Item 16 - Finish 30 3 books - "The Sisters Brothers" by Patrick deWitt

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So apparently I took a bit of an unplanned hiatus. In my little vacation from blogging I have still been working on my list. That's included finishing this little gem. I've always loved westerns and this one is a nice quick read and fills the void that "Deadwood" never coming back left. The comparison to "Deadwood" is deliberate, though, as this book uses the same sort of lofty language as that show to create a sense of disconnect between the characters surroundings/actions and their words. In places it felt a little forced, but overall it was enjoyable.

One thing that did stick out for me was the episodic nature of the book. Maybe it's just because I spent the last month playing "Fallout 3" (which of course has nothing to do with my lack of updates), but the whole story almost seemed like an RPG campaign: the characters would drift from place to place, be given a quest, get a reward and move on towards their final goal. This isn't necessarily a bad thing (I'd actually kind of like to try a western themed RPG now that I think of it) it just sort of made it a little strange.

Item 16 - Finish 30 4 books - "Packng for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void" by Mary Roach

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This is the second book by Mary Roach that I've read, the first being "Stiff". I felt that book was the stronger of the two, but this one was still engaging. Mary Roach is a funny, clever writer who always manages to talk about science-ish subjects in a fun way. I say "science-ish" because you don't really come away from these sorts of books any smarter, but you are primed for any cocktail party you might find yourself at with little factoids to drop into lulls in the conversation (this could be called the "Gladwellian school of science" if  you wanted to put a name on it.)

That may sound derisive, but I assure you it's not meant to be. I enjoyed this book and loved the little stories from her various interviews and resources. My only real problem with this particular book was the title: it makes it seem like it's going to actually be about the science of humans reaching Mars, or at least the plans to visit our second closest neighbor. That takes up a very small part of the book, mostly at the end of chapters where she will take on a couple of sentences about the subject she has just discussed and saying something to the effect of "and just imagine doing that for two years, which is how long it will take to get to Mars." This is largely due to the very nature of getting humans to Mars. It's such a theoretical proposition at this point that there is very little that can be written about it. To that end, I think that the very subject of Mars or theoretical space exploration could have been it's own chapter and the book could have just used "space" as the uniting theme.

The whole book does have a sort of unfortunate sadness about it. Now that our government has decided that manned spaceflight is far less important than invading other countries (as if there was ever any doubt about their priorities) it looks as though our role in flinging humans towards the red planet will be greatly diminished. Why should it be the United States' responsibility to stand at the forefront of science and exploration? I mean who wants to do that, right? Regardless, I sincerely hope that someone from this planet does continue funding space exploration. As Mary Roach quotes Ben Franklin in her book when he was asked what use a hot air balloon (the first human flying machine) was "What is the good of a newborn infant?" There is near limitless potential in the human animal, we just have to strive for it.

Item 16 - Finish 30 5 books - "Old Man's War" by John Scalzi

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I bought this book because of a thread on Reddit about great first lines in books or something like that. The quotation used was interesting enough that I decided to give it a shot:


Which also makes this another instance of me buying and reading a book because of a good high-concept. Thankfully, this one worked out much better than last time.

I'm not about to heap praises on this book though. We're offered glimpses of some great premises that I'm sure will be fleshed out in the further books in the series, but I just don't feel a desire to seek those books out. There's a scene in the book where the protagonist suddenly has a breakdown on the battlefield, realizing he's been killing dozens or hundreds of alien combatants since joining the army. It's actually a moment I waited for, since the rest of the book he deals with mowing down aliens as if he were talking about his laundry. But then the scene fizzles without any real resolution, he just kind of gets over it. That kind of sums up how I felt at the end; I'll never really know much more about this series, or if the hero ever truly feels anything about his actions, but I can live with that.

Item 16 - Finish 30 6 books - "Extinction Point" by Paul Antony Jones

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Oh boy. I'll just get this over with quickly; I didn't like this book. I had a lot of reasons but one of the primary ones is the protagonist, Emily. Emily is your typical reader stand-in character in that she is essentially a blank slate personality. This is even more unfortunate than you might expect since she is essentially the only "character" (and I use that word loosely here) that we are exposed to for most of the book. The one part of her personality that does make it into the plot is that she is incredibly genre blind.

