcoins in circulation. Seriously. That’s how it works. One dude.*
That’s what Bitcoin is, but the other question remains: why should I care about it?
You should care because the media is increasingly taking Bitcoin seriously. Which, in turn, means consumers will take it seriously, which, in turn, means they will pressure their legislators to take it seriously. This is a huge problem because no one – not even the drug dealers who have been the major source of Bitcoin transactions to date – should take it seriously. It’s a fraud, a sham, and a huge problem waiting to happen.
The issue is the word ‘coin’ in Bitcoin. Makes it sound legit. Plus, anything online makes the media's shriveled black hearts flutter, even if they don't understand it. Or maybe especially if they don't understand it. But let’s un-abstract this, and see if any of it makes sense.
Let’s assume that instead of being nothing but lines of code and electrons, Bitcoins were something real that you could touch. Say, special orchid petals. Rare ones. Only 21 million orchid petals like this exist in the world, and the orchid seeds are owned and controlled by one guy. The only way there are going to be more special orchid petals is if that one guy decides there should be more; he’s the only one who can grow them.
You own a coffee shop. One of your customers orders a latte, and wants to pay you in special orchid petals. They do this with a straight face, they’re completely serious. They tell you that if you accept the special orchid petals, even if you might not be able to spend them everywhere like you could real money, there are other places in the world you can use those orchid petals to buy stuff you’d need as a business.
Would you take this random, anonymous person’s special orchid petals as payment?
Absolutely not, orchid petals aren't real currency, they're intrinsically worthless and represent nothing of value. If Bitcoins were a tangible thing like special orchid petals there is no way anyone anywhere would accept them as currency, and you’d be a laughingstock if you did.
So why should it be different just because Bitcoin exists only online?
Yes, modern currency is an illusion. It’s a game of smoke and mirrors, shared assumptions and shared delusions. But while modern currencies are no longer backed by precious metals, they are backed by the full faith and credit of their respective governments, which means they’re backed by their citizens’ labor and efforts. Bitcoin is backed by nothing. And is worth exactly the same. If you get involved in it you deserve what you get.
* Everyone assumes it’s a dude, but it could just as well be a woman.
Bitcoin is a virtual currency. What’s that? It’s online money. That is, money not backed by the full faith and credit of any government. Bitcoin was made up by an anonymous developer and only has value in so much as people are willing to accept it as currency.
Which, at first glance, is not so different from any modern currency. Since the US went completely off the gold standard in the early 70’s, the Dollar is representative of the idea of money, rather than money itself. It’s the same thing for any modern currency, the Euro, the Yen, the Yuan, none of them backed by anything other than their respective governments claiming they’re worth something.
Bitcoin is kind of the same thing. Each Bitcoin only has as much value as two sides of a business transaction place on it. If I think one Bitcoin can buy an apple and you think one Bitcoin can buy an apple there’s no problem. If I think one Bitcoin can buy an apple and you think one Bitcoin can buy a Ferrari there’s a huge problem. This mismatch is what governments who centrally control currency manage. In the US, the Federal Reserve sets that value, saying (in essence) that one dollar can buy an apple but it takes half a million dollars to buy a Ferrari. Uncle Sam steps in to resolve what is, at its heart, a barter dispute.
The problem with Bitcoin is it has no Federal Reserve. It’s a peer-to-peer system, designed from the beginning to be decentralized. There is no Bitcoin monetary policy, the number of Bitcoins doesn’t come from anything other than the one guy who created it deciding there should be more or less Bitcoins in circulation. Seriously. That’s how it works. One dude.*
That’s what Bitcoin is, but the other question remains: why should I care about it?
You should care because the media is increasingly taking Bitcoin seriously. Which, in turn, means consumers will take it seriously, which, in turn, means they will pressure their legislators to take it seriously. This is a huge problem because no one – not even the drug dealers who have been the major source of Bitcoin transactions to date – should take it seriously. It’s a fraud, a sham, and a huge problem waiting to happen.
The issue is the word ‘coin’ in Bitcoin. Makes it sound legit. Plus, anything online makes the media's shriveled black hearts flutter, even if they don't understand it. Or maybe especially if they don't understand it. But let’s un-abstract this, and see if any of it makes sense.
Let’s assume that instead of being nothing but lines of code and electrons, Bitcoins were something real that you could touch. Say, special orchid petals. Rare ones. Only 21 million orchid petals like this exist in the world, and the orchid seeds are owned and controlled by one guy. The only way there are going to be more special orchid petals is if that one guy decides there should be more; he’s the only one who can grow them.
You own a coffee shop. One of your customers orders a latte, and wants to pay you in special orchid petals. They do this with a straight face, they’re completely serious. They tell you that if you accept the special orchid petals, even if you might not be able to spend them everywhere like you could real money, there are other places in the world you can use those orchid petals to buy stuff you’d need as a business.
Would you take this random, anonymous person’s special orchid petals as payment?
Absolutely not, orchid petals aren't real currency, they're intrinsically worthless and represent nothing of value. If Bitcoins were a tangible thing like special orchid petals there is no way anyone anywhere would accept them as currency, and you’d be a laughingstock if you did.
So why should it be different just because Bitcoin exists only online?
Yes, modern currency is an illusion. It’s a game of smoke and mirrors, shared assumptions and shared delusions. But while modern currencies are no longer backed by precious metals, they are backed by the full faith and credit of their respective governments, which means they’re backed by their citizens’ labor and efforts. Bitcoin is backed by nothing. And is worth exactly the same. If you get involved in it you deserve what you get.
* Everyone assumes it’s a dude, but it could just as well be a woman.
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 46: Undisputed Truth
This week's book:
Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman
Grade: A-
This one is two days late, but not because I couldn't make up my mind. I just started two days later than usual.
I don't think the final chapter on Mike Tyson has been written. Not even with this book. He is still a troubled mix of contradictions, but come to find out, he realizes this. He's even cool with it. Mostly.
This book is written with a ghost writer. I say 'with' a ghost writer instead of 'by' because it reads to me like a very long, extended interview. These are indeed Mike Tyson's words, just organized and edited.
The book begins with a prologue explaining how he did not rape the woman he was convicted of raping, and how even though he hated the process and the judicial system and the boxing organizations that put him in the position to stand accused of rape, he thinks the judge who put him away probably saved his life.
Then, in the very next chapter he outlines how horrific, abusive, and neglected his childhood was. How he didn't learn right from wrong, how he idolized criminals because those were the people who were making it in his neighborhood. How he became a criminal himself to escape bullying at school, and how he grew bolder and bolder with every criminal exploit he got away with. The bullied kid became the bully.
He doesn't see the contradiction. Or the irony. He outlines how he was - his words - 'an animal' and yet claims to have risen above that animal nature, at least in the one instance he was caught and convicted of a crime. Not only does he not see the contradiction, it's not a contradiction in his mind. He didn't rape that woman. He did lie and cheat and steal and do drugs and conceive illegitimate children. But the one crime he was convicted for he did not do.
This was a fascinating read. Not the least reason of which is the sociological study of the effect of inner city destitution on children. Mike Tyson's mother was a prostitute. And he shared her bed until he was fifteen. He grew up around thieves and pimps and drug dealers, only to become a thief and drug dealer himself, who victimized women. In the question of nature vs. nurture, nurture won out. At least early on.
Mike Tyson was a victim for much of his life, even well after his boxing career was over. He knows this, he says as much. But he has in recent years risen above it. Or gone beyond it, perhaps, he does take care to note his constant struggle not to revert to the insecure egomaniac he once was.
This isn't really a feel-good book. You come away from it realizing that Mike Tyson is much more than his public persona once might have led you to believe. But you also realize that he was, at one time, much less than that too. And he's still teetering in between. Could go either way. He says in the book he's such an egomaniac he'd need to die in front of a crowd. That still might happen. But I hope it doesn't.
Read this book. It is a genuine glimpse into the mind of a man more fascinating than you might think.
Next week:
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Yeah, I should have read this in high school. I may have given it a try, but 'Apocalypse Now' was on VHS, why would I have wanted to read a book? Plus, it's short, I can get it in by Sunday and get back on track.
Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman
Grade: A-
This one is two days late, but not because I couldn't make up my mind. I just started two days later than usual.
I don't think the final chapter on Mike Tyson has been written. Not even with this book. He is still a troubled mix of contradictions, but come to find out, he realizes this. He's even cool with it. Mostly.
This book is written with a ghost writer. I say 'with' a ghost writer instead of 'by' because it reads to me like a very long, extended interview. These are indeed Mike Tyson's words, just organized and edited.
The book begins with a prologue explaining how he did not rape the woman he was convicted of raping, and how even though he hated the process and the judicial system and the boxing organizations that put him in the position to stand accused of rape, he thinks the judge who put him away probably saved his life.
Then, in the very next chapter he outlines how horrific, abusive, and neglected his childhood was. How he didn't learn right from wrong, how he idolized criminals because those were the people who were making it in his neighborhood. How he became a criminal himself to escape bullying at school, and how he grew bolder and bolder with every criminal exploit he got away with. The bullied kid became the bully.
He doesn't see the contradiction. Or the irony. He outlines how he was - his words - 'an animal' and yet claims to have risen above that animal nature, at least in the one instance he was caught and convicted of a crime. Not only does he not see the contradiction, it's not a contradiction in his mind. He didn't rape that woman. He did lie and cheat and steal and do drugs and conceive illegitimate children. But the one crime he was convicted for he did not do.
This was a fascinating read. Not the least reason of which is the sociological study of the effect of inner city destitution on children. Mike Tyson's mother was a prostitute. And he shared her bed until he was fifteen. He grew up around thieves and pimps and drug dealers, only to become a thief and drug dealer himself, who victimized women. In the question of nature vs. nurture, nurture won out. At least early on.
Mike Tyson was a victim for much of his life, even well after his boxing career was over. He knows this, he says as much. But he has in recent years risen above it. Or gone beyond it, perhaps, he does take care to note his constant struggle not to revert to the insecure egomaniac he once was.
This isn't really a feel-good book. You come away from it realizing that Mike Tyson is much more than his public persona once might have led you to believe. But you also realize that he was, at one time, much less than that too. And he's still teetering in between. Could go either way. He says in the book he's such an egomaniac he'd need to die in front of a crowd. That still might happen. But I hope it doesn't.
Read this book. It is a genuine glimpse into the mind of a man more fascinating than you might think.
Next week:
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Yeah, I should have read this in high school. I may have given it a try, but 'Apocalypse Now' was on VHS, why would I have wanted to read a book? Plus, it's short, I can get it in by Sunday and get back on track.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 45: The Wolves of Midwinter
This week's book:
The Wolves of Midwinter by Anne Rice
Grade: B
Maybe you can tell because this review is two days late, but, man, I could not get into this book.
Once again I picked up the second novel in a series without reading the first one, but that's not it. Or not just it. I think it was the premise that did me in.
The story is that werewolves are real. No big deal, it's a novel by Anne Rice, so it's not going to be like 'Grapes of Wrath.' The hero, Rueben, has just been changed into a werewolf in the previous novel, and as this one opens he's been welcomed into the family, so to speak, and begins to learn about his new powers. But it's Christmas, which werewolves also celebrate, natch, and Rueben's education is interrupted by a ghost. There are secrets deeper than the werewolves, spirits and ancient things in the deep forest in Northern California.
Seems kind of overwrought, doesn't it? It was.
Anne Rice has been writing for quite a while, so the prose was very good, with tight descriptions and good pacing. But the dialogue... there was a lot of it. A lot. Conversations that were mostly exposition pretending to be revelations of inner life. It's a delicate balance, I know, between writing good dialogue for a book and realistic dialogue. You can't write dialogue the way real people speak, it's unreadable. But you can't have your characters speak like they're reading from the Encyclopedia Britannica either. There was lot of Britannica here. Pages and pages and pages of it. Back and forth, agonized discussion after agonized discussion. Just not for me.
One a more technical note, I noticed the narrative broke point of view many, many times. Rueben is the main character, but over and over again we'd get a paragraph from another character's perspective, right in the middle. Or, even better, Rueben providing another character's inner motivation. I didn't care for that either.
