The Factual Opinion

No Pictures: Justin Cronin Made A Lot Of Money In Print By Writing Something People Want To Read

The Passage
By Justin Cronin, 2010

If you haven't heard about it yet, here's a refresher course: this book made the writer nearly four million in publisher money, and then it made him nearly two million in Ridley Scott's movie money. That's before the book was published. It isn't Justin Cronin's first book--he has two previous novels and one horribly received novella (which he wrote in his twenties, which is when you're supposed to write those kinds of things)--but it is the first thing he's done that's completely removed from his educational and professional background, which can be summed up by merely listing a bit of them: Iowa Writer's Workshop, Harvard, professor of English. Because: this book? This multimillion dollar book that clocks in just a shade below 800 pages and happens to be the first in a trilogy?

It's about psychic vampires who have rendered North America (and probably the world, although there's no confirmation of that theory to be found in this first volume) a post-apocalyptic death zone.

So, fuck yeah. From beneath the feet of Marilynne Robinson (current faculty member of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and writer of the fantastic Gilead and near-perfect Housekeeping, neither of which of feature vampires or rogue FBI agents) comes something that reads a bit like The Stand would read if somebody had stopped Stephen King from including all those made-up colloquialisms he always spackles his dialog with.

King isn't the last comparison that might cross your mind when you're reading The Passage, but the one that won't make much of an appearance is Twilight or True Blood: this isn't a book about the people who befriend the vampires, that little fantasy is dispensed with early on in the book when the closest thing to "a good one" that the book has rips one of our earliest heroes into multiple pieces after a particularly engaging (albeit stocked with cliches like "i'll be right behind you") chase sequence. The other thing you won't find much of is the word "vampire"--it's made clear early on, by one of the overachieving scientists responsible for the world's condition, that the word is in the verboten category. And for the most part, so are all the stock vampire truisms--sunlight remains a problem, but killing them is more a question of weaponry and speed, neither of which our eventual protagonists have in great abundance. Garlic just turns them on.

For the most part--and yes, this is one of those rare attempts at Spoiler Freedom--the book is set after the world has collapsed, almost a century after mankind's numbers have dwindled to tiny, walled in communes rife with possible incest and a knowledge of history dependent on the memories of the old and senile. Cronin's Crichton-y efforts at the beginning of the story--which focus on the days and actions that preceded the current status quo--are rife with the sorts of things that always populate these kinds of novels, crash-course biographies and chainmail-fisted attempts to inspire a reader's immersion. Maybe it's due to his serious American fiction background, but most of it actually works--a beaten, impoverished white trash wife, an FBI agent trying to stem the moral collapse his infant daughter's death has brought about, the decaying sanity of a "recovered" child molester--even when the book's blurb leaves no question of whether these people will survive past the opening pages, thus rendering this first section a laundry list of "people who aren't going to make it".

Of course, it's when the book opens to its primary setting of a world after that Cronin starts to show off the second part of his so-fetching-it-must-be-public-relations bio takes hold. Supposedly, Cronin came up with a good bit of what he was going to write during a game he and his daughter played during their daily walks to school; a game where they were making up a story. True or false, it's not hard to see what he means--The Passage, like almost all post-apocalyptic fantasy, fits perfectly with what one might refer to as "daydream" fiction, the types of stories we tell ourselves about what we would do if we won the lottery tomorrow, or if we were forced to scavenge for food at the cheap bodega we usually just buy cigarettes at. From here, the book follows some predictable twists and turns, but it's ultimately successful: a smart, compelling thriller that's biggest flaw might be the mercenary techniques that Cronin overuses to give each of the book's "Parts" a cliffhanger to rest upon. (It's wholly possible that some people might be reading this book slowly, but god knows why--if ever there was a genre that suffers from multiple stops and starts, it's thrillers-in-prose.) By the end of the book, when Cronin sandwiches two fake-out gotchas right next to one another, even the most forgiving reader will be irritated by the gears of manipulation left out so plainly. (And they'll feel an even deeper level of irritation when they read the book's last sentence and remember how far away 2012--when the second book will "hopefully" drop--really is.)

The Passage isn't about to change the world, and it isn't Twilight for grown-ups. In time, it may be as dated as the good versus evil portions of The Stand are now, hell, it may be a stupid book already. But it doesn't feel like one. It feels like the sort of book that Red Dragon or the Day of the Jackal still are, the sort of airport-friendly don't-put-that-fucker down experience that books supposedly don't provide that often. It's got some work to do if it's not going to turn into a super-powered magic fight, and the violence could use some greasier descriptions to better marry it to Cronin's blunt surprise delivery, but for what it is--a Stephen King post-apoc thriller with a Michael Crichton meets Andre Dubus opener--it's a hell of a good time.