It's one thing if a story never makes mention of a genre; I'm willing to accept, for instance, in "Friday the 13th" that the teens have never seen a slasher movie in their life, maybe in their universe that particular type of fiction doesn't exist and therefore it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do to split up and go into the basement by themselves. This is not the case with Emily; she explicitly states she's a fan of zombie movies and that a sci-fi movie is playing in the background at one point. And yet she persists in doing everything that you would expect someone with no experience in either subject to do: Hmmm, should I arm myself in case someone/something attacks me? NOPE! Should I find a flashlight before going exploring? Fuck that! What was that strange sound? I'll go investigate!

I think what really gets me is that I think the author is probably a good writer, but it felt like he phoned this in. So much so that nothing actually happens or is resolved by the end of the book. It ends with a non-cliffhanger cliffhanger. It's very obviously designed with  a desire to be a series in mind. You are left with a single character who you don't care about, doing something that doesn't seem to matter and no resolution to any part of it. It could have done so much more, which is it's cardinal sin.

Item 16 - Finish 30 7 books - "How to Be Black" by Baratunde Thurston

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Baratunde Thurston takes a really amazing approach to race in this book, which is appropriate for a book with such a lofty title as "How to Be Black," the amazing thing is that he aims high and he hits his target. The book is part comedy, part autobiography and part instruction manual on race relations in the United States. It is one of the better comedy books that I've read in a long time and he manages to integrate his own experience and life story pretty seamlessly into the different sections of the book. Like the best "Onion" articles, I found myself quoting it in conversation or pulling the book out and reading whole sections to helpless people.

My one complaint is that sometimes the other contributors to the book (his "panel of experts") didn't fit in quite perfectly. I assume this is due to the nature of the way they were collected (I believe they were interviews rather than written essays) or possibly an issue of editing. I want to emphasize that I actually enjoyed all of the contributors thoughts and thought they all were interesting and funny, I just felt that they were sometimes unnecessary or slightly awkward to the rest of the text.

Item 16 - Finish 30 8 books - "The Big Lebowski" by Jenny M. Jones

The Polish poster for "The Big Lebowski" (Source)

I've lost count of how many times I've seen "The Big Lebowski". It's one of my favorite movies of all time. I remember my mom told me about when she introduced a friend to it and the friend's immediate reaction was to say "I want to write an essay about that movie." A couple of years later in college I managed to live that dream not once but twice, milking the movie for two papers in two separate classes. Apparently I was just a little early on that trend; the last few years has seen the publication of a fairly large number of books about this wonderful little film that was barely a blip when it came out (including one by El Duderino himself).

There are worse things to devote your time to

This is the first time I've read one of these books, I bought it when it was on sale on Amazon. I enjoyed the behind the scenes look at it, but the overall feel was a bit too much like reading a lengthened Wikipedia article or the trivia section of IMDb. The author used very few original sources and instead depended primarily on other publications, interviews and documentaries. I would have appreciated a bit more of her own interviews or thoughts, because when she did have them they were interesting. She has a very good voice, I just wish I could have read more of that.

I think I might have too many t-shirts

Item 16 - Finish 30 9 books - "Ulysses" by James Joyceand"The New Bloomsday Book" by Harry Blamires

From "Ulysses 'Seen'", something that everybody should check out, not just Joyce fans

This one was a little bit of a cheat as it's the third time that I've read "Ulysses." It's become a somewhat semi-annual tradition for me to start reading it as late in the year as I can and still finish it by Bloomsday. Each year I try to expand on the tradition and make that Bloomsday a little bit extra special. This year I added "The New Bloomsday Book" to the mix. I've read annotations for "Ulysses" before, but never quite so comprehensive."Ulysses" is one of those books that the more you read about it and what it means the better it becomes.

But this entry wasn't going to be about either of these books, I feel the very fact that I read a book about a book while I was reading the first book says enough about the amount that has already been said by other far more intelligent people. Instead, I was going to write about what I did with my Bloomsday to make it remarkable this year. I had a plan to get lamb kidneys and have a whole meal based around that. Unfortunately, I missed my chance to order them as I was distracted by a number of other things going on in my life.