Overall it wasn't bad. Leaps and bounds better than Twilight, thank God. And I can see where someone else might like the dialogues and personal interplay, but it left me flat. It felt like a Bronte sister novel, but with werewolves. Maybe that was her intention all along, to make a Gothic horror out of Romanticism, to put werewolves and ghosts and spirits into Wuthering Heights. If so, she succeeded admirably, because that's precisely what I found. It was just not to my tastes.
Next week:
Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman
I've been fascinated with Mike Tyson since the first time I saw him box. He's a troubled mix of contradictions trying to resolve themselves, and as he gets older I don't know if he's finding a way to get beyond his past or is in danger of being overwhelmed by it. I'll read his book to find out.
The Wolves of Midwinter by Anne Rice
Grade: B
Maybe you can tell because this review is two days late, but, man, I could not get into this book.
Once again I picked up the second novel in a series without reading the first one, but that's not it. Or not just it. I think it was the premise that did me in.
The story is that werewolves are real. No big deal, it's a novel by Anne Rice, so it's not going to be like 'Grapes of Wrath.' The hero, Rueben, has just been changed into a werewolf in the previous novel, and as this one opens he's been welcomed into the family, so to speak, and begins to learn about his new powers. But it's Christmas, which werewolves also celebrate, natch, and Rueben's education is interrupted by a ghost. There are secrets deeper than the werewolves, spirits and ancient things in the deep forest in Northern California.
Seems kind of overwrought, doesn't it? It was.
Anne Rice has been writing for quite a while, so the prose was very good, with tight descriptions and good pacing. But the dialogue... there was a lot of it. A lot. Conversations that were mostly exposition pretending to be revelations of inner life. It's a delicate balance, I know, between writing good dialogue for a book and realistic dialogue. You can't write dialogue the way real people speak, it's unreadable. But you can't have your characters speak like they're reading from the Encyclopedia Britannica either. There was lot of Britannica here. Pages and pages and pages of it. Back and forth, agonized discussion after agonized discussion. Just not for me.
One a more technical note, I noticed the narrative broke point of view many, many times. Rueben is the main character, but over and over again we'd get a paragraph from another character's perspective, right in the middle. Or, even better, Rueben providing another character's inner motivation. I didn't care for that either.
Overall it wasn't bad. Leaps and bounds better than Twilight, thank God. And I can see where someone else might like the dialogues and personal interplay, but it left me flat. It felt like a Bronte sister novel, but with werewolves. Maybe that was her intention all along, to make a Gothic horror out of Romanticism, to put werewolves and ghosts and spirits into Wuthering Heights. If so, she succeeded admirably, because that's precisely what I found. It was just not to my tastes.
Next week:
Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman
I've been fascinated with Mike Tyson since the first time I saw him box. He's a troubled mix of contradictions trying to resolve themselves, and as he gets older I don't know if he's finding a way to get beyond his past or is in danger of being overwhelmed by it. I'll read his book to find out.
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
What Time Is It?
I've been thinking about time again. Yeah, I know there are theoretical physicists getting paid to ponder the same thing - what is time? - but that shouldn't keep me from thinking about it any more than the existence of NASCAR drivers should keep me from getting behind the wheel of my truck. They're professionals, and they run their race very well, but they can't get me where I need to go, that's my job.
As Einstein demonstrated, space and time are connected, the same fabric. It's where we get the concept of spacetime. And we are embedded in spacetime, all four dimensions of it. Which is why, I think, we experience time as a one-way arrow. In order to step outside of time, we'd have to be able to experience a fifth dimension which would allow us a separate perspective on our original four.
Think of it in terms of Flatland, a hypothetical two-dimensional world. The Flatlanders have forward and back, and left and right, but they do not have up and down. They can't even conceive of up and down, since that's a third dimension and they have only two. Everything they do is constrained to those two dimensions, and even if they were somehow transported through a third dimension they'd never know it, since they can't perceive it.
Same thing with us and time. It's a fourth dimension, but we're stuck in it like it's 4-D flypaper, nothing we can do to get out of it. It's not only all we know, it's all we can know.
There's a very good question about time travel: If time travel is possible, where are all the time travelers? Once time travel is invented, no matter how far in the future, every era would be lousy with time tourists, because every moment in time would essentially be 'now.' Since we don't see any time travelers, ipso facto, time travel must not be possible.
But I put this to you: if time travel is possible, it's only possible through a fifth dimension. And since we can't perceive that fifth dimension, we can't perceive any time travelers, who must, of necessity, be five-dimensional beings. So maybe there are time travelers all around us right now. We'd never know it, just like Flatlanders could never know us higher-dimensional beings.
Which brings us to another notion about time. We experience time as a linear flow, but if there is a fifth dimension outside of our four familiar dimensions of spacetime, wouldn't someone in that fifth dimension be able to see all of time? To them, wouldn't time be just another dimension they could move along, forward or backward or sideways or what have you? Furthermore, wouldn't that mean that time - though we experience it linearly - is actually all happening at once? Is every moment in time really lined up in order like a huge card catalog* we leaf through from front to back because we have to by virtue of our four-dimensionality?
I think the notion of there being no real 'now,' just a card-catalog moment we experience as now is both disturbing and poetic. It's like we live each moment like it's a frame of movie film, one at a time, one after the other.
Which has all sorts of implications for the notion of free will. But that's another sleepless night lying in bed.
* kids, a card catalog is what libraries used to keep track of their books in the days before computers did everything for us.
As Einstein demonstrated, space and time are connected, the same fabric. It's where we get the concept of spacetime. And we are embedded in spacetime, all four dimensions of it. Which is why, I think, we experience time as a one-way arrow. In order to step outside of time, we'd have to be able to experience a fifth dimension which would allow us a separate perspective on our original four.
Think of it in terms of Flatland, a hypothetical two-dimensional world. The Flatlanders have forward and back, and left and right, but they do not have up and down. They can't even conceive of up and down, since that's a third dimension and they have only two. Everything they do is constrained to those two dimensions, and even if they were somehow transported through a third dimension they'd never know it, since they can't perceive it.
Same thing with us and time. It's a fourth dimension, but we're stuck in it like it's 4-D flypaper, nothing we can do to get out of it. It's not only all we know, it's all we can know.
There's a very good question about time travel: If time travel is possible, where are all the time travelers? Once time travel is invented, no matter how far in the future, every era would be lousy with time tourists, because every moment in time would essentially be 'now.' Since we don't see any time travelers, ipso facto, time travel must not be possible.
But I put this to you: if time travel is possible, it's only possible through a fifth dimension. And since we can't perceive that fifth dimension, we can't perceive any time travelers, who must, of necessity, be five-dimensional beings. So maybe there are time travelers all around us right now. We'd never know it, just like Flatlanders could never know us higher-dimensional beings.
Which brings us to another notion about time. We experience time as a linear flow, but if there is a fifth dimension outside of our four familiar dimensions of spacetime, wouldn't someone in that fifth dimension be able to see all of time? To them, wouldn't time be just another dimension they could move along, forward or backward or sideways or what have you? Furthermore, wouldn't that mean that time - though we experience it linearly - is actually all happening at once? Is every moment in time really lined up in order like a huge card catalog* we leaf through from front to back because we have to by virtue of our four-dimensionality?
I think the notion of there being no real 'now,' just a card-catalog moment we experience as now is both disturbing and poetic. It's like we live each moment like it's a frame of movie film, one at a time, one after the other.
Which has all sorts of implications for the notion of free will. But that's another sleepless night lying in bed.
* kids, a card catalog is what libraries used to keep track of their books in the days before computers did everything for us.
Sunday, November 3, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 44: Damned
This week's book:
Damned by Chuck Palahniuk
Grade: ... I don't really know...
Well, at least it's short.
I'm stumped. Honestly stumped. I have no idea if this is a work of towering genius I just can't see, or the worst piece of crap pastiche I have ever read.
One thing I know for sure, it's either one or the other, and nothing in between.
This is the story of Madison, who is dead and in Hell. She writes to Satan - somehow, maybe in a journal we never see? - at the start of each chapter like the just-teen protagonist of a Judy Blume novel. She's newly arrived in Hell, stuck in a filth-smeared cage out on an infinite plain, near four other Breakfast Club members. They break out and go for walkabout in Hell, as the facts of their damnations are slowly made plain.
Yeah... it is definitely a pastiche, call it 'homage' to make it polite, of a Judy Blume novel. Thirteen-year-old Madison goes on a voyage of self-discovery that is thinly-disguised as a travelogue of Hell, and then later is not even thinly-disguised when she discovers that, as a dead person, she can reinvent herself into whatever she wants. You know you're in trouble when the author abandons the metaphor and just states things plainly.
There are parts, little passages and entire themes, that are really, really good. But but those tiny bits and brief moments are surrounded by half-assed writing compounded by half-assed editing. Reading Damned was like sifting through all the gunk in a drain pipe to find the tiny diamond engagement ring your sweetie dropped. Sure, you get the diamond, but was the kitchen smeared with sewer juice really worth the effort?
This is the problem as I see it: Chuck Pahlaniuk the Best Selling Author doesn't get edited nearly as rigorously or as thoroughly as Chuck Pahlaniuk the Relative Unknown. In actuality, as we see with many authors over and over and over again, the Best Selling Author needs a great editor even more than the Relative Unknown does. The Relative Unknown has had years of obscurity to hone his craft, and to nurture his manuscript through the stage of outline to terrible first draft to slightly less-terrible second draft and so on to something worthy of publishing. The Best Selling Author has to work under time constraint, he has to produce according to his contract, and the editor has to edit to a release date and printer schedule. Things the Relative Unknown could never get away with are the things the Best Selling Author gets a free pass on.
And that's how you get something like Damned.
Like I said, there are themes that merit exploration, existential stuff that we're all interested in like free will and how our earthly lives affect those around us. But... the whole just doesn't hang together. It reads to me like what I strongly suspect it was, the author noodling at the typewriter coming up with pages without a clear road map or plan where to go with the story. Just a dude gettin' a little finger exercise. Then, when he had to put it into a complete - though mercifully short - novel, the author tacked on bits and pieces to try to make a coherent story, without smoothing the rough edges and making everything neat and tidy. You can see where he had to add a few lines or pages to something he wrote earlier. His writing style from later in the book matches those patches, which do not match to the style he had earlier in the book.
Same thing with the characters, they're established as contemporaries of Madison - they appear in the same plain of infinite cages - and they behave as her contemporaries. Until the author decides it would be cooler if they weren't. Character details don't match from the beginning of the book to the end, their behavior isn't consistent, and their demeanor doesn't match what the author has told us of souls who have been in Hell for a long time. Sloppy.
Who should read this book? Well, if you read and liked 'Fight Club,' first let me offer condolences, then let me tell you that you will not like this book at all. If you liked Judy Blume books you might like Damned, as long as you go into it with the proper expectations. This is not Judy Blume, there is no truth here, even though the author kind-of tried to put some in.
Read it or don't. I don't know. Whatever.
Next week:
The Wolves of Midwinter by Anne Rice
I think this is my second Anne Rice novel. My first in a very long time. This is about werewolves, I'm guessing. I hope it's not werewolves who put on way too much Axe body spray.
Damned by Chuck Palahniuk
Grade: ... I don't really know...
Well, at least it's short.
I'm stumped. Honestly stumped. I have no idea if this is a work of towering genius I just can't see, or the worst piece of crap pastiche I have ever read.
One thing I know for sure, it's either one or the other, and nothing in between.
This is the story of Madison, who is dead and in Hell. She writes to Satan - somehow, maybe in a journal we never see? - at the start of each chapter like the just-teen protagonist of a Judy Blume novel. She's newly arrived in Hell, stuck in a filth-smeared cage out on an infinite plain, near four other Breakfast Club members. They break out and go for walkabout in Hell, as the facts of their damnations are slowly made plain.
Yeah... it is definitely a pastiche, call it 'homage' to make it polite, of a Judy Blume novel. Thirteen-year-old Madison goes on a voyage of self-discovery that is thinly-disguised as a travelogue of Hell, and then later is not even thinly-disguised when she discovers that, as a dead person, she can reinvent herself into whatever she wants. You know you're in trouble when the author abandons the metaphor and just states things plainly.
