One of the craziest of the "lost" books

OK, it is not really lost, just rather hard to read. You have to get the manuscript at a library in Florida. Charles Willeford was a crime writer known for his character. He is considered one of the great hard-boiled guys although he hasn't gotten the attention of a Jim Thompson. One of his more popular books was Miami Blues. It was the first of a series of books featuring Hoke Moseley. Willeford, though, had a different plan. The second, unpublished, book was to be called Grimhaven and it featured Moseley killing his family and timing the murders to get the best death penalty possible. Lee Goldberg has the story.

Going back to the Gold Soundz

Start saving your money. Pavement is going back on tour next year. There will be much rejoicing.

A Map of Home

How many coming of age novels can our bookstores bear? Given the number published each year, the answer is apparently "limitless." Still, how can the reader choose which one to choose? Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home provides a number of reasons to put it on your reading pile.

Number one is the narrator. We've seen a wide range of narrators, but how about a Palestinian/Greek/Egyptian female? Nidali, named for an Arabic word for struggle, is born in the United States, grows up in Kuwait, flees the 1990 invasion via Iraq, moves to Egypt and ends up back in the United States.

Then there is the balance between humor and seriousness. Nidali's tale is told in a series of vignettes about her life. The first, about the day of her birth, is laugh out loud funny and shows that Jarrar is quite happy to work blue, a trait I always appreciate. She is just as capable of presenting subtle heartbreak. Her characters constantly uproot themselves and discard one set of dreams for another.

The overall theme of the stories is the notion of home. Is it geographic, cultural, personal? The characters wrestle with all of these and with the the home they never reach, Palestine. The characters have so many homes that all of them blend in to create a home in the head.

The language may be a bit salty at times for some readers (not me!) but I suspect that most will find this an engaging read.

The new Dennis Lehane continues to rule

The first 50 or so pages of the Given Day were great, top shelf reading for certain. Then it leaps into classic territory. He hits all my buttons on this one. It has a huge civic canvas (Boston 1918/1919). It has morally ambiguous characters, your opinion of which Lehane carefully guides. The plotline shifts constantly but in completely fair ways. He plays few favorites, but I think Lehane has no love for the fervent certainty of the ideologue. Two of his more repellent bit characters are super-righty J Edgar Hoover and supreme leftie Eugene O'Neill. It might still crash and burn but I seriousldy doubt it.

As a long time fan, I worried that Lehane, on his road to literary fiction, might discard his trademark acts of badassery. No worries on that count.

Check out Jonathan Yardley (but skip the spoilerish last few paras) on the book. He doesn't like it as much as I do, but he still finds it strong.

Dan Brown's Day

Today is a nice day to own a bookstore as the new Dan Brown book is out. Janet Maslin of the New York Times is happy with the book. Lev Grossman has a review at Time, he thinks it works too, although he says the ending is weak. It looks like if you liked the last one, you will like this one. As lots of people liked that one, I bet sales will be through the roof. I am sure I will read it at some point.

Apparently, the Masons are at the center of this plot. Going from the Catholic Church to the Masons is a bit like going from the Empire to the Trade Federation, but at least they are cloaked in some level of mystery. Jay Kinney has a new book called the Masonic Myth that hopes to burst the conspiracy bubble. It lays out the history, the activities and the future of the Masons. Kinney's book is dispassionate, but I bet conspiracy theorists inspired by the Brown book will enjoy trying to read between the lines and to know the real truth.

On the topic of Masons, if you ever visit Alexandria, VA, you should stop by the giant George Washington Masonic Temple. Well worth your time.

Curse you Ayn Rand

So you've started work at a new place and you want to avoid hanging out with douchebags. Sometimes they are easy to spot. In the work place, unfortunately, they often hide their ways until it is too late. I have identified a simple way to determine if you are a dealing with a douche. Look at their desk. If they have a copy of Clausewitz's Art of War (and this isn't the Pentagon or an IR department) or any book by Ayn Rand sitting prominently on the desk, you have to avoid this person at all costs. In the former case, the person is likely a pompous ass, in the latter he or she is likely dangerously deranged.

While those willing to wade through cumbersome Teutonic prose can learn a lot about war from Clausewitz, the books of Ayn Rand are like the unholy texts in HP Lovecraft stories. Just a few pages and you go nuts.

Jonathan Chait has a review article about Rand and her nefarious influence on the ideology of many on the Right. If possible, I dislike her even more now.