I was able to salvage the day though, I bought some Guinness and got to share it with one of the only other people in my life that enjoys Joyce (and Guinness) as much as I do. My mom has had a few health problems recently (in comedy this is what would be called "Understatement"), so being able to share a beer with her and just getting to chat for a little while was special enough.

Besides, next year is the 110th Bloomsday. Shit's gonna get real.

Item 16 - Finish 30 11 books - "Oz Reimagined" Edited by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen

Ooh, it's all edgy and grimdark

I read "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" (check that out, you can get it for free) when I was seven and ill. I had to stay home from school and had nothing to do so my mom gave my a beat up old copy she'd picked up for fifty cents at a bookstore. I read it in one sitting and after I was well I plowed through the other fourteen books in the original series. There is something so lovely about those first few books, they are strange and funny and touching. And always sincere. You always got the feeling that Baum truly loved entertaining children; despite his best efforts to try to the end the series a number of times, he'd always relent to the wishes of the children that would barrage him with letters.

There doesn't appear to be a lot of that same sincerity in this volume. Most of the stories skew toward the gritty re-imaginings that have become the norm in recent years. I should mention here that I'm not a purist when it comes to new interpretations of other works, I don't think that they must follow the tone of the original to the letter. I enjoyed Gregory Maguire's "Wicked" enough to read the sequel "Son of a Witch" and will probably get around to the other two books in the series at some point as well. I just think that going straight to the gritty is a bit cliche; if you want to see what I mean go to deviantART and search for "Oz re-imagined" or "Oz reimagined." There are some clever ideas on there, but it's largely the same sort of material that would be right at home in this book.

I don't want to seem like there weren't any good stories in this book, there were a few that I really liked. One of my favorites was "The Boy Detective of Oz" by Tad Williams. It served as a great commentary on the very thing that I'm talking about, the habit of authors to distort Oz into a nightmare without much reason. Williams is actually able to have his cake and eat it too, in this way; he gets to do a little of the dreary stuff within a framework where it works, while still telling a somewhat more classical Oz story and gets in a jab at writers whose first impulse is to turn the Tin Woodman into a murderous mechanical tyrant.

There were a some other stories in here that I really enjoyed, one or two that fall into that category I've so scorned in the last three paragraphs. The thing they had in common was some sort of joy lurking in the text. As I said before, sincerity is essential to Oz.

Item 16 - Finish 30 12 books - "The Lottery and Other Stories" by Shirley Jackson

I think I am in the minority of American college graduates in that I never read "The Lottery" when I was in school. Now that I have read it and some of Jackson's other work I wish I had been exposed to it earlier. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the short stories in this book and I always love reading an author who is obviously influential on other writers that I admire but I feel like she would have hit me a lot harder if I had read her when I was younger. I think she is one of those writers who you have to read at a certain stage in your life to fully appreciate; someone that expresses something with their words that you felt in that time that you hadn't been able to properly emote or something that you had never seen before. These are the best authors in the world, on an individual level, because you carry that love and appreciation for them with you for the rest of your life.

Item 16 - Finish 30 13 books - "The Will to Whatevs" by Eugene Mirman

I'm a fan of Eugene Mirman. He is one of the best parts of "Bob's Burgers" and his riffs can be some of the funniest moments on the show. His stand-up is smart, funny and original. Rather than write a review of the book I've decided that I'd post a clip of him talking about doing a reading of his book (skip to 2:59 for the relevant part, or watch the whole thing, it's pretty funny).

Item 16 - Finish 30 14 books - "Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem" by Jonathan Woods

Bad Juju, good cover

I read this book primarily in a bar while waiting for friends. Not in a single trip, hopefully I would give up on waiting after an hour; but it happened to be a book that I had on my phone and that I didn't mind putting down when people would show up unexpectedly. I mention this because there is something deceptive that happens when reading noir fiction in a bar. The atmosphere of a bar can make the worst noir seem good; it can make it more real, more gritty, more sexy. This book was far from the worst but even the bar couldn't put it into great reading territory.