There are parts, little passages and entire themes, that are really, really good. But but those tiny bits and brief moments are surrounded by half-assed writing compounded by half-assed editing. Reading Damned was like sifting through all the gunk in a drain pipe to find the tiny diamond engagement ring your sweetie dropped. Sure, you get the diamond, but was the kitchen smeared with sewer juice really worth the effort?
This is the problem as I see it: Chuck Pahlaniuk the Best Selling Author doesn't get edited nearly as rigorously or as thoroughly as Chuck Pahlaniuk the Relative Unknown. In actuality, as we see with many authors over and over and over again, the Best Selling Author needs a great editor even more than the Relative Unknown does. The Relative Unknown has had years of obscurity to hone his craft, and to nurture his manuscript through the stage of outline to terrible first draft to slightly less-terrible second draft and so on to something worthy of publishing. The Best Selling Author has to work under time constraint, he has to produce according to his contract, and the editor has to edit to a release date and printer schedule. Things the Relative Unknown could never get away with are the things the Best Selling Author gets a free pass on.
And that's how you get something like Damned.
Like I said, there are themes that merit exploration, existential stuff that we're all interested in like free will and how our earthly lives affect those around us. But... the whole just doesn't hang together. It reads to me like what I strongly suspect it was, the author noodling at the typewriter coming up with pages without a clear road map or plan where to go with the story. Just a dude gettin' a little finger exercise. Then, when he had to put it into a complete - though mercifully short - novel, the author tacked on bits and pieces to try to make a coherent story, without smoothing the rough edges and making everything neat and tidy. You can see where he had to add a few lines or pages to something he wrote earlier. His writing style from later in the book matches those patches, which do not match to the style he had earlier in the book.
Same thing with the characters, they're established as contemporaries of Madison - they appear in the same plain of infinite cages - and they behave as her contemporaries. Until the author decides it would be cooler if they weren't. Character details don't match from the beginning of the book to the end, their behavior isn't consistent, and their demeanor doesn't match what the author has told us of souls who have been in Hell for a long time. Sloppy.
Who should read this book? Well, if you read and liked 'Fight Club,' first let me offer condolences, then let me tell you that you will not like this book at all. If you liked Judy Blume books you might like Damned, as long as you go into it with the proper expectations. This is not Judy Blume, there is no truth here, even though the author kind-of tried to put some in.
Read it or don't. I don't know. Whatever.
Next week:
The Wolves of Midwinter by Anne Rice
I think this is my second Anne Rice novel. My first in a very long time. This is about werewolves, I'm guessing. I hope it's not werewolves who put on way too much Axe body spray.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 43: Medicus
This week's book:
Medicus: a Novel of the Roman Empire by Ruth Downie
Grade: A
In college one of my concentrations was Classics, Latin and Greek. Later I taught Latin, which included a healthy helping of Roman culture and customs. I always told my students that even though we modern Americans get many of our legal traditions and symbols from Romans - not to mention Christianity - the Romans of classical times were very, very different people from you and I. Their culture was a slave culture through and through, and that's not something modern people really get. Sure, we understand it intellectually, but we don't feel it, we haven't ever participated in the cultural evil of holding another person in bondage so our understanding of slavery lies on the shallow end of the enlightenment pool. It was always tough, maybe impossible, to get the truth across to my students.
I wish this book had been available back then.
Medicus is a murder mystery, set in Roman-occupied Britain back in the Second Century AD. The hero is the physician - a 'medicus' - Gaius Petreius Ruso, late of Rome itself. He used to be in the Emperor's favor, but Roman politics and intrigue conspired against him, his wife divorced him, and his family farm in Gaul is in trouble and his brother might have to sell. Overwhelmed by circumstance, he flees to military medical service in the Empire's hinterlands, among the barbarians. He's slowly coming undone, becoming less than who he thought he was without finding who he really is. Then, someone finds a body in the river, and Ruso can't stop asking questions. His already complicated life becomes much more messy.
So far it sounds like a fairly straightforward mystery. Sure, the trappings are Roman - and suitably authentic, I can vouch for that - but the situation could be a regular modern mystery. Then we find out that the dead woman fished out of the river was a slave. And then we find out there are more dead slaves, all women, and no one seems to know anything. Slowly the author pulls back the veil and lets the readers see that slavery corrupts. Everyone touched by the slave trade, even the hero Ruso, becomes soiled by it. They're all dirty, it's just that some are dirtier than others.
Balancing that tension is what led me to like this book. More than once characters say 'anyone can buy a girl,' with a casual voice that made me shiver. It's true, that's the way things work in a slave economy, people aren't people, they're property, and treated only as well as their owner treats his things. The characters are in a terrible society, but it's the only one they have; they don't know any other way. They try to do good, but it never works out right.
The story is suitably convoluted for a murder mystery, complicated by the hero's own personal shortcomings, and it comes to a satisfactory conclusion, with all the loose ends tied off. But even the final pages, where the hero comes to a triumph of sorts, involve slavery and the inherent power imbalance between master and slave.
You can read this book just for the mystery part, which is very good, or just for the Roman culture and history part, which is also very good and incredibly real, or you can read it for the deeper shades of meaning that apply to our own time and place. I recommend the third one.
Next week:
Damned by Chuck Palahniuk
The dude who wrote 'Fight Club.' I read 'Fight Club' years ago and didn't really like it. Too... I don't know... angry white guy? This is about a dead teenaged girl. I'm trying to go into it with no expectations, we'll see how well that works out.
Medicus: a Novel of the Roman Empire by Ruth Downie
Grade: A
In college one of my concentrations was Classics, Latin and Greek. Later I taught Latin, which included a healthy helping of Roman culture and customs. I always told my students that even though we modern Americans get many of our legal traditions and symbols from Romans - not to mention Christianity - the Romans of classical times were very, very different people from you and I. Their culture was a slave culture through and through, and that's not something modern people really get. Sure, we understand it intellectually, but we don't feel it, we haven't ever participated in the cultural evil of holding another person in bondage so our understanding of slavery lies on the shallow end of the enlightenment pool. It was always tough, maybe impossible, to get the truth across to my students.
I wish this book had been available back then.
Medicus is a murder mystery, set in Roman-occupied Britain back in the Second Century AD. The hero is the physician - a 'medicus' - Gaius Petreius Ruso, late of Rome itself. He used to be in the Emperor's favor, but Roman politics and intrigue conspired against him, his wife divorced him, and his family farm in Gaul is in trouble and his brother might have to sell. Overwhelmed by circumstance, he flees to military medical service in the Empire's hinterlands, among the barbarians. He's slowly coming undone, becoming less than who he thought he was without finding who he really is. Then, someone finds a body in the river, and Ruso can't stop asking questions. His already complicated life becomes much more messy.
So far it sounds like a fairly straightforward mystery. Sure, the trappings are Roman - and suitably authentic, I can vouch for that - but the situation could be a regular modern mystery. Then we find out that the dead woman fished out of the river was a slave. And then we find out there are more dead slaves, all women, and no one seems to know anything. Slowly the author pulls back the veil and lets the readers see that slavery corrupts. Everyone touched by the slave trade, even the hero Ruso, becomes soiled by it. They're all dirty, it's just that some are dirtier than others.
Balancing that tension is what led me to like this book. More than once characters say 'anyone can buy a girl,' with a casual voice that made me shiver. It's true, that's the way things work in a slave economy, people aren't people, they're property, and treated only as well as their owner treats his things. The characters are in a terrible society, but it's the only one they have; they don't know any other way. They try to do good, but it never works out right.
The story is suitably convoluted for a murder mystery, complicated by the hero's own personal shortcomings, and it comes to a satisfactory conclusion, with all the loose ends tied off. But even the final pages, where the hero comes to a triumph of sorts, involve slavery and the inherent power imbalance between master and slave.
You can read this book just for the mystery part, which is very good, or just for the Roman culture and history part, which is also very good and incredibly real, or you can read it for the deeper shades of meaning that apply to our own time and place. I recommend the third one.
Next week:
Damned by Chuck Palahniuk
The dude who wrote 'Fight Club.' I read 'Fight Club' years ago and didn't really like it. Too... I don't know... angry white guy? This is about a dead teenaged girl. I'm trying to go into it with no expectations, we'll see how well that works out.
Sunday, October 20, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 42: The Lies of Locke Lamora
This week's book:
The Lies Of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
Grade: B+
I liked this book. It was mechanically sound, had a decent plot with twists and turns and what-have-yous, and was an entertaining read. The hero is a con man whose only real talent is lying, a thief who preys exclusively on the wealthy of his city. But he's not nearly as clever or untouchable as he thinks he is. Good premise.
So why the B+? Well, sit down a spell and I'll tell you why...
This is a fantasy novel, and by that I mean adult fantasy. No, not that kind of 'adult' fantasy, I mean it's more like Game of Thrones than Harry Potter. For grown-ups instead of kids. The main character, Locke Lamora, lives in a world where magic is real - but not ubiquitous - and alchemy is real and poverty is real and slavery is very real, and people live by intrigue and trickery or they don't live very long at all.
When you get a brand-new fantasy world, you have to allow the author the page count to do a decent job of world building. Some things need explanation, after all, especially if they're germane to the plot. But it's a fine line between explaining the way your fantasy world works and losing your narration in the details. Sometimes the author stepped over that line. Many times, actually. We don't get to even the hints of the plot of the book until about 50 pages in. There is actually a Prologue, which in publishing nowadays just isn't done. Honestly, I'm surprised the term 'Prologue' survived the editing process, if I were in charge that would have been my first edit.
The author never gets past this tendency to navel-gaze the details of his world. Time after time after time the narration is interrupted with an explanation of some point of the world that's going to be important in ten pages or so. I get it, you thought this through, but this over-reliance on exposition of the details of the world is just like when other authors over-share their research. Dan Brown, I'm looking your direction here. It gets in the way and only calls attention to itself.
There is too much dialogue. Luckily, the author avoids - mostly - the kind of too-clever 'author's voice' dialogue I loathe; the characters speak in their own voice. They just do too much of it. There is banter between characters, which is the author's self-indulgence leaking through, and it persists long after establishing mood and defining relationships. Towards the end the dialogue veered into exposition from time to time.
Because of the first two points, too much world-building and too much dialogue, the book is too long. Much too long. The plot, even with its twists and setbacks, could have been accomplished in 450 pages instead of 650. When I actually have to turn off the page count on my e-book reader because the countdown to the end is interminable, you know the book is too long.
Also, even though this is a fantasy world, the author clearly based it on the Italian Renaissance, probably Venice or Florence or a combination of both. There are many Italianate words and names and terms, which keeps them from sounding like Fake Fantasy names, but doesn't allow them to fade into the background either. I got the feeling that the heroes would take a gondola to St. Mark's Basilica any moment.
Even though I have my complaints and I graded it a B+, I really did like the book. It's clever, and the fantasy elements hang together. The hero is likable even though he's a rogue and a con man, and the bad guys' motivations seemed reasonable enough. As far as first novels go, it was much, much better than Twilight or Ready Player One, but not quite as good as The Golem and the Jinni or The Panopticon.
Next week:
????
I have absolutely no idea. I need to go to the bookstore and find something tomorrow.
The Lies Of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
Grade: B+
I liked this book. It was mechanically sound, had a decent plot with twists and turns and what-have-yous, and was an entertaining read. The hero is a con man whose only real talent is lying, a thief who preys exclusively on the wealthy of his city. But he's not nearly as clever or untouchable as he thinks he is. Good premise.
So why the B+? Well, sit down a spell and I'll tell you why...
This is a fantasy novel, and by that I mean adult fantasy. No, not that kind of 'adult' fantasy, I mean it's more like Game of Thrones than Harry Potter. For grown-ups instead of kids. The main character, Locke Lamora, lives in a world where magic is real - but not ubiquitous - and alchemy is real and poverty is real and slavery is very real, and people live by intrigue and trickery or they don't live very long at all.
When you get a brand-new fantasy world, you have to allow the author the page count to do a decent job of world building. Some things need explanation, after all, especially if they're germane to the plot. But it's a fine line between explaining the way your fantasy world works and losing your narration in the details. Sometimes the author stepped over that line. Many times, actually. We don't get to even the hints of the plot of the book until about 50 pages in. There is actually a Prologue, which in publishing nowadays just isn't done. Honestly, I'm surprised the term 'Prologue' survived the editing process, if I were in charge that would have been my first edit.
