9 posts tagged “book of the week”
When I was about 12, I read a book that really changed everything for me, affected my relationship with literature, set me on a path that I still travel to this day. I wish I could say that the book was something cool like On the Road or The Brothers Karamazov or Journey to Ixtlan. In fact, it was Agatha Christie's Murder On The Orient Express.
It was the first time I'd read a real, grown-up mystery, with a carefully constructed plot, and I was fooled completely. What especially got to me was that the solution was so unexpected, yet upon immediate rereading it seems that Christie was trumpeting the truth at every opportunity. I began reading all the Christies I could get my hands on - and there are a lot of them - and branching out into Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, Rex Stout and others. It turned me from an occasional reader into a voracious one. It made me feel intellectual, and connected to the adult world. And it helped me through a period when I started to realize I was seriously depressed, but not ready to talk to anyone about it.
As I got older, my reading habits broadened, but mysteries have always been a staple, something I continually return to. It's a little surprising, then, that I haven't really reviewed any mysteries on this blog. With this week's book, and going for the next, say, 4 or 5 weeks, I'll be reading and reviewing just mysteries, and talking a little about my history with them.
And what better way to start than with Sherlock Holmes? Surely the most written about fictional character of any kind; the number of authors who have tried to continue the adventures of Doyle's character must number in the hundreds. After The Seven Per Cent Solution became a bestseller, writers seemed to compete to fix Holmes up with the most unlikely real-life character, or come up with some other outrageous gimmick (someone wrote a novel alleging that Holmes was a visitor from the future, another that he was Jack the Ripper). Recent entries into the game include a short novel by Michael Chabon , an acclaimed nonmystery about Holmes facing old age, and an encounter between Holmes and Father Brown. Caleb Carr, best known for his superb historical mystery, The Alienist, takes the tack of trying to duplicate the feel of authentic Doyle in The Italian Secretary, and captures the atmosphere and dialogue quite well. The mystery here involves the slayings of an architect and a workman at Queen Victoria's Royal Palace of Holyrood, in Edinburgh, Scotland; the gruesome deaths resemble the slaying, centuries earlier in the same palace, of David Rizzio, the Italian music teacher and secretary of Mary Queen of Scots. The book takes too long to really get started, with 100 pages devoted to setting out the politics and court life of Victoria, and the backstory of Rizzio. Once Holmes and Watson arrive in Scotland, though, the game is really afoot, and the book becomes a pageturner, though the satisfactions of the plot are secondary to being in the presence of the two greatest detective story characters ever created.
Read a good mystery lately? Let me know about it.
Dirk Moeller didn't know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident. But he was ready to find out.
Great opening. Moeller is Earth's representative for trade talks with the Nidu, an obnoxious race who happen to be our planet's chief ally on the Celestial Council, which is like being friends with the high school geek. The Nidu have an advanced sense of smell, and a sophisticated vocabulary of scents and the messages they can carry; Moeller has a private vendetta, and a device in his rear end that converts his intestinal gas to the worst insults in the Nidu dictionary. When his olfactory prank turns deadly, Earth is in trouble.
As Nidu military starships move toward Earth, their ambassador throws Earth a bone - a major incident can be averted if Earth can help find an object needed for the Nidu coronation ceremony. Specifically, they need a sheep - a breed called The Android's Dream, whose electric blue-colored wool explains the Philip K. Dick reference in the name. Sounds easy, but someone is wiping out the last stocks of those sheep with a virus. The problem lands in the lap of a minor diplomat named Harry Creek, war hero, ex-cop, hacker with major skills, new to the secret agent game but a fast learner.
Scalzi's comic novel of interplanetary intrigue is funny throughout, but not in a wacky, Douglas Adams way. The action is tightly plotted, and even the most insane plot twists are made to seem plausible. The Android's Dream seems to me a science fiction cousin to the comic thrillers of Donald Westlake, or the sly, cynical spy novels of Ross Thomas.
You may remember Richard A. Clarke - Washington intelligence insider since the Reagan administration, broke with the Bush administration about the war on terror, wrote the bestselling memoir Against All Enemies. He followed it with a novel, The Scorpion's Gate; not surprisingly, a geopolitical Mideast thriller. Breakpoint is his second novel, and it's something different.