"Bad Juju" committed a few of the ancient sins of noir fiction, things that I hope we can all learn from and work past to make better books. Woods didn't commit all of them, very rarely do you get authors that do that aren't self-published. But in an effort to spread the gospel here are some of the cardinal sins of neo-noir:

• You shall not make your protagonist an invincible badass white guy, Bruce Willis already exists and we're all kind of tired of him anyway.

Seriously, smirking...

...is not...

...acting. Knock it off.

• You shall not make two dimensional female characters that are just sex in high heels, even if you believe that making her the protagonist is "forward thinking." Remember the Bechdel Test and keep it handy.

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• Smoking and drinking are not all that is required to give fiction a hardboiled edge; reaching for a cigarette or a whiskey is not a character trait, it is just filler.

I'm cutting you off for your own good, trust me (Source)

• Honor your forefathers and foremothers: Hammett, Chandler, Highsmith, Ellroy and Mosley (among others) blessed are their names. Learn from their teachings but do your own thing (i.e. you shall not steal).

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I'm sure there are many more, but these are the ones I've come up with off the top of my head. I want to reiterate that "Bad Juju" didn't commit all of these sins; its chief problem was that it flogged number two to death. There wasn't a single female character in any of the stories that was more than a sex object or a venomous snake. Not that the male characters were likable nor that characters necessarily need to be likable, but all of the women were little more than prizes to be won or monsters to be defeated.

There was one instance where this wasn't the case. The story in which the POV was a female character by it nature necessitated it. Unfortunately being a woman is her only defining characteristic and her sex is her primary weapon. It all just came off as sloppy and a bit lazy.

Item 16 - Finish 30 15 books - "Swann's Way" by Marcel Proust

Swann's Way by Vanessa Fermino Card

I said before that there was very little I could say about "Swann's Way" that hasn't been said already and said better. It's the world in a teacup. It's the persistence and imperfection of memory. It's idealized love.

That, or it's a really good marketing strategy for sponge cookies.

Item 16 - Finish 30 16 books - "The Hole" by Aaron Ross Powell

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I'll break my review of "The Hole" by Aaron Ross Powell down, in the interest of keeping it short.

Il buono: Great premise; a zombie book that's not actually a zombie book. Plus the elder gods in the shape of Mormon mythology angle is a fantastic idea that I wish had been explored more fully instead of in just the last bit of the book. As I've said before, I'm a sucker for a good premise.

Il brutto: There are only two characters in the book and they are never really fleshed out. Every once in a while another character is introduced just to be killed a few pages later, but they are never defined enough to make you care. Unfortunately the same is essentially true of the protagonists.

Il cattivo: That last part of the book where the most interesting part happens? It's also where the anti-climactic finish comes up. We trade any sort of action that happened in the rest of the book for what I can only describe as deus exposition machina, it's pretty unsatisfying. I think Powell is a decent writer and had a good concept, unfortunately it just didn't work.

Item 16 - Finish 30 17 books - "Masters of Atlantis" by Charles Portis

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The first time I read a Charles Portis book ("True Grit", if you're curious) I had the feeling that I've had with a few authors in my life; a feeling of joy and sadness. Joy that I had just read something great that I would hold dear for the rest of my life. Sadness because I would never be able to read it for the first time again and that I would one day run out of books that that author had written.

With "Masters of Atlantis" I've run out of Charles Portis' books. As I mentioned once before, I'm trying to keep these reviews short and to the point, but I didn't feel it was right to pass by this book without eulogizing it in some way. So there it is. It's not his finest book (that would be "The Dog of the South" without question) but it's a fine meditation on getting old and the expectations that an artist has placed on them and places on themselves.

Item 16 - Finish 30 18 books - "They Live" Deep Focus critical viewing and interpretation by Jonathan Lethem

They Live by RustyShakelford

You guys, I seriously love this movie. So much that I bought and read this book. It's worth a read if you love it as much as I do. But if you do, you've probably already read it.

Seriously, I love this movie.

Review of "War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches" edited by Kevin J. Anderson Item 16 - Finish 30 19 books

War of the Worlds by Paul Alexander Mudie

I tracked down a copy of this book (another one that appears to be out of print) once again because I loved the concept: the Martian invasion of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" through the eyes of contemporaries.