The author never gets past this tendency to navel-gaze the details of his world. Time after time after time the narration is interrupted with an explanation of some point of the world that's going to be important in ten pages or so. I get it, you thought this through, but this over-reliance on exposition of the details of the world is just like when other authors over-share their research. Dan Brown, I'm looking your direction here. It gets in the way and only calls attention to itself.
There is too much dialogue. Luckily, the author avoids - mostly - the kind of too-clever 'author's voice' dialogue I loathe; the characters speak in their own voice. They just do too much of it. There is banter between characters, which is the author's self-indulgence leaking through, and it persists long after establishing mood and defining relationships. Towards the end the dialogue veered into exposition from time to time.
Because of the first two points, too much world-building and too much dialogue, the book is too long. Much too long. The plot, even with its twists and setbacks, could have been accomplished in 450 pages instead of 650. When I actually have to turn off the page count on my e-book reader because the countdown to the end is interminable, you know the book is too long.
Also, even though this is a fantasy world, the author clearly based it on the Italian Renaissance, probably Venice or Florence or a combination of both. There are many Italianate words and names and terms, which keeps them from sounding like Fake Fantasy names, but doesn't allow them to fade into the background either. I got the feeling that the heroes would take a gondola to St. Mark's Basilica any moment.
Even though I have my complaints and I graded it a B+, I really did like the book. It's clever, and the fantasy elements hang together. The hero is likable even though he's a rogue and a con man, and the bad guys' motivations seemed reasonable enough. As far as first novels go, it was much, much better than Twilight or Ready Player One, but not quite as good as The Golem and the Jinni or The Panopticon.
Next week:
????
I have absolutely no idea. I need to go to the bookstore and find something tomorrow.
Sunday, October 13, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 41: Why I Jump
** Fair warning, I get very, very, very cussy below. If you don't
like a lot of bad words spread around like spiteful mayonnaise on an
anger sandwich, skip this one and wait until next week. **
This week's book:
The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida -- really by his mother
Grade: F-- this is a bullshit scam using 'facilitated communication.' Do not buy this book, it's charlatanism of the highest order.
Fuck this guy, fuck his mother, and fuck his transcriber. Fuck his Japanese publisher, fuck his American publisher, fuck his English translator and fuck Apple and iTunes for making it available.
And a very special two-middle-fingers-waaaaaaay-up for Jon Stewart. Fuck him sideways with a watermelon for giving this awful, despicable, entirely-discredited and thoroughly exposed fraud a fresh start on national cable TV (more on that below).
This book is a fraud. From start to finish. Do not buy this or even read it if someone gives it to you, it's pure fakery.
I suspected as much, when I heard about Mr. Higashida. He's severely autistic, essentially non-verbal, and the means he used to 'write' this book is facilitated communication. You may have heard about this in the 90's, it's where an assistant - in this case his mother - holds a disabled person's hand or arm, allowing them the smooth control to point to letters or words (or ideograms in Japanese) and make themselves understood.
The problem is, the disabled person isn't the one doing the pointing.
Study after study after study has proved that facilitated communication is nothing more than the 'facilitator' doing the typing. With very simple methods it's been demonstrated time and again. For instance, when the disabled person is shown a picture of a cat, but the facilitator sees a dog, the disabled person types 'dog.' Or when the facilitator can't see the word, oddly enough the disabled person types something random.
Even better, the facilitator usually has to be the same person all the time. If the disabled person really just needed a steady hand it wouldn't matter whose hand it was, or even whether they could see what the disabled person could. And yet, when the disabled person's special facilitator is taken away, the disabled person stops being able to communicate. Like when 'psychics' are asked to reproduce their methods in lab settings, the ability just flees them for some reason. Because they're faking.
Naoki Higashida did not write this book. His mother did, using long-disproved methods. For a week I have looked for proof of Mr. Higashida's independence in this matter. I just need one video, or one reliable first-hand account of him writing on his own, where his mother isn't looking at his alphabet board or a disinterested third party does the facilitating. I found nothing. Not a single independently verified instance of Mr. Higashida doing anything like writing.
** If someone can provide me this proof, I will gladly retract everything in this review. I'll start holding my breath now. **
I understand why Mr. Higashida's mother does this. It was hard enough for me to try to know the mind of the autistic kids at camp and fail, and I only had them for a week, five nights. The parent of a person locked away into autism craves understanding, they want to know - or feel they know - what's going on with their child. So they buy into this kind of crap, hoping their child can reveal themselves.
Facilitated communication tells parents they can know their child, that it's simple and easy, all the child has to do is point. But it's just a late-20th Century version of spiritualism, nothing but fakery and self-deception. And so very cruel. I wouldn't wish the false hope 'facilitated communication' offers on my worst enemy.
Which is where Jon Stewart comes in. He of 'The Daily Show,' a man who is adept at parsing political speech and asking tough questions, never questioned this book at all. He took at face value the proposition that a severely autistic man, who can't even be demonstrated to read let alone write, dictated a book word by word. Jon Stewart researches his comedy assiduously, and picks apart situations to shovel away the bullshit and expose the lies. But he just sat in awe of this garbage, and whole-heartedly recommended this miserable excuse for book to all his viewers. Then he crowed about it shooting up the charts, never suspecting that it was complete and utter bullshit.
So fuck you, Jon Stewart. Fuck you to Hell and back for all the damage you're going to do to families with autistic kids because you couldn't be bothered to do your homework. People are going to read 'Why I Jump' and expect their autistic children to be able to make their wishes known using 'facilitated communication.' At best they'll be heartbroken when it doesn't work, and at worst they'll be victims of their own hope and believe, even for a short time, that their child can actually communicate, before the veil is ripped away and they learn the awful truth. Fuck you.
Next week:
The Lies Of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
A first novel. I'm kind of hit or miss with first novels, but I've found I like rolling the dice. Maybe because with the last few I've hit my point. Some day I'm going to crap out again, though.
This week's book:
The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida -- really by his mother
Grade: F-- this is a bullshit scam using 'facilitated communication.' Do not buy this book, it's charlatanism of the highest order.
Fuck this guy, fuck his mother, and fuck his transcriber. Fuck his Japanese publisher, fuck his American publisher, fuck his English translator and fuck Apple and iTunes for making it available.
And a very special two-middle-fingers-waaaaaaay-up for Jon Stewart. Fuck him sideways with a watermelon for giving this awful, despicable, entirely-discredited and thoroughly exposed fraud a fresh start on national cable TV (more on that below).
This book is a fraud. From start to finish. Do not buy this or even read it if someone gives it to you, it's pure fakery.
I suspected as much, when I heard about Mr. Higashida. He's severely autistic, essentially non-verbal, and the means he used to 'write' this book is facilitated communication. You may have heard about this in the 90's, it's where an assistant - in this case his mother - holds a disabled person's hand or arm, allowing them the smooth control to point to letters or words (or ideograms in Japanese) and make themselves understood.
The problem is, the disabled person isn't the one doing the pointing.
Study after study after study has proved that facilitated communication is nothing more than the 'facilitator' doing the typing. With very simple methods it's been demonstrated time and again. For instance, when the disabled person is shown a picture of a cat, but the facilitator sees a dog, the disabled person types 'dog.' Or when the facilitator can't see the word, oddly enough the disabled person types something random.
Even better, the facilitator usually has to be the same person all the time. If the disabled person really just needed a steady hand it wouldn't matter whose hand it was, or even whether they could see what the disabled person could. And yet, when the disabled person's special facilitator is taken away, the disabled person stops being able to communicate. Like when 'psychics' are asked to reproduce their methods in lab settings, the ability just flees them for some reason. Because they're faking.
Naoki Higashida did not write this book. His mother did, using long-disproved methods. For a week I have looked for proof of Mr. Higashida's independence in this matter. I just need one video, or one reliable first-hand account of him writing on his own, where his mother isn't looking at his alphabet board or a disinterested third party does the facilitating. I found nothing. Not a single independently verified instance of Mr. Higashida doing anything like writing.
** If someone can provide me this proof, I will gladly retract everything in this review. I'll start holding my breath now. **
I understand why Mr. Higashida's mother does this. It was hard enough for me to try to know the mind of the autistic kids at camp and fail, and I only had them for a week, five nights. The parent of a person locked away into autism craves understanding, they want to know - or feel they know - what's going on with their child. So they buy into this kind of crap, hoping their child can reveal themselves.
Facilitated communication tells parents they can know their child, that it's simple and easy, all the child has to do is point. But it's just a late-20th Century version of spiritualism, nothing but fakery and self-deception. And so very cruel. I wouldn't wish the false hope 'facilitated communication' offers on my worst enemy.
Which is where Jon Stewart comes in. He of 'The Daily Show,' a man who is adept at parsing political speech and asking tough questions, never questioned this book at all. He took at face value the proposition that a severely autistic man, who can't even be demonstrated to read let alone write, dictated a book word by word. Jon Stewart researches his comedy assiduously, and picks apart situations to shovel away the bullshit and expose the lies. But he just sat in awe of this garbage, and whole-heartedly recommended this miserable excuse for book to all his viewers. Then he crowed about it shooting up the charts, never suspecting that it was complete and utter bullshit.
So fuck you, Jon Stewart. Fuck you to Hell and back for all the damage you're going to do to families with autistic kids because you couldn't be bothered to do your homework. People are going to read 'Why I Jump' and expect their autistic children to be able to make their wishes known using 'facilitated communication.' At best they'll be heartbroken when it doesn't work, and at worst they'll be victims of their own hope and believe, even for a short time, that their child can actually communicate, before the veil is ripped away and they learn the awful truth. Fuck you.
Next week:
The Lies Of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
A first novel. I'm kind of hit or miss with first novels, but I've found I like rolling the dice. Maybe because with the last few I've hit my point. Some day I'm going to crap out again, though.
Sunday, October 6, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 40: Doctor Sleep
This week's book:
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
Grade: A for the novel itself
B- for the horror
This is my very first Stephen King novel. I kind-of read a short story decades ago and that was as far as I got. I've seen more Stephen King movies than I have read Stephen King books. I have to say, I liked it. But then again, Mr. King has been a professional novelist for almost as long as I've been alive, so he'd better have learned a thing or two about telling a story.
Here it is in a nutshell: the kid from The Shining, Danny, has grown up. He's reliving all his father's mistakes, becoming an alcoholic and drug addict. He tells himself it's a way to numb the 'shine' that shows him when people will die, but he knows that's not the real reason. He hits rock bottom and starts to climb his way out with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then he meets a little girl named Abra (no, really, that's her name) who has more of the shine than he does. Trouble is, there are others after her as well, and they're not nice at all.
I liked this story more for its first part, where Danny - now Dan - is on his slow slide to the lowest point in his life. Mr. King is himself a decades-sober alcoholic, and the description of Dan's worst moment rings completely true. In the story it's complicated by his shining (psychic powers), but those chapters felt to me like the author ripping the scabs off his own addiction and ascribing the pain and remorse to a character. Really good. Beyond good.
The rest of the story... meh. It wasn't bad. but it didn't feel so much like a horror novel to me as a comic book in novel form. There's astral projection, telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, all sorts of mental powers. And then there are bad guys who feed off the shine of non-bad guys. Yup... vampires. Not blood-sucking vampires, soul-sucking vampires. Same diff. At least they weren't glowing and angsty teens, they were old. And drove RVs. Like vampire Travelers.
In the first half of the novel, when the narrative got to the horror parts where the bad guys were preying on their victims, who have to be children because the shining is strongest in them, I felt uncomfortable. Like I didn't want to read it. Then I realized that was pretty much the aim, the author intends those passages to be uncomfortable (scary?) as part of the genre convention. Thing is, after a couple of these I got numb to it. It stopped making me uncomfortable. And with all the psychic comic-book-y stuff going on, it kind of got lost in the whirl. This is why I graded the novel down for its horror elements. Sure, there are ghosts and vampires and revenants and what-have-yous, but they're opposed by two of the most powerful psychics around. Tight and suspenseful, but not terribly scary.