-Tucker Stone stayed up until 4 two nights in a row to prove to his wife he could read this fucker in less than 30 hours, 2010

No Pictures: "The Limits of My Language Mean The Limits of My World"

Freedom: A Novel
By Jonathan Franzen, 2010

He came, conquered, then pissed right off again, the derision of a million unforgiving housewives ringing across his apologetic face. Is it any wonder that he returned bearing them a present? Is it any surprise the character that exercised him the last block of years?

Franzen will never escape the legacy of Oprah and the Corrections, and it's well he shouldn't: he's a novelist most concerned with what's right now, more than what should or could be, and he seems content for the first time, finally in concert with the audience he most assuredly will satisfy: this is a book for those who want to read and will pay for the privilege to do so, as long as they're getting to read about themselves. If the disdain he's suffered from some younger writers carries a whiff of truth to it--and in drips, it does, calling an Uncle Tupelo analog "Walnut Surprise" denotes Franzen as somebody who doesn't pay that much attention to Pitchfork--it's besides the point: Freedom, like Corrections, isn't a book for the precocious youth still enamored with style and speed, but that more dissident audience, one seeking the comforting pleasure of Strunk & White-ian craft. An old book, for the middle age, about their right now. (For those who question what seems a weird emphasis on "the population explosion", it's worth knowing that was a talking-point fear on par with Barack Obama, terrorism and "snark" back when the primary audience for Freedom: A Novel were as old as I imagine most of the one-minute glancers that this particular blog attracts to be.) The fear of children fucking too soon, an educated contempt for contemporary music, hysterically funny jeremiads against iPods and blogs, Freedom is interested in grown-ups in an ultimately democratic fashion: you don't have to agree on anything, you just have to survived past a certain date.

It's met with some ambivalence around these parts, some of these goals. Not because it collapses into a Gray's Anatomy/Desperate Housewives fetishization of middle-aged sexual affairs when it comes time for those kinds of twists, not because its dedication to old fashioned Writing Good Sentences ignores the compulsive pleasures of more ambitious experimentation, but merely because it's so sturdily placed in a genre that's been under attack for so long that the assumption that there's something wrong with it has been internalized like bone marrow: this is Literary Fiction, it's Great American, and so it must be dead, wrong, and shit. Immersive as he can be, Franzen--a proud member of the "don't write on an Internet-accessible computer" writing crew--seems to recognize the abandonment of solitary focus that book-reading is so popularly described as having lost. His elder characters stay on track as much as they can, and his most jittery young man is paired with a heavily fictionalized portrayal of autistic manic depression to keep the tides of lost attention at bay, but the wolf of multi-tasking is forever at the door. It's not an accident that Franzen's largest characters in the book are either married to all-consuming actions, like sports or the immobile silence of birdwatching, any more than it is when he glosses over the actual creativity of his one artist character. Purposefully, heroically, Freedom isn't the tombstone of the Great American Novel, but it is one of the few larger pieces of fiction that will be able to ignore the compulsive speed with which these generations live now while still grasping towards that classification. Hiding it as he does, the tang of bitterness multiplies by the end, leaving one desperately fending off the most 2010 of reactions: that's it?

Occupied City
By David Peace, 2009

The brilliant second in Peace's to-be-finished trilogy of crime in post-World War Two Japan sees the author upping and refining the style of Tokyo Year Zero--this is half-book, half-epic poem, and the real crime that serves as centerpiece this time burns even hotter. Whereas Year Zero was a heavily stylized rendition of crime fictions most reliable device--the pursuit of a serial killer--Occupied City uses the Sadamichi Hirasawa case as its spawning core. (Googling that is to know horror: be warned.)

Crediting Peace as a writer who "pulls no punches" seems cliched, yet its difficult to ignore the aptness of the phrase--here in Occupied City, one finds a writer going much farther afield than his contemporaries (a small number, that) in terms of ambition, violently rejecting any of the standard crime novel conventions, choosing instead to layer out tightly bound chapters in a myriad of styles. Here, one finds entire sections written in unpunctuated mental waste, the product of an unknown detective's scratchpad as he spirals into mania, while the multiple victims gather for choral outpourings of black mass rage, sputtering alongside the living throughout the book, always beginning with chants of "Beneath The Black Gate". Throughout the book, Peace returns to set writing patterns, copying and pasting entire paragraphs to give the relevant passage a sense of oppressive repitition, only to cut the tape so that he can splice multiple narratives in one long string of sentences, using capitalization and italics to code the work--the ghosts jabber about everything at once, it is only our narrator who is willing to provide a crutch.