I have very fond memories of "War of the Worlds." I read it when I was 8 or 9 years old, it was one of the first books that I remember actively seeking out. I don't remember what it was that started my obsession with it, but I have a feeling it had something to do with the Orson Welles radio play, which I found on cassette at the library and listened to multiple times. After reading the book I tracked down a VHS copy of the 1953 movie which has the fact that it is a film that is firmly of it's time as an excuse for it's mediocrity (come to think of it, that's a pretty reasonable excuse for the Spielberg version as well).

The further you get away from those early obsessions of your youth the stronger the impulse to revisit them becomes. Plenty of people refuse to move beyond them; embracing them either sincerely or ironically (if irony even still exists, I'm really not sure if it does). For my part, I think I can separate out my feelings of sentimental attachment to the original book to accept that it's not all that good. As I said, it will always have a special spot in my heart.

As for this book, it doesn't really matter what I thought of it. It's out of print and unlikely to ever be reissued. I will point out that I thought that Connie Willis' section is one of her funnier short pieces that I've ever read and definitely worth tracking down (it's called "The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson's Poems: A Wellsian Perspective," if you're curious). Overall, my sense of nostalgia wasn't enough to make this a book I will ever revisit but the same is true of the original, so it's in good company.

Review of "Anatomy for Runners" by Jay Dicharry Item 16 - Finish 30 20 books

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The classic wisdom is that every runner gets an injury at some point, the ones who never hurt themselves just stopped running. Before I switched to minimalist footwear I'd had a few instances of tendonitis and bursitis, after making the switch I had no injuries for a long time. That caught up with me eventually, this last year I've hobbled along between minor pains, most of which didn't last very long and that I just put down to getting old.

That was all fine until about six months ago when I noticed that I would get a pain in my knee and hip after I finished longer runs. The pain wasn't constant but would show up again every time and would stick around longer than I liked. My doctor, who is also a runner, diagnosed it as being an issue with my form and suggested going to a sports medicine doctor to have an assessment. When I explained that my budget ran more towards Excedrin than experts he recommended this book as an alternative.

Much like my own doctor, Dicharry tends to focus on form. It makes sense, if you aren't running correctly you are going to hurt yourself. The problem I had with this is that he tends to repeat a lot of the same information, alluding to advice that he will give later. The advice is there and is useful, but when you diagnose what your actual issue is, it's hard to not just rush straight to the solution. The result is that with so much repetition that solution can often get confused.

It really is a great resource, but I would never recommend reading it straight through. Better to find your particular problem and then read the exercises he suggests to help with it. If you are intent on reading straight through as I was, go the Marshall McLuhan route and read every other page, at least until you get to the exercises. You likely won't miss any information and you will save yourself the time.

Review of "Slow Chocolate Autopsy" by Iain Sinclair and Dave McKean Item 16 - Finish 30 21 books

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I sought out this book (it doesn't appear to be in print in the US) for a few reasons. I became aware of it as a result of Alan Moore's "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"books. I loved the concept of the prisoner of London, a man trapped spatially in London but not temporally. But the book wasn't content with one high concept and pushed for even greater oddity with it's free-form-nearly-to-the-point-of-stream-of-consciousness writing. The results are mixed for me.

The book is a collection of stories tied together by Norton, the aforementioned prisoner of London and nearly every review I could find of it refers to the book as a work of Psychogeography (which may be because they all cribbed from Wikipedia). It opens with a story about the death of Christopher Marlowe and ends with a bit about William S. Burroughs. It's appropriate, since much of the book is concerned with how the writer views himself and his art. Not just Sinclair, but writers in general. Norton is, I believe, at least at some level a stand-in for Sinclair and his frequent dips into self-loathing ring fairly true for anybody that has ever attempted to write anything for the sake of writing it.

The problem for me was the free-form style did become distracting. I know that this is more an indictment of my own tastes rather than of the any of the books merits, but this sort of style has always been rather hit or miss for me. But Sinclair is artful with his words and when he hits you feel it. One of my favorite bits from the text popped out at me and I knew I would have to use it end this appraisal: "The vagrant was a fine old man, one of the resources of the city, a living fossil; put some bone in the pouch of his cheeks, compost in his boots, he'd be a dead ringer for the Duke of Kent. One of them. Proof positive: there is no such thing as 'absolute poverty', except of the imagination."