Maybe one of my favorite parts of the story is what Danny does with his gifts. Since he can read minds, and move stuff, and see ghosts, you could imagine what sort of charlatanism he might engage in. But after he finds sobriety, he settles into a hospice, where he provides comfort for the residents in their last minutes alive. It's a kind, gentle sort of application of an amazing talent, one that makes the character more human despite the incredible things he can do. It's also why the staff call him 'Doctor Sleep.' Good choice, Mr. King.
Next week:
The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida
Years ago I worked several summers at a camp for handicapped kids, including severely autistic ones. I know many autistic people, and a hallmark of for-real, no-shit autism is the inability to communicate, it's almost the defining characteristic. This is a book purportedly written by an autistic boy. Or maybe 'written,' you can make your own finger quotes. I'm not buying it until someone proves it to me. Stay tuned.
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
Grade: A for the novel itself
B- for the horror
This is my very first Stephen King novel. I kind-of read a short story decades ago and that was as far as I got. I've seen more Stephen King movies than I have read Stephen King books. I have to say, I liked it. But then again, Mr. King has been a professional novelist for almost as long as I've been alive, so he'd better have learned a thing or two about telling a story.
Here it is in a nutshell: the kid from The Shining, Danny, has grown up. He's reliving all his father's mistakes, becoming an alcoholic and drug addict. He tells himself it's a way to numb the 'shine' that shows him when people will die, but he knows that's not the real reason. He hits rock bottom and starts to climb his way out with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then he meets a little girl named Abra (no, really, that's her name) who has more of the shine than he does. Trouble is, there are others after her as well, and they're not nice at all.
I liked this story more for its first part, where Danny - now Dan - is on his slow slide to the lowest point in his life. Mr. King is himself a decades-sober alcoholic, and the description of Dan's worst moment rings completely true. In the story it's complicated by his shining (psychic powers), but those chapters felt to me like the author ripping the scabs off his own addiction and ascribing the pain and remorse to a character. Really good. Beyond good.
The rest of the story... meh. It wasn't bad. but it didn't feel so much like a horror novel to me as a comic book in novel form. There's astral projection, telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, all sorts of mental powers. And then there are bad guys who feed off the shine of non-bad guys. Yup... vampires. Not blood-sucking vampires, soul-sucking vampires. Same diff. At least they weren't glowing and angsty teens, they were old. And drove RVs. Like vampire Travelers.
In the first half of the novel, when the narrative got to the horror parts where the bad guys were preying on their victims, who have to be children because the shining is strongest in them, I felt uncomfortable. Like I didn't want to read it. Then I realized that was pretty much the aim, the author intends those passages to be uncomfortable (scary?) as part of the genre convention. Thing is, after a couple of these I got numb to it. It stopped making me uncomfortable. And with all the psychic comic-book-y stuff going on, it kind of got lost in the whirl. This is why I graded the novel down for its horror elements. Sure, there are ghosts and vampires and revenants and what-have-yous, but they're opposed by two of the most powerful psychics around. Tight and suspenseful, but not terribly scary.
Maybe one of my favorite parts of the story is what Danny does with his gifts. Since he can read minds, and move stuff, and see ghosts, you could imagine what sort of charlatanism he might engage in. But after he finds sobriety, he settles into a hospice, where he provides comfort for the residents in their last minutes alive. It's a kind, gentle sort of application of an amazing talent, one that makes the character more human despite the incredible things he can do. It's also why the staff call him 'Doctor Sleep.' Good choice, Mr. King.
Next week:
The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida
Years ago I worked several summers at a camp for handicapped kids, including severely autistic ones. I know many autistic people, and a hallmark of for-real, no-shit autism is the inability to communicate, it's almost the defining characteristic. This is a book purportedly written by an autistic boy. Or maybe 'written,' you can make your own finger quotes. I'm not buying it until someone proves it to me. Stay tuned.
Sunday, September 29, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 39: Five Days At Memorial
This week's book:
Five Days At Memorial by Sheri Fink
Grade: A-
"Brownie, you're doin' a heck of a job." - George Bush, 02 Sep 2005
I was in Virginia during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall on 29 Aug 2005. I remember the 'heck of a job' quote, which seemed at the time such an incongruous, out-of-touch thing to say, what with people in New Orleans still calling for rescue from the attics of their flooded homes.
After reading this book, I actually got angry.
If you were alive and over the age of about ten back in 2005, you remember Katrina. You also remember the way every government entity, from the municipalities all the way up to the Federal government completely underestimated the severity of the storm, even though NOAA and other agencies warned of the bad things to come. When things did turn from bad to worse in New Orleans, the situation was magnified by massive incompetence, failure, and miscommunication at all levels, and then compounded by panic and despair. The author of Five Days at Memorial examines the situation in one of New Orleans' oldest hospitals at great length.
Why Memorial? Because it's where doctors and nurses killed patients. On purpose.
Yup, it happened. Only three days after the levees broke, five days after Katrina made landfall. Things in New Orleans had taken 72 hours to degenerate into a lawless, every-man-for-himself situation, one where health care professionals - at least a few of them - and one very overwhelmed administrator thought the best course of action for a few problematic, almost certainly terminal patients would be to end their lives.
How could such a thing come to pass? Read the book and you'll find out.
No one gets away without a scathing critique in this book, not the City of New Orleans, not the doctors and nurses involved in giving the injections that gradually stole the breath from their patients, not the Federal government, not the local police or National Guard, and especially not the corporate shills at Tenet Health Care, owners of both Memorial Hospital and the LifeCare business unit hosted there.
It's not an easy read. For any other topic I'd say Ms. Fink makes the subject entertaining, but when she follows failure after failure and outrage after outrage it's hard to call that entertaining. Thorough, perhaps? It's a case study in what can happen when precisely the wrong corporate culture intersects with precisely the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Heartbreaking. And infuriating.
I loved it, even though it made me madder with practically every page, but I graded it down to an A- because it's so damned long. In other non-fiction the extra page count came from extensive notes. And there are extensive notes with Five Days At Memorial. There are also 689 pages of text. That's a lot of book by anyone's measure. Not a light read at all.
I think this book should be required reading for any emergency manager. Back in 2005 none of the people in charge took their preparations seriously, leaving staff in an emergency with no direction, people who were unsuited to the challenge. And medical professionals euthanized patients because of it. An object lesson for everyone.
If you're a medical professional you must read this book. You think it can't happen to you, but so did these doctors and nurses. Aside from them, anyone who wants to understand how seriously incompetent the entire emergency response apparatus in the US was in 2005 should give it a look. Keep in mind the events in the book happened four years after 9/11. Let's hope they learned their lesson.
Next week:
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
My first Stephen King novel. Really. I saw 'The Shining' in the theater and loved it, but that was Kubrick, after all. Before he even considered 'Eyes Wide Shut.'
Five Days At Memorial by Sheri Fink
Grade: A-
"Brownie, you're doin' a heck of a job." - George Bush, 02 Sep 2005
I was in Virginia during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall on 29 Aug 2005. I remember the 'heck of a job' quote, which seemed at the time such an incongruous, out-of-touch thing to say, what with people in New Orleans still calling for rescue from the attics of their flooded homes.
After reading this book, I actually got angry.
If you were alive and over the age of about ten back in 2005, you remember Katrina. You also remember the way every government entity, from the municipalities all the way up to the Federal government completely underestimated the severity of the storm, even though NOAA and other agencies warned of the bad things to come. When things did turn from bad to worse in New Orleans, the situation was magnified by massive incompetence, failure, and miscommunication at all levels, and then compounded by panic and despair. The author of Five Days at Memorial examines the situation in one of New Orleans' oldest hospitals at great length.
Why Memorial? Because it's where doctors and nurses killed patients. On purpose.
Yup, it happened. Only three days after the levees broke, five days after Katrina made landfall. Things in New Orleans had taken 72 hours to degenerate into a lawless, every-man-for-himself situation, one where health care professionals - at least a few of them - and one very overwhelmed administrator thought the best course of action for a few problematic, almost certainly terminal patients would be to end their lives.
How could such a thing come to pass? Read the book and you'll find out.
No one gets away without a scathing critique in this book, not the City of New Orleans, not the doctors and nurses involved in giving the injections that gradually stole the breath from their patients, not the Federal government, not the local police or National Guard, and especially not the corporate shills at Tenet Health Care, owners of both Memorial Hospital and the LifeCare business unit hosted there.
It's not an easy read. For any other topic I'd say Ms. Fink makes the subject entertaining, but when she follows failure after failure and outrage after outrage it's hard to call that entertaining. Thorough, perhaps? It's a case study in what can happen when precisely the wrong corporate culture intersects with precisely the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Heartbreaking. And infuriating.
I loved it, even though it made me madder with practically every page, but I graded it down to an A- because it's so damned long. In other non-fiction the extra page count came from extensive notes. And there are extensive notes with Five Days At Memorial. There are also 689 pages of text. That's a lot of book by anyone's measure. Not a light read at all.
I think this book should be required reading for any emergency manager. Back in 2005 none of the people in charge took their preparations seriously, leaving staff in an emergency with no direction, people who were unsuited to the challenge. And medical professionals euthanized patients because of it. An object lesson for everyone.
If you're a medical professional you must read this book. You think it can't happen to you, but so did these doctors and nurses. Aside from them, anyone who wants to understand how seriously incompetent the entire emergency response apparatus in the US was in 2005 should give it a look. Keep in mind the events in the book happened four years after 9/11. Let's hope they learned their lesson.
Next week:
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
My first Stephen King novel. Really. I saw 'The Shining' in the theater and loved it, but that was Kubrick, after all. Before he even considered 'Eyes Wide Shut.'
Sunday, September 22, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 38: The Princess Bride
This week's book:
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
Grade: A+
Better than the movie, and the movie is one of the greatest of all time. You need to read this book.
Next week:
Five Days At...
I'm sorry... what? You want more detail about The Princess Bride? Sure, I can do that.
William Goldman is a celebrated screenwriter with impeccable credits, including two Academy Awards. He wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All The President's Men, Marathon Man. And, of course, The Princess Bride.*
Before it was an amazing screenplay and one of my favorite movies ever, though, The Princess Bride was a book. A fantastic book, it turns out. William Goldman has been one of my screenwriting heroes for some time. Now he's one of my book-writing heroes too.
The set-up runs a little like the framing sequences in the movie. The author claims that his near-illiterate father read the book aloud to him when he was sick with pneumonia, and that it was this book by S. Morgenstern that turned him into the literary powerhouse he is. He tried to find the book for his son on his tenth birthday to recreate his own discovery on his tenth. His son didn't like the book. When Goldman read the book (keep in mind this is all fiction too) he discovered that the original Florinese writer had produced a work that was unreadable, full of pages of discussions of hats and customs and whatnot. Things that didn't interest scholars let alone ten-year-old boys.
When his father read it aloud, come to find out, he skipped all the boring parts and just included the good parts. The swordfighting, poison, pirates, spiders, pain, death, chases, and miracles. So what Goldman did was abridge the original, to make a book that matched the one his immigrant father read to him when he was sick. That's still fiction, there has never been a country called Florin. I checked.
The book follows the movie, for the most part. But there is so much more in the book. So much more. If you've seen the movie you know the plot. But do you know who Inigo's father actually was, and why the Count killed him? Do you know Fezzik's story, or that he was a Turk before he became French and Andre the Giant? You'll have to read the book to discover these things.
I loved every moment I spent reading this book. Yes, it's from an older literary tradition, one where the author speaks directly to the reader sometimes, but it still holds up. It's better than many of the newer books I've read during this year of a book a week.
Who should read this book? If you loved the movie you'll love this book, I guarantee it. If you didn't see the movie then you absolutely need to read this book, and then see the movie. If you love adventure stories, if you love love stories, if you love being immersed in one man's clearly overactive imagination then you'll love this book.
If you hated the movie then... you're clearly a communist and you deserve a punch in the throat. How could you not like The Princess Bride? What the hell is wrong with you?