First, I had to get used to Clarke's writing. It's amateurish - stiff, simply drawn characters, dialogue that rings wrong. What keeps you reading is Clarke's insider knowledge, and the unexpected scenarios he keeps springing on you. The novel begins with a terrorist attack on America's internet capability. Seems there are ten little shacks on the Atlantic coast where fiber-optic cables come from Europe and enter our routers and switches, there's no or little security for them, and Clarke's not happy about that. When 7 of the ten go up in truck bombs, the FBI and Homeland Security go into action. Clarke has little confidence in these organizations - "the Keystone Kops... stumbling all over themselves as usual" - and makes his heroes outsider investigators for a Special Projects division in the Intelligence Analysis Center, a small, agile unit instead of a bumbling bureaucracy. So far, so good, if run of the mill. Things begin to get weird, though, when one investigator talks to a scientist, who begins discussing her work in transhumanism.
Breakpoint, which is set five years from now, has one foot firmly set in science fiction, and has more in common with William Gibson or Bruce Sterling than Tom Clancy. Hackers pull off miraculous works of data mining. A Marine unit in the desert is testing exoskeletons to give soldiers superpowers. A global computer science project is on the verge of giving the internet something akin to sentience (shades of Neuromancer!) In an appendix, Clarke lays out what in the book is still theoretical, what's being worked on and what is close to being realized. Clarke's last government job, in the Bush administration, was Special Advisor to the President on Cybersecurity; once more, he knows what he's talking about.
Recently, I saw the movie A Scanner Darkly on DVD, and I was pleased to see that a film adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story kept the original story and tone, and didn't just build an action movie around his plot ideas (see Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck et al). It made me remember that, back in my teens and twenties, Dick was an important author to me, as a pop culture author who played with philosophical ideas about the relationship between fantasy and reality, especially in an age when technology could alter the way your brain experienced the outside world. Dick wrung more changes out of the idea of virtual reality long before the concept was a familiar concept.
It occured to me that I hadn't read any Dick in a long, long time. Back in the 1980's, I had read the most famous and celebrated Dick books, and had moved into the second tier, where you never knew if a book was going to be a masterpiece, a dud, or (most often) something with good ideas that didn't work overall. I decided to try a book that I had missed in my earlier years.
Dr. Bloodmoney, written in 1966, turns out to be an after-the-bomb book. Dick paints a near-future portrait of life in San Francisco and Marin County, then drops the bombs and follows a large cast as they struggle through the early post-bomb days, and the years of building makeshift substitutes for civilization. Characters include Hoppy, a limbless handyman with robotic prostheses, whose affability hides a chilling megalomania; Walt Dangerfield, an astronaut stranded in a satellite who becomes the friendly radio host the earth comes to depend on; and Dr. Bluthgeld, the nuclear scientist whose guilt drives him completely, but secretly, insane. The portrait of a large cast of more or less decent people muddling through a hideous historical period reminds me of one of Dick's most famous books, The Man in the High Castle. Despite some harrowing descriptions, this may be the most hopeful after-the-bomb story I know; Dick believes that not even a nuclear holocaust can destroy the human connections .that civilization depends on, and can use to rebuild.
Sometimes my kids have really good book suggestions. My 12-year-old said I should read the two books (so far) in Rick Riordan's series Percy Jackson and the Olympians, and I had a great time with them. It's fantasy very much in the Harry Potter mode -- young boy discovers he has magical powers, goes to special place to learn how to use them -- but the books are brisker and more action-packed, and Riordan has his own sneaky sense of humor.
The pantheon of Greek gods, goddesses, along with the monsters, centaurs and fauns, are still alive in the 21st century, and in keeping with the ancient legends, occasionally they fall in love with a human and produce semidivine offspring. Such is the situation of young Percy Jackson, whose ADHD and behavior problems have caused him to be bumped from school to school. After his teacher turns into a dragon and tries to kill him, he learns that his learning problems are not unusual among his kind - demigods, that is. In the first book, The Lightning Thief, he finds his way to the gods' summer camp on Long Island, Camp Half-Breed, where he learns the basics of archery, swordsmanship and chariot-racing, and goes on a quest to find Zeus' stolen lightning bolt. I just finished the second book, The Sea of Monsters, in which the only way to save the camp is to find the Golden Fleece, on an island in the Bermuda Triangle, guarded by a cyclops.
Riordan has a lot of fun with Greek myths, and his portrayals of gods cleverly manage to be archtypal yet modern (I especially like his leather-clad, motorcycle-riding Ares, god of war). If you're trying to find some good fantasy until the next Potter, or you've found Rowling to have too much bloat, then check these out.
This is, understand, the book of the week from last week, which I didn't get around to posting about. I hope to have another botd later this week.