Random items

Check out this literary map of San Francisco. It consists of thirty-ish quotes from literary fiction about San Francisco. Where possible, it even sites the quotes in the appropriate locale. Pretty cool.

So I am reading the massive From Colony to Superpower, the only thematic book in the Oxford History of the United States. I am quite enjoying it and anyone who wants to look at the grand sweep of American foreign policy would do well to read the book. I am up to 1898 or so and I was a bit surprised to see that the author refers to War of 1898 saying that it was once called the Spanish-American War. When did this name change happen?

Nina Siegel has a lengthy essay on the bestseller lists and what it says about literacy in America. She brings in arguments from Chabon and Franzen about how people might start reading decent books again, instead of 17 new books from James Patterson.

The New York Times reviews a great looking book about Paul Nitze and George Kennan called the Hawk and the Dove. The title simplifies their viewpoints, but these two men are central to the Cold War and international relations.

Jim Carroll RIP

Poet Jim Carroll died Friday. He was 60. I wasn't a huge fan, but there are few songs that blew me away like People Who Died. I heard back it back in the day when you couldn't just go to Hype Machine or Google and find the studio version, a cover and your choice of live versions. I spent weeks tracking down the singer and the song. Buying the cassette (that's right) felt like a triumph.

I'm totally not reading the Krakauer book

Damn, I was excited for the new Krakauer book about Pat Tillman. Now the New York Times and the Washington Post reviews say not to do so.

Dexter Filkins, who knows a thing or two about war zones, essentially calls the book boring. The key line is "With Tillman, you would think he’d have all he needed to fashion an epic narrative. Unfortunately, he fails to pull it off." Filkins complains that very little of the story is about Afghanistan and that the book is plagued by digressions.

Andrew Exum, author of This Man's Army, is a bit harsher arguing that Kraukauer doesn't really know his subject matter. He ties the friendly fire death of Tillman to the evils of the Bush administration rather than to the mistakes of the local commanders. His final paragraph captures the mistake that outsiders make of many organizations (notably corporations):

An Air Force officer I know likes to say that whenever one seeks to understand an epic failure of our nation's military, one must first draw a line on a sheet of paper and write "conspiracy" at one end and "buffoonery" on the other. Those who have spent time in the military and have seen it struggle not just with war but with everyday barracks life tend to err on the side of incompetence, while those who never have -- such as Krakauer -- tend to suspect conspiracy.

Disappointing indeed, but at least I can keep plugging away on the massive George Herring book I am reading.

The new Lehane

I finally picked up the Given Day. After the first chapter I was amazed that I hadn't started it sooner. If it continues to be as good as it is now, this is probably his best book, which puts it above nearly everything else out there. The book reminds me quite a bit of James Ellroy's LA Quartet books. While they have their basis in police work, they are really stories of the City and the political and social fault lines in those cities. More on this great one later.

Another good movie to be remade

I saw the Spanish horror film The Orphanage the other night. It is totally awesome. The suspense is slow-building and rewards patience. This one isn't about the fake shock every ten minutes. It is about anguish, pain and possible madness. Belen Rueda is fantastic and more or less makes the movie.

Which is why, I think the American re-make will probably be a disaster. Although director Larry Fessenden is also known for understated horror movies, I suspect we will have more scares, more gore and less acting in the new one.

The Wheel of Time rolls on, and on, and on....

Back in the early to mid-90s, I could not get enough of the Wheel of Time series. Sure it was a Tolkein ripoff, with small town heroes emerging to fight a nasty Sauron like dark force, but it was a story well told with its own flourishes. Hey, why not bring the Fremen like Aiel into the picture?!

Then the books kept coming and the story got thinner and thinner. By the time I stopped reading them, the plot had moved forward an inch in about 700 pages. No thanks.

Robert Jordan died before completing the series and Brian Sanderson was brought on board to wrap it up. For some reason I had it in my head that he would just write a single volume, which would be fine with me. Nope, he has THREE more books for the series, which will bring the total to FOURTEEN books by the end. Yes, yes, Patrick O'Brien had more than that, but those were models of concision by comparison.

Anyway, the first one comes out next month and Tor.com has the first chapter available online. You have to log into the site to read it.

Tor.com also has a guest blogger writing about the series, chapter by ever-loving chapter. So far, the blog is through the still readable volumes. Soon, the hell begins. How will the blogger deal with it?