Review of "20th Century Ghosts" by Joe Hill Item 16 - Finish 30 22 books

The first thing that I ever read by Joe Hill was his phenomenal comic series "Locke and Key" and from the first issue I was in the tank for him. This was my first experience with his prose and it was a good one. Hill has a way with short stories that very few modern writers can match and while there may be an impulse from some to qualify that with some nonsense about the horror genre (mostly from the same quarters that start reviews of every graphic novel comic book with phrases like "comics aren't just for kids anymore") I won't. I think he's a fantastic writer and every story in this collection, horror or otherwise, shines in one way or another.

In fact, he uses a few of the stories in this collection to subvert some very ingrained horror conventions; "Best New Horror" in particular plays with the tropes of the psycho family, not to mention the classic horror writer go-to of the publishing world. I honestly can't recall the last time that I felt as tense while reading a suspense story as I did while in the grip of "In The Rundown". And "Voluntary Committal" reminded me so much of "House of Leaves" that I couldn't help but love it.

That actually gets to one sticking point with this set of stories: I wanted more with several of them. Not just in the sense that I would have loved to explore deeper into the world of "Voluntary Committal" (already a fairly lengthy section) but also that a few of the stories just end. And while in some cases it could be argued that they do so in a way that does subvert those same tropes as mentioned before (again, here I'm thinking of "Best New Horror"), in the end I felt let down when it happened. Overall, however, I was so pleased that I didn't care. Joe Hill is the sort of writer who has such a strong command of the storytelling process that anything short of fantastic feels almost disappointing.

Review of "The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy" by Stanslaw Lem Item 16 - Finish 30 23 books

Ijon Tichy by Adoradora

This book was not my first experience with Stanislaw Lem, though it is the first book of his that I've read. I saw the 1972 Tarkovskiy film "Solaris" in college. And like everyone else that saw that particular film while in college, I pretended I understood it and discussed it with my equally unsure friends. The point here is not to self-flagellate for the delusions of adequacy of youth, but rather to give an idea of what my idea of Lem was going in to this book. I had always heard and believed (in no small part due to the obvious parallels between "Solaris" and "2001") that he was sort of the Polish Arthur C. Clarke. I have of course mentioned before my trepidation concerning these sorts of comparisons and rightfully so here as that reputation (at least as far as "Futurological" is concerned) is completely unfounded.

I've read a good number of Clarke's novels, I don't think it surprises anybody that I have always been a nerd. While Clarke was an excellent writer, the works of his that I've read all lacked a sense of humor or whimsy. It may be that he was a bit busy playing the Texas sharpshooter with his own predictions (try reading the introductions he wrote to some of his later works, it sometimes feels a bit embarrassing how self-congratulatory they can be) but he went in strictly for what people that I tend not to associate with would call "hard sci-fi". Lem on the other hand has a playfulness in this book that often crosses into the ludicrous. The artist who created the above picture of the narrator of "Futurological" said of Ijon Tichy (the star of "Futurological" and many other stories by Lem) that he is something of a "spacefaring Baron [Münchhausen]", which is as apt a description as anything.

Again, the danger in these comparisons lies in how limiting they are. For instance, Tichy's lineage includes equal parts of Alice as well Münchhausen: the bulk of this novel takes place in various dream states. It also has the sort of humor and social criticism that would make Vonnegut proud. And for that matter, there is an element of Dickishness (to steal a page from Robert Brockway) as well. Although it's probably more likely that Dick was influenced by Lem rather than vice versa and as far as I know it's just as likely that neither had any clue the other existed, I'm honestly not willing to put forth the effort at the moment to find out; to go back to Alice, I'd just as soon not go down this rabbit hole too far.

In the end, these comparisons really have no effect on my enjoyment of the work. At the same time I bought this book I bought another by Lem and can't wait to dive into it. I think I'll also have to see about getting Solaris out from Netflix to see if the intervening years have had any effect on it or me.