David Rakoff is a deliciously witty reporter who, in the best gonzo style, puts himself in the most uncomfortable situations and makes himself and his reactions as much part of the story as what he's covering. To make this work, you have to be a sharp-eyed observer of both the outside world and your own inner climate. A theme running through the book is the increasingly expensive and elaborate things that first world consumers have come up to occupy their life - high fashion, haute cuisine, plastic surgery, cryogenics - with some side trips to some ways to try to break the cycle and get back to the real world - a fine essay about a man who forages in Central Park for his food, and an essay on Rakoff's experience with fasting. Rakoff doesn't just make terrific jokes - he also thinks deeply about the meaning of what he sees. I heard this book on audio, read by Rakoff himself, and it was nice to be in the company of a great storyteller.
Here's an excerpt that captures the book's flavor.
The legal thriller is not my favorite genre - I've taken a vow to never read another John Grisham book - but I do like Scott Turow. He's got it all: graceful writing style, well-drawn characters, plotting that makes you turn the pages, and a skilled handling of big themes. His new book, Limitations, is not a major work. A trade paperback of less than 200 pages, it began life as a serial for the New York Times Magazine, and qualifies as a quick read rather than a book that creates a world you can lose yourself in. But Turow's qualities are in evidence. His main character is a judge, and Turow is interested in the question of how a flawed man can sit in the judgement of others.
George Mason, previously seen as a lawyer in Personal Injuries, is now a Court of Appeals judge trying a teen gang rape case. Aspects of the case remind Mason of an incident in his past, and make him question his fitness to try the case. Other stresses in his life bring him to a breaking point - his wife's serious illness, and a series of threatening emails that come closer and closer to home (Turow is better at the emotional crisis than at the whodunit plot in this one). If you want to try Turow, I'd recommend Presumed Innocent or Personal Injuries over this, but this is worth reading.
While I'm posting, here's this week's random ten:
1. "When We Ran" by John Hiatt
2. "Na Na Na Na Naa" by Kaiser Chiefs
3. "Come On (Let The Good Times Roll)" by Jimi Hendrix
4. "Walk in the Woods" by Peter Case
5. "Language Symbolique" by Thievery Corporation
6. "Chains and Things" by B.B. King
7. "You Got It" by Etta James
8. "Another Time, Another Place" by U2
9. "Lip Service" by Elvis Costello and the Attractions
10."Right On For the Darkness" by Curtis Mayfield
My second book of the week is also on espionage. That's not particularly an interest of mine, I just happen to be on a kick.
Robert Baer spent over 20 years in the CIA, being posted to some of the world's most dangerous trouble spots. His adventures in Beirut, Iraq, Central Asia are eye-opening and cool, with the spycraft and derring-do that good spy fiction can provide. But Baer's larger purpose is to chart what he sees as the demise of his agency. Over the years, he's watched as the CIA has gradually abadoned the practice of running agents in the field, and making contacts with people on the ground. Spy satellites have replaced field agents. An institutional cowardice seems to have taken over, with a don't-rock-the-boat mentality overcoming the will to seek out evildoers. After years in overseas postings, Baer returns to a Washington desk job and uses his position to investigate how things got so bad. At the end, Baer notes that the war against terrorism is a task more suited for intelligence agencies than armies, but America has spent years letting its intelligence apparatus fall apart, and it would take decades to get it back up to speed. Assuming that anyone is trying to improve it.
This is not a book to make you feel good about America's direction. It especially made me consider a different side of the torture debate. Baer thinks that the best intelligence comes from people who have been recruited from the other side, people who want to help America because they believe in it. Making America a torture state seems especially designed to alienate people who might help us. If torture victims are one of sources of intelligence, soon they will be our only source of intelligence.
After this, I think I might want to try some spy fiction, maybe Baer's novel or the new John Le Carre. Or I may take my son's advice and read "Alex Rider: Stormbreaker."
The National Security Agency doesn't get much attention from the press, but according to Keefe, it's the largest intelligence agency in the world. It works in tandem with similar agencies in Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, to listen in on the world's satellite, radio, telephone and other communications systems. Keefe walks us through what is known about this system, called Echelon, and introduces us to characters who've come into contact with it: ex-spies, whistleblowers, dogged investigative journalists, politicians who've found out only long after their administrations were over what their intelligence services were up to behind their back. Keeping in mind that the more a source is willing to talk about Echelon, the less they really know about it, Keefe gives a picture of a system far more reaching and embedded in everyday life than you'd imagine.
This is frightening in the Orwellian sense, of course, but also frightening in that the glut of information the NSA has to wade through gets larger and larger, and their ability to find the truly important nuggets that could help our country gets smaller. Maybe. The NSA may have computer programs that can efficiently wade through the mess, or they may not. We're in an age where the line between national security and personal privacy keeps getting redrawn, and this book walks that line.