* he has also made millions upon millions of dollars as the uncredited script doctor - essentially ghost writer - on many very successful Hollywood movies. There are rumors about which ones (Good Will Hunting, for example), but you'll never find out for certain. Mr. Goldman has made a fortune by keeping his mouth shut.
Next week:
Five Days At Memorial by Sheri Fink
Back to non-fiction. The story of what happened at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans in the days during and immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit the city. I don't think this is going to be as fun as The Princess Bride.
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
Grade: A+
Better than the movie, and the movie is one of the greatest of all time. You need to read this book.
Next week:
Five Days At...
I'm sorry... what? You want more detail about The Princess Bride? Sure, I can do that.
William Goldman is a celebrated screenwriter with impeccable credits, including two Academy Awards. He wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All The President's Men, Marathon Man. And, of course, The Princess Bride.*
Before it was an amazing screenplay and one of my favorite movies ever, though, The Princess Bride was a book. A fantastic book, it turns out. William Goldman has been one of my screenwriting heroes for some time. Now he's one of my book-writing heroes too.
The set-up runs a little like the framing sequences in the movie. The author claims that his near-illiterate father read the book aloud to him when he was sick with pneumonia, and that it was this book by S. Morgenstern that turned him into the literary powerhouse he is. He tried to find the book for his son on his tenth birthday to recreate his own discovery on his tenth. His son didn't like the book. When Goldman read the book (keep in mind this is all fiction too) he discovered that the original Florinese writer had produced a work that was unreadable, full of pages of discussions of hats and customs and whatnot. Things that didn't interest scholars let alone ten-year-old boys.
When his father read it aloud, come to find out, he skipped all the boring parts and just included the good parts. The swordfighting, poison, pirates, spiders, pain, death, chases, and miracles. So what Goldman did was abridge the original, to make a book that matched the one his immigrant father read to him when he was sick. That's still fiction, there has never been a country called Florin. I checked.
The book follows the movie, for the most part. But there is so much more in the book. So much more. If you've seen the movie you know the plot. But do you know who Inigo's father actually was, and why the Count killed him? Do you know Fezzik's story, or that he was a Turk before he became French and Andre the Giant? You'll have to read the book to discover these things.
I loved every moment I spent reading this book. Yes, it's from an older literary tradition, one where the author speaks directly to the reader sometimes, but it still holds up. It's better than many of the newer books I've read during this year of a book a week.
Who should read this book? If you loved the movie you'll love this book, I guarantee it. If you didn't see the movie then you absolutely need to read this book, and then see the movie. If you love adventure stories, if you love love stories, if you love being immersed in one man's clearly overactive imagination then you'll love this book.
If you hated the movie then... you're clearly a communist and you deserve a punch in the throat. How could you not like The Princess Bride? What the hell is wrong with you?
* he has also made millions upon millions of dollars as the uncredited script doctor - essentially ghost writer - on many very successful Hollywood movies. There are rumors about which ones (Good Will Hunting, for example), but you'll never find out for certain. Mr. Goldman has made a fortune by keeping his mouth shut.
Next week:
Five Days At Memorial by Sheri Fink
Back to non-fiction. The story of what happened at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans in the days during and immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit the city. I don't think this is going to be as fun as The Princess Bride.
Sunday, September 15, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 37: TekWar
This week's book:
TekWar by William Shatner (really Ron Goulart)
Grade: D+
Here's all you need to know about TekWar to make an informed decision about the kind of book it is. The main character's name is Jake Cardigan.
Cardigan. Like the sweater Mr. Rogers wore every day. That cardigan. They could have picked any other last name - it's fiction, after all - but they went with Cardigan. How about Jake Pullover? Or Jake Necktie? Or Jake Waistcoat? If you're not going to take naming your main character seriously, why take anything seriously?
Another name minus: there is a character named Warbride. I'm not lying.
This was such a truly, astonishingly awful novel that it's really hard to know where to start. Is it the cardboard characters? Is it the terrible dialogue? Is it the horrible mechanics? Is it the miserable excuse for a story?
I will tell you one thing, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Or worse, depends on the direction you're coming from. As a singular work, TekWar is exponentially more awful than its transgressions.
None of it's good, but let me pick two of the worst parts to expound on: the dialogue and the setting.
Dialogue: unless you pick up the book and read it yourself, it's hard to convey how terrible this is. No one speaks the way the characters in this book speak. Now, realistic speech is not necessarily a requirement, City of Bohane demonstrates that, but the dialogue in TekWar wasn't a stylized, made-up patois. The characters in TekWar used the English we're familiar with, but the execution is just awful. It's clear that the author - not really William Shatner - did not read this dialogue out loud. If it were just one character with an odd way of speaking I might be able to excuse it as a failed experiment in dialect. But they all speak like they're sitting behind a typewriter, planning what they'll say in the next paragraph. Practically every page includes needless exposition, and Jake Cardigan, Two-Fisted Detective, has the annoying habit of commenting on the narrative as if it were coming from his own head. It's not a first-person point of view.
Setting: there's no reason for this to be a sci-fi novel. This is a cop story, and not a very good one. There's a lot of mention of sci-fi type materials, an awful lot of those, like someone went to a Home Depot and tried to think of what they'd call aluminum in 200 years. And there are flying cars, and Los Angeles now includes 'Sector' after every city name, like 'Pasadena Sector.' And there are robots. And androids which are robots who look like people. And Tek, which is a kind of psychoactive drug delivered by microchip. But the story doesn't really depend on these, all the sci-fi stuff is window dressing. Replace 'tek' with 'cocaine' and this could be a story from Miami Vice in 1987. It speaks to a lack of understanding of the genre, the sci-fi elements should enhance and amplify a contemporary conflict, allowing the author to explore real-word consequences in a fantastic setting. This is just TJ Hooker with flying cars.
Quite possibly the worst sin? It's boring. Dull, dull, dreadfully dull. I can excuse a lot of bad stuff if the author takes me on a ride. This wasn't a roller coaster, this was a plodding donkey-ride with an old, tired donkey. It takes over 100 pages of a 300 page book to get things going, and when things did start happening I found I didn't care.
Who should read this book? No one. I took the bullet for the rest of you, please, for the love of Spock, do not try this at home.
One plus: at least it wasn't set in Florida.
Next week:
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
It was a book before it was a movie. Years before. 1973, in fact.
TekWar by William Shatner (really Ron Goulart)
Grade: D+
Here's all you need to know about TekWar to make an informed decision about the kind of book it is. The main character's name is Jake Cardigan.
Cardigan. Like the sweater Mr. Rogers wore every day. That cardigan. They could have picked any other last name - it's fiction, after all - but they went with Cardigan. How about Jake Pullover? Or Jake Necktie? Or Jake Waistcoat? If you're not going to take naming your main character seriously, why take anything seriously?
Another name minus: there is a character named Warbride. I'm not lying.
This was such a truly, astonishingly awful novel that it's really hard to know where to start. Is it the cardboard characters? Is it the terrible dialogue? Is it the horrible mechanics? Is it the miserable excuse for a story?
I will tell you one thing, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Or worse, depends on the direction you're coming from. As a singular work, TekWar is exponentially more awful than its transgressions.
None of it's good, but let me pick two of the worst parts to expound on: the dialogue and the setting.
Dialogue: unless you pick up the book and read it yourself, it's hard to convey how terrible this is. No one speaks the way the characters in this book speak. Now, realistic speech is not necessarily a requirement, City of Bohane demonstrates that, but the dialogue in TekWar wasn't a stylized, made-up patois. The characters in TekWar used the English we're familiar with, but the execution is just awful. It's clear that the author - not really William Shatner - did not read this dialogue out loud. If it were just one character with an odd way of speaking I might be able to excuse it as a failed experiment in dialect. But they all speak like they're sitting behind a typewriter, planning what they'll say in the next paragraph. Practically every page includes needless exposition, and Jake Cardigan, Two-Fisted Detective, has the annoying habit of commenting on the narrative as if it were coming from his own head. It's not a first-person point of view.
Setting: there's no reason for this to be a sci-fi novel. This is a cop story, and not a very good one. There's a lot of mention of sci-fi type materials, an awful lot of those, like someone went to a Home Depot and tried to think of what they'd call aluminum in 200 years. And there are flying cars, and Los Angeles now includes 'Sector' after every city name, like 'Pasadena Sector.' And there are robots. And androids which are robots who look like people. And Tek, which is a kind of psychoactive drug delivered by microchip. But the story doesn't really depend on these, all the sci-fi stuff is window dressing. Replace 'tek' with 'cocaine' and this could be a story from Miami Vice in 1987. It speaks to a lack of understanding of the genre, the sci-fi elements should enhance and amplify a contemporary conflict, allowing the author to explore real-word consequences in a fantastic setting. This is just TJ Hooker with flying cars.
Quite possibly the worst sin? It's boring. Dull, dull, dreadfully dull. I can excuse a lot of bad stuff if the author takes me on a ride. This wasn't a roller coaster, this was a plodding donkey-ride with an old, tired donkey. It takes over 100 pages of a 300 page book to get things going, and when things did start happening I found I didn't care.
Who should read this book? No one. I took the bullet for the rest of you, please, for the love of Spock, do not try this at home.
One plus: at least it wasn't set in Florida.
Next week:
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
It was a book before it was a movie. Years before. 1973, in fact.
Sunday, September 8, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 36: The Last Buccaneer
This week's book:
The Last Buccaneer by Lynn Erickson
Grade: B
Dear God in Heaven and all the saints besides, this is yet another book set in Florida. I can't get away from America's wang. Maybe I'll just punch out my own teeth, grow a mullet, cultivate an oxycontin habit and move there.
Anyway... about the book. I was surprised. Honestly, pleasantly surprised. This is a romance, sure, but it's also a time travel story.
Say what?
Yup, time travel. Both into the past and then back into the future. Here's the setup: a young woman - because it's a romance, natch - who's doing her Master's in Spanish history comes across a misfiled document that points to the true location of a shipwreck, a treasure shipwreck, that people have been after for four hundred years. She dives on the wreck, touches a necklace, and is transported back in time, where she's rescued by a Spanish slave ship. She's rescued from that Hellish vessel by a dashing one-eyed English privateer, who also frees the slaves and is generally an honest, forthright man - again, because it's a romance - who mistakes her for a cabin boy. Yes, boy. At least for a while.
I have to say, the set up and plot were not what I expected. The 'romance' waters have been decidedly muddied by Fifty Shades of Porn, and I suppose I thought I'd find more of that kind of thing rather than the well-researched historical novel I got. Like I said, pleasantly surprised.
If only the dialogue and pacing had been better, I might have graded it higher.
Absent dialogue the narrative was tight and crisp. For instance, the opening scene in the prologue is absolutely riveting, as are most scenes set in the past that have to do with ships and combat and what have you. When the authors* switch to scenes involving people, however, things slow down A lot. There are a lot of sarcastic asides, arched eyebrows, misunderstood anachronisms, heaving sobs, you get the idea. Didn't do it for me.
Then there was the pacing. More accurately the pacing at the end of the book. Up until Tess, the heroine, goes forward to her own time again, the plot worked great. It was really more of an adventure story with a sex scene than a romance with history. But once back in Florida the pacing sped up unacceptably. I felt the authors were thinking through the trouble with a time-displaced privateer Englishman too much, and the narrative suffered because of it. It was rushed, and felt incomplete. It was also set in modern Florida and I just hated that.
But, for my first foray into genre romance, not half bad. If nothing else this book a week exercise is teaching me to let go of my genre snobbery.
If you're a romance reader, then you should read this one too. It's kind of old, 1994 (since when is that old?), but I think that's it's strength, there's more story than I think you'd find in a similar book from this year. If you're not a romance reader... well, I can't say you should read it, since it might be a little too far from what you're used to. But I think you should at least give it a try.
* Lynn Erickson is a pen-name for co-authors Carla Peltonen and Molly Swanton
Next week:
TekWar by William Shatner
Yes, it's that William Shatner. Don't worry, even though his name's on the cover he didn't really write it, some other guy did. First published in 1989, the Summer of Public Enemy. The two really have nothing to do with each other. I assume, maybe I'm wrong. I'll know in a week.