Books for your wishlist

An article in the Wall Street Journal recently listed major book releases for the fall. The Dan Brown book will drown nearly everything else, (613 holds at Multnomah County Library!) but there are plenty of other exciting books to be found. There is a new post-apocalyptic book by Margaret Atwood called the Year of the Flood. This is great news as her Oryx and Crake remains one of my fave post-apoc novels of all time.

Kazuo Ishiguro has a book of short stories/novellas called Nocturnes coming out. The connection between the five stories is music. His mastery of the understated study of emotion should be interesting in short story form.

Jonathan Lethem's newest is longer and larger in scope than his last book. This one is called Chronic City. Chronic does appear to be used as Dr. Dre used it, but I imagine it has other meanings as well.

John Irving has another one too. Ho hum.

On the nonfiction side, John Krakauer has a new one called Where Men Win Glory, about Pat Tillman, the football star turned Army soldier. There are few nonfiction writers that can enthrall like Krakauer.

Death in the ice

I am all for a little mindless monster fiction every once and again. Or every week if it is any good. Lincoln Child co-created one of the great modern monsters with Relic and his latest Terminal Freeze is good fun as well.

This one will immediately remind you of Who Goes There/ The Thing with a far North scientific expedition uncovering what seems to be a saber tooth tiger in the ice. Not long after that a Discovery Channel-like documentary crew helicopters in and takes over the exhibition. They are such total bastards that you wonder if Mr. Child has had some run-ins with Hollywood in the past. A couple are so eggregious that they may as well be wearing I Am Going to Die....Badly shirts.

So it isn't exactly original and it telegraphs some of the bodycount, but it is still a good read. Child knows how to build and sustain tension and he gives just enough detail and background to enrich the story without weighing it down. Some times he moves a little too fast, there is one sub-plot that he seems to have felt needed extra tension, but it felt like a throwaway.

The monster is cool, especially in his gruesome attacks. For most of the book, when asked to describe it, survivors just started gibbering and going mad. I thought he was going to go down the too-terrible-to-describe Lovecraft path, but worry not, he eventually reveals and I think it works well.

A great intro

Ah the first day of school. Things were quite hectic at Skyline when I dropped off the kids today. Sad of course that I have less time with them, but now I have more time for weighty matters, like blogging.

I was in the used bookstore the other day when I found one I thought might be good. The book is called Boonville, and I couldn't remember if I had read good things about it, recall driving through the town of the same name or just remember the town's beer. It is always a risk, so I decided to try the first page test. Having read it, I took the book straight to the register.

I repeat, this is a work of fiction. I tried my best to get at some "higher truth." It think we all know the inherent problems in that undertaking. So, any of the local residents who can read, and do read this novel, and take offense at the descriptions or content, instead of sucker-punching me while I'm in town trying to buy groceries with my wife and son, let me just buy you a drink and we'll call it even. As for the hippies in the county who may be upset at the depiction of hippies, I say "Tough shit, hippie." Anyone willing to identify themselves as a hippie here in the 21st century has their head up their ass and gets what they deserve.

A vexing question regarding bands

I listened to Kelly Clarkson's Since U Been Gone last night. I love that song, but nothing else I have heard. That got me thinking about other bands I dislike with songs I like. Does one good song redeem a bad band? Or does it just provide a silver lining?

Take the aggressively bad band Bush. Oh how they plagued alternative rock stations for years. That said, they gave us the awesome Swallowed.



Does this redeem the band?

Continuing to binge on graphic novels

Thanks to the riches of the Multnomah Public Library and Cosmic Monkey comics, I am continuing my comic book binge. I read issues 2 and 3 of Unwritten and will shortly be getting the rest. It's a fun story of characters from books coming to life and has lots of jokes about horror stories.

Hack/Slash is a tongue in cheek horror comic about a pair of sword wielding misfits who hunt slashers. In this world, serial killers and mass murderers are often a form of undead that Cassie Hack and her hulking partner Vlad dispatch in often gruesome form. If you enjoy horror movies, and particularly if you like loving send-ups like Scream, this one is for you.

Ex Machina is super dee duper awesome. It is written by the same dude who penned Y: the Last Man and has an equally novel story. It is a superhero book of sorts. Thanks to a strange accident with a mysterious, potentially alien?, technology Mitchell Hundred gains the ability to communicate with and control machines. He becomes an underground hero and, thanks to heroism on 9/11, gains enough stature to win the office of Mayor of New York. So it is a comic about politics, with superhero and sci-fi elements. He weaves in stories about gay marriage into ongoing political intrigue. This one is awesome.