Like most of Peace's output so far, the book is a grotesque hunchback of cynical contempt, refusing at every introduction to produce characters who can escape the diseased violence that infects them. While only overtly political in a few brief passages circling the various humiliations that a few American soldiers unleash upon the Japanese citizens, there's no escaping the observational tone--the rage squirts out, spattering like the guts of roaches, their carcasses smashed by wet, sticky hands. Judgments are few and far between, and so the result: it's why the word ambition should go so rarely used.

The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company
By David Price, 2008

Pretty much the go-go positive side of the coin that is popularized by the library of collapse on the flip, The Pixar Touch shares a lot of the qualities (stylistic and structural) that books by the Michael Lewis types produce. Here, one reads about the decades in the wilderness spent by Pixar's braintrust, years where they hid their ultimate ambition--to make movies--while struggling to keep the money flowing. While there's a consistent sense that portions of the story are being left unsaid, as it's difficult to believe that so much money could pump in one direction without more animosity, it's not hard to grasp why. It's a book about success, about winning one's goals with very little (beyond time) sacrificed, the story of dreams, eventually fulfilled. 

-Tucker Stone, 2010 

No Pictures: If You Ain't Smokey, Then This Ain't Your Message

The Pregnant Widow
By Martin Amis, 2010

Martin Amis gets more shit than he probably deserves, but I wouldn't attempt to mount a defense for the man's work--it would be impossible, as the only thing I remember about Night Train and Yellow Dog (the only books I've read of his besides this one) is that I didn't like them. This one came highly recommended though, by somebody who often strikes me as a singularly perfect human being made flesh by the Hebrew God of old, and after diving into it, I have to say: this is excellent.

Franzen's new book sure is getting a lot of high praise, right? That's got to be in part because its For Adults with capital letters, that it concerns itself less with meeting the nostalgia and kitsch audiences on their level--I could, of course, be totally wrong, as I'm only guessing at it, having not cracked it myself. And yet, I have to wonder if it's going to go so far as something like what Amis does here, something that's so immediately concerned with the shaping of what makes memory into something falsely reliable (if you're looking for truth) and still so important (if you want to know why we do the things we do, the way we wished we'd live then, as the memory of it determines how we do it now). Because this is a book about sex, fucking, women, men, boys, hate, and even more so, again, sex. It's about fucking each other for too long, and then fucking somebody else on the side, it's about the way sex has become ad copy, but when it actually occurs--with the sweat, and the bodies, and the eye contact, and the furtive, sneaking lies that lust creates through lack of love--it thoroughly annihilates the way we talk about it.

This isn't making a lot of sense to me, I'm not even sure how to say what I'm trying to say--but that's The Pregnant Widow itself, a book that probably deserves every single negative thing one might level about its structure and style. It's not going to kick its way into the stacks of "confusing" books, nobody should go that far, but it's still brilliantly manipulating and maddeningly obnoxious at times. You find yourself forced to count occasional streams of dialog into couplets to determine who is saying what, re-reading paragraphs of convoluted monologues just to figure out which parts are the lies, and at the end--when the entirety of its preceding structure of obsessively detailed chronology is rejected so that decades of time can be presented in greatest hits of fucking--you can't help but question whether the book should've been 500 pages longer, or 300 pages shorter.

Of course, that's probably the joke. Sex wants perfect, but it also wants unique. And when you hit the engine room, all the planning ends up in the floor with the mess our bodies leave behind. 

Shop Class as Soulcraft
By Matthew Crawford, 2009

Praised as a testament to human excellence, derided as a manifesto of middle class macho posturing, Crawford's semi-auto-biographical study in the glories of knowing what you own struck me as a bit of both and ultimately neither. This is a book about the way one spends one time and what one spends it on: if it makes you want to learn about the engines and mechanical nature of the objects that rest amongst even the most luddite of lives, it's only achieved the smallest of its goals. See, what it's about is more like this, wrapped up in an inoffensive play on self-help jargon: what are you doing with your time, and why?

Crawford's story is pretty simple to blurb: he's a college educated ex-corporate think tanker who rejected the "life of the mind" and turned his lifelong hobby (repairing motorcycles) into a career. His book was spurred the desire to condemn a mythological glorification of blue collar efforts (and in doing so, lambast the popularity of faked "authenticity") while acknowledging the satisfactions of those efforts. Opening by pointing out that the vastly popular myth of "our digital employed future" has yet to produce the widespread financial or intellectual rewards its ever-distancing horizon continually promises, he then punchily dismisses the wholesale rejection of outsourcing fears with the simple truth that overseas wage-slaves can't build your deck any more than they can plumb your toilet.