The Last Buccaneer by Lynn Erickson
Grade: B
Dear God in Heaven and all the saints besides, this is yet another book set in Florida. I can't get away from America's wang. Maybe I'll just punch out my own teeth, grow a mullet, cultivate an oxycontin habit and move there.
Anyway... about the book. I was surprised. Honestly, pleasantly surprised. This is a romance, sure, but it's also a time travel story.
Say what?
Yup, time travel. Both into the past and then back into the future. Here's the setup: a young woman - because it's a romance, natch - who's doing her Master's in Spanish history comes across a misfiled document that points to the true location of a shipwreck, a treasure shipwreck, that people have been after for four hundred years. She dives on the wreck, touches a necklace, and is transported back in time, where she's rescued by a Spanish slave ship. She's rescued from that Hellish vessel by a dashing one-eyed English privateer, who also frees the slaves and is generally an honest, forthright man - again, because it's a romance - who mistakes her for a cabin boy. Yes, boy. At least for a while.
I have to say, the set up and plot were not what I expected. The 'romance' waters have been decidedly muddied by Fifty Shades of Porn, and I suppose I thought I'd find more of that kind of thing rather than the well-researched historical novel I got. Like I said, pleasantly surprised.
If only the dialogue and pacing had been better, I might have graded it higher.
Absent dialogue the narrative was tight and crisp. For instance, the opening scene in the prologue is absolutely riveting, as are most scenes set in the past that have to do with ships and combat and what have you. When the authors* switch to scenes involving people, however, things slow down A lot. There are a lot of sarcastic asides, arched eyebrows, misunderstood anachronisms, heaving sobs, you get the idea. Didn't do it for me.
Then there was the pacing. More accurately the pacing at the end of the book. Up until Tess, the heroine, goes forward to her own time again, the plot worked great. It was really more of an adventure story with a sex scene than a romance with history. But once back in Florida the pacing sped up unacceptably. I felt the authors were thinking through the trouble with a time-displaced privateer Englishman too much, and the narrative suffered because of it. It was rushed, and felt incomplete. It was also set in modern Florida and I just hated that.
But, for my first foray into genre romance, not half bad. If nothing else this book a week exercise is teaching me to let go of my genre snobbery.
If you're a romance reader, then you should read this one too. It's kind of old, 1994 (since when is that old?), but I think that's it's strength, there's more story than I think you'd find in a similar book from this year. If you're not a romance reader... well, I can't say you should read it, since it might be a little too far from what you're used to. But I think you should at least give it a try.
* Lynn Erickson is a pen-name for co-authors Carla Peltonen and Molly Swanton
Next week:
TekWar by William Shatner
Yes, it's that William Shatner. Don't worry, even though his name's on the cover he didn't really write it, some other guy did. First published in 1989, the Summer of Public Enemy. The two really have nothing to do with each other. I assume, maybe I'm wrong. I'll know in a week.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 35: Bad Monkey
This week's book:
Bad Monkey by Carl Hiassen
Grade: B
Maybe I'm not that into cop procedurals or detective stories. Maybe it's just Florida...
The author is a very good writer, as he should be, since he also writes as a journalist for the Miami Herald. No dangling participles here, no fragments, no changes in voice or point of view mid-scene. It's clean and spare, sometimes to the point of being abrupt. Well-executed.
The tone, however... eh, not so much.
I did not like the tone. Not one bit. Since the action is set in the Florida Keys, mostly, maybe this is the tone it should have. I don't know, I've never been to the Keys. I do know, though, that I don't like books where the dialogue comes fast and snappy, and the banter is really just the author being clever with himself. This is what we have here. I've referenced The Gilmore Girls before, which I also never got into, and this is more of the same. Everyone's clever, everyone's got a snappy comeback, everyone's too cool for school. Real people aren't like this, real people have real conversations that don't always dive for the punch line. Matter of fact, if you know someone who always has to be clever, who always tries to speak the way the characters in Bad Monkey speak, you probably try to avoid them at all costs. Narcissists are tedious to be around.
As far as the story goes, it's not a bad premise. A disgraced detective - I presume the disgrace happens in a prior novel but I'm not certain - is allowed to stay employed by becoming a health department inspector. It's a gross job, as anyone the restaurant biz can tell you, and he hates it but it keeps him in rent money. Because of this connection and his desperate need to get back on the police force, he's drawn into a mystery when a severed human arm is snagged by a tourist fishing for sailfish. The plot proceeds from there, moving from the Keys to Miami to the Bahamas.
I think it's a very imaginative and suitably convoluted beginning. I'm not a regular mystery reader, but I'm pretty sure they don't all start out with a severed arm being dragged out of the Gulf by a tourist who wants to pose with it as if he snagged the Great White from Jaws.
The plot is very twisty and turn-y, as a mystery should be, lots of ins and outs, lots of what-have-yous. I had it figured out by page 100 or so. By that I mean I suspected the major twist - again not a Dan-Brown-style lie but a for-real twist - by page 100. I wasn't proved right until 200 or so pages later. I don't hold this against the author, I've learned this year that I'm something of a mystery spoil-sport. No harm, no foul. With the details, such as a dead man whose business was running a Medicare scam with mobility wheelchairs, Bahamians looking for voodoo curses, and desperate real-estate developers, the plot was also very Floridian. Which isn't really for me.
At times the secondary characters kind of blended for me, I wasn't quite sure who was who every so often. But the major characters all distinguished themselves, even if their dialogue devolved into the same brand of patter more than I liked.
There was, in fact, a monkey in this story. He did turn out to be a major character, though he was the only one who wasn't constantly trying to one-up the others with a punch line. He was not, in fact, a bad monkey at all.
If you like mystery novels, this is good one, you should read it. If you hated the Gimore Girls, like I did, you'll probably not like this either.
Next week:
The Last Buccaneer by Lynn Erickson
A Harlequin Romance. I'm not lying. I got it at Half-Price books by way of Goodwill. I paid a buck and I probably got ripped off. This is so far out of my genre comfort zone that I'm actually giddy and sick with anticipation at the same time.
Here's the proof that I actually have this book in my possession, and that the provenance is true. The Goodwill sticker is the upside-down one under Eyepatch's chiseled chin.
Bad Monkey by Carl Hiassen
Grade: B
Maybe I'm not that into cop procedurals or detective stories. Maybe it's just Florida...
The author is a very good writer, as he should be, since he also writes as a journalist for the Miami Herald. No dangling participles here, no fragments, no changes in voice or point of view mid-scene. It's clean and spare, sometimes to the point of being abrupt. Well-executed.
The tone, however... eh, not so much.
I did not like the tone. Not one bit. Since the action is set in the Florida Keys, mostly, maybe this is the tone it should have. I don't know, I've never been to the Keys. I do know, though, that I don't like books where the dialogue comes fast and snappy, and the banter is really just the author being clever with himself. This is what we have here. I've referenced The Gilmore Girls before, which I also never got into, and this is more of the same. Everyone's clever, everyone's got a snappy comeback, everyone's too cool for school. Real people aren't like this, real people have real conversations that don't always dive for the punch line. Matter of fact, if you know someone who always has to be clever, who always tries to speak the way the characters in Bad Monkey speak, you probably try to avoid them at all costs. Narcissists are tedious to be around.
As far as the story goes, it's not a bad premise. A disgraced detective - I presume the disgrace happens in a prior novel but I'm not certain - is allowed to stay employed by becoming a health department inspector. It's a gross job, as anyone the restaurant biz can tell you, and he hates it but it keeps him in rent money. Because of this connection and his desperate need to get back on the police force, he's drawn into a mystery when a severed human arm is snagged by a tourist fishing for sailfish. The plot proceeds from there, moving from the Keys to Miami to the Bahamas.
I think it's a very imaginative and suitably convoluted beginning. I'm not a regular mystery reader, but I'm pretty sure they don't all start out with a severed arm being dragged out of the Gulf by a tourist who wants to pose with it as if he snagged the Great White from Jaws.
The plot is very twisty and turn-y, as a mystery should be, lots of ins and outs, lots of what-have-yous. I had it figured out by page 100 or so. By that I mean I suspected the major twist - again not a Dan-Brown-style lie but a for-real twist - by page 100. I wasn't proved right until 200 or so pages later. I don't hold this against the author, I've learned this year that I'm something of a mystery spoil-sport. No harm, no foul. With the details, such as a dead man whose business was running a Medicare scam with mobility wheelchairs, Bahamians looking for voodoo curses, and desperate real-estate developers, the plot was also very Floridian. Which isn't really for me.
At times the secondary characters kind of blended for me, I wasn't quite sure who was who every so often. But the major characters all distinguished themselves, even if their dialogue devolved into the same brand of patter more than I liked.
There was, in fact, a monkey in this story. He did turn out to be a major character, though he was the only one who wasn't constantly trying to one-up the others with a punch line. He was not, in fact, a bad monkey at all.
If you like mystery novels, this is good one, you should read it. If you hated the Gimore Girls, like I did, you'll probably not like this either.
Next week:
The Last Buccaneer by Lynn Erickson
A Harlequin Romance. I'm not lying. I got it at Half-Price books by way of Goodwill. I paid a buck and I probably got ripped off. This is so far out of my genre comfort zone that I'm actually giddy and sick with anticipation at the same time.
Here's the proof that I actually have this book in my possession, and that the provenance is true. The Goodwill sticker is the upside-down one under Eyepatch's chiseled chin.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Put The Chicken Before The Nugget
There’s a fast-food worker strike brewing. What started in NYC as essentially a protest has gained populist steam in larger cities across the country. People working in McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, and similar places are agitating for an increase in their wages. The workers state that it’s impossible to live on $7 or $8 an hour in New York. Or Chicago. Or San Franscisco. And they’re right.
But they’re also wrong. These jobs – unskilled and entry-level – aren’t supposed to be jobs you make a living wage at. These are the kinds of jobs the minimum wage laws were designed for, the kinds of jobs that the employer would absolutely pay you much less to do, if the Federal Government would only let them. Once you’ve gone from table-wiper to order-taker to fry-o-later wrangler to grill guy, there’s really nowhere else to go unless you want to be the manager, which requires an entirely different set of skills. Sorry, fast-food workers, but you’re not doing the kinds of jobs you’re supposed to support a family doing.
Yet… many of them are trying to do exactly that. And failing, of course, simple arithmetic proves you can’t feed a family of four with two parents doing minimum-wage jobs. The profile of the fast-food worker has changed over the past decade, and what was once the province of the high-school first-job-taker or retiree with too much time on his hands has now become the land of uneducated mid- to late-twenties fathers and mothers. These are people who would once have been receptionists, or simple laborers, or factory workers. Except those jobs don’t exist any more, and the living wages those jobs provided vanished too.
The real problem here is not that McDonald’s pays minimum wage for horrible jobs, it’s that people who would otherwise be productive members of the American workforce are relegated to those horrible jobs instead of working a solidly middle-class job they might have enjoyed twenty or thirty years ago. Do you think a grown man with a wife and two kids actually wants to take your order at McDonald’s? Of course he doesn’t, but it’s the best job he could get. Which is a modern tragedy.
So what’s the solution? If it were a simple problem I’d have a simple solution and I’d be a billionaire. Full disclosure: I’m not a billionaire. I do know that employers – even evil corporations like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart who routinely abuse and take advantage of their workforce – cannot pay a family-supporting living wage for unskilled labor. But they could pay more than they do now. And they could pay for health care benefits. And they could work with local employment agencies to help their mid-twenties workers who shouldn’t be trying to make a career out of a minimum-wage job in the first place. At least part of the solution is for these fast-food companies to recognize that their workforce is drastically different now than it was even five years ago, let alone twenty, and to adjust their wages, prices, and expectations accordingly.
Another part of the solution would be to repair the middle class that the NeoCons have so expertly dismantled over the past 30 years. That’s going to take a lot of work, because older people have just accepted the terrible changes to our society and younger people have never known anything else. Maybe this new wave of activism and populism will shake things up again. Fingers crossed.
But they’re also wrong. These jobs – unskilled and entry-level – aren’t supposed to be jobs you make a living wage at. These are the kinds of jobs the minimum wage laws were designed for, the kinds of jobs that the employer would absolutely pay you much less to do, if the Federal Government would only let them. Once you’ve gone from table-wiper to order-taker to fry-o-later wrangler to grill guy, there’s really nowhere else to go unless you want to be the manager, which requires an entirely different set of skills. Sorry, fast-food workers, but you’re not doing the kinds of jobs you’re supposed to support a family doing.