I wish Point Blank were as good. The book is an early Ed Brubaker comic set in the same universe as the superior Sleeper and Incognito comics. This one though lacks the stream lined plot and tight writing of those later works. I think Brubaker also created unnecessary confusion with his dream vs. reality plot.

God is an Englishman

It is a generalization to be sure, but today's literary novelists work with a much smaller scope than those of the past. The books are generally shorter, with a focus on fewer characters and on a less complex story. There are great exceptions, like Chabon's Kavalier and Klay, but overall, the focus is more on the intense examination of character.

The big writers of the 19th century, from Melville to Trollope to Tolstoy wrote giant novels with epic lists of characters and stories long enough to sustain months of reading. There are downsides of course. How many high school students think of Moby Dick with little more than bitterness at the lengthy asides about whale parts and the business of whaling? My 11th grade teacher was kind enough to let us skip many of those sections, but the book still felt interminably long.

That said, I have had years of enjoyment out of the likes of the Chronicles of Barset or the Pickwick Papers. The usual phrase is that you get lost in these books, which makes them quite like fantasy novels. Fantasy novels create worlds in which you temporarily take residence. Their breed of escapism is one of immersion and the big fat story telling literary novel is the same.

While modernism has dominated 20th century fiction, story tellers held their own as well. Englishman R F Delderfield specialized in the story-telling novel. Out of print for many years, his God is An Englishman is available once again. It is the first of a trilogy of books about Adam Swann, a soldier turned businessman in Victorian Britain.

The story starts after a battle during the Indian Mutiny (or First War of Indian Independence if you prefer) with some jewels falling into Swann's hands. He returns to England with vague plans of becoming a tycoon, probably in rails. His second bit of fortune is his meeting with a station master who tells him the opportunity is in transporting goods where rails can't go.

On a scouting expedition, he meets Henrietta, the daughter of a small town mill owner. She is driven by a desire to escape and she finds it with Swann. The novel is about the rise of his business and the development of their romance.

Delderfield spins his tale slowly and relishes the little details. We hear for example, about how some of Swann's operators won over locals with the capture of an escaped circus lion. Where most authors would be happy for a paragraph length aside to describe the goings on, Delderfield spends a number of pages to relate the humorous anecdote.

If you have an interest in British history, this book will be particularly interesting with its picture of bustling London, the railroads, the smog-covered Lancashire and the still green countryside. Even those who don't will likely appreciate Delderfield's story telling abilities.

This is a writer's life

I suspect that many of us envy the idea of a writing life. Lots of contemplation, musings, and being one's own boss. The ultimate life of thinking leisure. Mine would involve sipping sloe gin fizzes and Pimm's Cup while resting at the Lodge at Torrey Pines.

The reality of course is often far different. For many it means taking a series of soulless jobs, facing years of rejection and living with an odd mix of relationships. In Beg, Borrow or Steal, novelist Michael Greenberg describes his writers life from his early, striving and starving days to his recent successful ones.

The book consists of a series of short essays, originally published in the Times Literary Supplement, built around an anecdote from his life. They range from the tense, as when he and his wife have a run-in with the military government of Argentina, to the comic, as in his failed attempts to pay the bills working as a waiter and his visit to a polyamory group. While the subject matter varies, there is a calm sense of reflection about them that makes each of them a great pleasure to read.

Greenberg has spent most of his life in New York City and its environs so much of the stories focus on the City. You'll learn for example about the giant potter's field located not far from LaGuardia and as well as the "Negros Burial Ground," the earliest known African-American cemetery in the United States. Greenberg also writes about Jewish life, including the role of circumcision. His principal subject, though, is writing, including the perils of screen-writing and the role his writer friends and mentors have played in his life.

The essays here are remarkably concise, but are still meaningful. They are strong stories well worth reading.

A few links for your morning

Here is Alan Jacobs writing on Michael Chabon in an essay called Jews with Swords. It is about Chabon's journey as a writer: "Chabon insists that he doesn't repudiate any of that work. He just wants to contend that it is perfectly reasonable for him to do what he did in writing Gentlemen of the Road: take off "in search of a little adventure."

The Musical Pairings blog has a pile of Spoon live covers for your enjoyment. The cover of Panic is one of the finest Smiths covers I have yet heard. It captures the wild exuberance of a band that many tend to think of in morose terms. There is also a cover of one of my fave Springsteen songs, namely I'm Going Down.

Pitchfork has a list, with videos, of the top music videos of the decade.