Yet… many of them are trying to do exactly that. And failing, of course, simple arithmetic proves you can’t feed a family of four with two parents doing minimum-wage jobs. The profile of the fast-food worker has changed over the past decade, and what was once the province of the high-school first-job-taker or retiree with too much time on his hands has now become the land of uneducated mid- to late-twenties fathers and mothers. These are people who would once have been receptionists, or simple laborers, or factory workers. Except those jobs don’t exist any more, and the living wages those jobs provided vanished too.
The real problem here is not that McDonald’s pays minimum wage for horrible jobs, it’s that people who would otherwise be productive members of the American workforce are relegated to those horrible jobs instead of working a solidly middle-class job they might have enjoyed twenty or thirty years ago. Do you think a grown man with a wife and two kids actually wants to take your order at McDonald’s? Of course he doesn’t, but it’s the best job he could get. Which is a modern tragedy.
So what’s the solution? If it were a simple problem I’d have a simple solution and I’d be a billionaire. Full disclosure: I’m not a billionaire. I do know that employers – even evil corporations like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart who routinely abuse and take advantage of their workforce – cannot pay a family-supporting living wage for unskilled labor. But they could pay more than they do now. And they could pay for health care benefits. And they could work with local employment agencies to help their mid-twenties workers who shouldn’t be trying to make a career out of a minimum-wage job in the first place. At least part of the solution is for these fast-food companies to recognize that their workforce is drastically different now than it was even five years ago, let alone twenty, and to adjust their wages, prices, and expectations accordingly.
Another part of the solution would be to repair the middle class that the NeoCons have so expertly dismantled over the past 30 years. That’s going to take a lot of work, because older people have just accepted the terrible changes to our society and younger people have never known anything else. Maybe this new wave of activism and populism will shake things up again. Fingers crossed.
Sunday, August 25, 2013
A Book A Week - Week 34: City of Bohane
This week's book:
City of Bohane by Kevin Barry
Grade: A+ for originality
B for accessibility
You have not read this kind of novel before. I can guarantee it.
Many times, with many books, you know the story. There are only supposed to be seven plots after all, which means that if you read eight books you're guaranteed to encounter a plot you've read before. I suppose that's at least partly true with City of Bohane, it's almost like Julius Caesar as far as plot goes. Generally speaking, of course.
But, man, the execution is stunningly unique.
I've said many times that I want fiction to transport me, to take me somewhere else, and Mr. Barry certainly did that. Set forty years into a bleak version of the future Ireland, the plot follows Logan Hartnett - the current criminal kingpin of the city - as he deals with a challenge to his authority in the form of the man he replaced twenty-five years prior, The Gant Broderick, who has come back to town for reasons only known to himself. That's as simple as I can make the plot, but it's far, far, far more involved than I can relay. There are minor characters who become major, major characters who 'disappear,' twists, turn, double-dealings, triple-dealings, and base betrayals. It's a ride.
Anybody ever read 'Ulysses' by James Joyce all the way through? Of course you haven't, no one has. I've read parts of it, and this book is reminiscent of Ulysses, but in a very good way. Joyce was Irish, as is Mr. Barry, and those Irish are a clever people. The Japanese might be weird, the Germans efficient, the Russians melancholy, and Americans crass, but the Irish are clever. And literary. And poetic. I think Mr. Barry adds to the proud Irish tradition of amazing fiction.
Now for the down side. I don't know how far my tastes will translate to the average reader. I loved this book, but I can easily see where someone else might find it so dense and stylistic that they might abandon the effort it takes to read it.
The author has his characters speak in a made-up patois - and there are even upper- and lower-class variations on it between characters - which I think adds to the mood and tone. Defines it, even. But other people hate reading dialect. Plus, it's dialogue-heavy, so if you're not inclined to make the effort there's nowhere to go to avoid it.
The narration is also stylized, though not as much as the dialogue. It's not plain-jane, it's peacocking.
Finally, while sympathetic, the characters are not particularly likeable. This is as much by design as the dialogue and the narration, the City is intended to be a rough, corrupt, terrible place. But sometimes readers want their heroes to be heroes instead of the least villainous of a disreputable bunch. I loved it, but I can see where others might not.
I learned a long time ago that some of my tastes aren't for everyone.* For instance, when I drink wine, which happens very infrequently, I prefer the kind of dry red wine that makes most people pucker. I like seriously overcooked lasagna. I think Picasso was a better artist before he moved to Paris. I actually like the look of the Disney Concert Hall. You get the idea.
I also loved this book. I just don't think everyone will. Maybe I'm second-guessing myself, I don't know.
If you only read certain things and don't like moving out of your comfort zone, then give this one a pass. If, however, you like your fiction to slap you around a little before it takes you on a ride to some unknown destination, definitely give City of Bohane a read.
* and some are very, very, very proletarian. I do watch NASCAR every weekend, after all.
Next week:
Bad Monkey by Carl Hiassen
No sci-fi, this is a contemporary mystery. Set in Florida. America's wang. Where the underwhelming Book of Fate was set. Why did it have to be Florida?
City of Bohane by Kevin Barry
Grade: A+ for originality
B for accessibility
You have not read this kind of novel before. I can guarantee it.
Many times, with many books, you know the story. There are only supposed to be seven plots after all, which means that if you read eight books you're guaranteed to encounter a plot you've read before. I suppose that's at least partly true with City of Bohane, it's almost like Julius Caesar as far as plot goes. Generally speaking, of course.
But, man, the execution is stunningly unique.
I've said many times that I want fiction to transport me, to take me somewhere else, and Mr. Barry certainly did that. Set forty years into a bleak version of the future Ireland, the plot follows Logan Hartnett - the current criminal kingpin of the city - as he deals with a challenge to his authority in the form of the man he replaced twenty-five years prior, The Gant Broderick, who has come back to town for reasons only known to himself. That's as simple as I can make the plot, but it's far, far, far more involved than I can relay. There are minor characters who become major, major characters who 'disappear,' twists, turn, double-dealings, triple-dealings, and base betrayals. It's a ride.
Anybody ever read 'Ulysses' by James Joyce all the way through? Of course you haven't, no one has. I've read parts of it, and this book is reminiscent of Ulysses, but in a very good way. Joyce was Irish, as is Mr. Barry, and those Irish are a clever people. The Japanese might be weird, the Germans efficient, the Russians melancholy, and Americans crass, but the Irish are clever. And literary. And poetic. I think Mr. Barry adds to the proud Irish tradition of amazing fiction.
Now for the down side. I don't know how far my tastes will translate to the average reader. I loved this book, but I can easily see where someone else might find it so dense and stylistic that they might abandon the effort it takes to read it.
The author has his characters speak in a made-up patois - and there are even upper- and lower-class variations on it between characters - which I think adds to the mood and tone. Defines it, even. But other people hate reading dialect. Plus, it's dialogue-heavy, so if you're not inclined to make the effort there's nowhere to go to avoid it.
The narration is also stylized, though not as much as the dialogue. It's not plain-jane, it's peacocking.
Finally, while sympathetic, the characters are not particularly likeable. This is as much by design as the dialogue and the narration, the City is intended to be a rough, corrupt, terrible place. But sometimes readers want their heroes to be heroes instead of the least villainous of a disreputable bunch. I loved it, but I can see where others might not.
I learned a long time ago that some of my tastes aren't for everyone.* For instance, when I drink wine, which happens very infrequently, I prefer the kind of dry red wine that makes most people pucker. I like seriously overcooked lasagna. I think Picasso was a better artist before he moved to Paris. I actually like the look of the Disney Concert Hall. You get the idea.
I also loved this book. I just don't think everyone will. Maybe I'm second-guessing myself, I don't know.
If you only read certain things and don't like moving out of your comfort zone, then give this one a pass. If, however, you like your fiction to slap you around a little before it takes you on a ride to some unknown destination, definitely give City of Bohane a read.
* and some are very, very, very proletarian. I do watch NASCAR every weekend, after all.
Next week:
Bad Monkey by Carl Hiassen
No sci-fi, this is a contemporary mystery. Set in Florida. America's wang. Where the underwhelming Book of Fate was set. Why did it have to be Florida?
Monday, August 19, 2013
Another Day At The Grind...
This past weekend I was having breakfast with a friend of mine and I happened to look out the window to see two men passing by the cafe. They looked pretty much like any of the other people passing by, and they seemed to be having a pleasant conversation. I didn't really notice them other than to see that they both needed a shave. So did I at that point - nine days without a razor - and it was no big deal, beard brothers one and all.
Fast forward about thirty minutes. Our breakfast finished and paid for, my friend and I walked out of the cafe and on our way. A few blocks later we came upon those same two men again. This time they were propped up against lamp posts at a busy intersection, now wearing dirty, ripped t-shirts, with cardboard signs on their stomachs that said 'homeless, please help.' Evidently their leisurely stroll and polite conversation had been a prelude to fraudulent panhandling.
You ever see those Roadrunner cartoons where the sheep dog and the coyote are just regular Joes working a shift? They walk in with their lunch boxes, punch a clock, and then get to the business of cartoon anvils? That was these guys. Except they were going to their work of... not working.
I was incensed at first - how dare they? Then I realized I hadn't finished that thought. How dare they what? Walk past a restaurant where I was eating? Plant themselves at a busy intersection to increase the odds of getting a handout? Ask for the handout in the first place? What, exactly, was I getting upset about?
Then it hit me. I was upset that this seemed to be their job. When I saw them they were going to 'work.' But that work involved putting on a grody shirt and pretending to be homeless. They had probably driven in, parked down the street from the cafe, three or four blocks from their 'office' and then planted themselves where gentle souls would be assured to see them.
I used to live five blocks over and four blocks down from a Salvation Army residence, and I walked to work essentially across the street from it. I encountered the destitute, the barely-hinged, the drug-addled, and the hopeless every single day. I bought them cigarettes and handed them spare change and gave them $5 bills on Thanksgiving. I know homeless people. These guys weren't. They were lazy. That's what I objected to. Sons of bitches. They could have honed a talent - that same intersection hosts sax players and tap dancers - but instead they sat around, trying to look pitiable.
I left them alone, and later I saw them run off by the cops. Who did not, regrettably, use their tasers. And that's the pity.
Fast forward about thirty minutes. Our breakfast finished and paid for, my friend and I walked out of the cafe and on our way. A few blocks later we came upon those same two men again. This time they were propped up against lamp posts at a busy intersection, now wearing dirty, ripped t-shirts, with cardboard signs on their stomachs that said 'homeless, please help.' Evidently their leisurely stroll and polite conversation had been a prelude to fraudulent panhandling.
You ever see those Roadrunner cartoons where the sheep dog and the coyote are just regular Joes working a shift? They walk in with their lunch boxes, punch a clock, and then get to the business of cartoon anvils? That was these guys. Except they were going to their work of... not working.
I was incensed at first - how dare they? Then I realized I hadn't finished that thought. How dare they what? Walk past a restaurant where I was eating? Plant themselves at a busy intersection to increase the odds of getting a handout? Ask for the handout in the first place? What, exactly, was I getting upset about?
Then it hit me. I was upset that this seemed to be their job. When I saw them they were going to 'work.' But that work involved putting on a grody shirt and pretending to be homeless. They had probably driven in, parked down the street from the cafe, three or four blocks from their 'office' and then planted themselves where gentle souls would be assured to see them.
I used to live five blocks over and four blocks down from a Salvation Army residence, and I walked to work essentially across the street from it. I encountered the destitute, the barely-hinged, the drug-addled, and the hopeless every single day. I bought them cigarettes and handed them spare change and gave them $5 bills on Thanksgiving. I know homeless people. These guys weren't. They were lazy. That's what I objected to. Sons of bitches. They could have honed a talent - that same intersection hosts sax players and tap dancers - but instead they sat around, trying to look pitiable.
I left them alone, and later I saw them run off by the cops. Who did not, regrettably, use their tasers. And that's the pity.
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