While Shop Class doesn't allow enough of an alternate perspective for it to be the philosophical argument that the book is most popularly marketed as, it would be dishonest to pretend that its goals aren't more in line with the library of personal manifestos. It's not a book designed to create mechanics, just a book about one man who took that path. The questions he came up with on the way--why we care so much about college educations when employers view it primarily as a box to check, why intellectual work is valued so poorly financial while the men and women who fix our things are valued so poorly as intellectuals--are designed to work within the reader, not as a mob's battle cry. Is it macho, and does the posture irritate at times? Of course it does. But to expect that it would be otherwise is to layer an obligation that has more to say about the reader than it does, as it were, the work. 

Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture
By David Hajdu, 2009

Here's the problem with this collection: the music articles are, for the most part, well written and informative. When Hajdu goes vicious--mostly when he goes after the lazy, the self-promotional, or the trend-followers--he's usually pretty funny, even when he's painting himself into the corner of the know-it-all-white-rich-guy playing at Authentic Real Man Upbringings. His stuff on blogging and Myspace is all ridiculous as all of that stuff always sounds, but that's more a symptom of the inherent difficulty that everybody has when they're trying to issue blanket criticisms (or praise, although Hadju doesn't have much of that) for something as amorphous and schizophrenic as blogs. There's good writing here, even if he's clearly overly used to a writing format that seems stuck in college (opening anecdote, brief rundown of thesis, followed by a biographical portion that almost always starts with "John Smith was born in 1963, in Cheseapeake, Wyoming...").

But the comics stuff ruins the whole thing. I'm not Dan Nadel, Jeet Heer, Gary Groth, Donald Phelps; I don't have the historical background to take apart everything Hajdu writes here, and yet, even with the tiny bit of comics history I've got running through my brain (most of which comes from reading guys like Nadel, McCulloch and Spurgeon), I can tell you that this statement "it has become commonplace for comics artists to generate complete stories, leaving empty word balloons in the panels; only when the art is finished does the 'writer' come in, filling in the blanks with dialogue to accommodate the imagery" is complete bullshit, I can tell you that Will Eisner's time spent on PS Magazine wasn't "wasted", and if I know that shit, then David Hajdu should really, really know that shit. I'm a guy interested primarily in documenting my own interests on a temporal basis for my own personal entertainment both now and at a later date, someone who knows just enough about comics to know that I know absolutely fucking dick about comic books, and guys like Hajdu--someone who doesn't make comics, and has no apparent ambition to make comics--should be somebody that people like me can look up to, because he seems to be actively working towards dealing with this stuff outside of the normal, jerk-each-other-off channels. But his reasoning in his comics pieces, whether they're about Persopelis, the Spirit, Joe Sacco, or Ghost World is completely crap, his research is unreliable in a way that makes my head hurt, and the fact that he gets away with it--and despite the various places where people go after this dude for reasons just like these, he gets away with it all the time--is fucking disgusting. I'm a huge, huge fan of reading people I disagree with about comics, as long as they aren't sycophantic promote-the-industry-and-my-friends-in-the-face-of-all-reason apologists, but Hajdu isn't one of those people. Instead, he's a guy that simply doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about, and yet he has a forum where far more people are going to engage with him--and believe his skillfully written essays--than just about any of the people that you might name if you were to write up your favorite comics critics.

Barbarians At The Gate
By Bryan Burrough & John Helyar, 1990

Barbarians At The Gate may or may not be one of the most influential business books of all time, but it's certainly an influence on the last twenty years of business books. While lacking in the charismatic corporate sociopath characters that populate the far more entertaining books of Steve Coll or Michael Lewis, it follows their format exactly, leading one to wonder who exactly pioneered this style of writing. Whoever did deserves a prize, because the style alone--a to-the-minute dead run through closed door billion dollar negotiations--is enough to propel interest all the way to the final chapter, which is always the one where the writer (or in this case, writers) throws out the laundry list of Where These People Are Now. Age hasn't served this book well, and you're probably better off with Coll's work if your tolerance for these kinds of books is limited, but this is still a far, far better way to spend one's time than the horrible movie they made out of it.

The Bay of Noon
By Shirley Hazzard, 1970

It takes a good quarter of the book to get used to Hazzard's faux-declarative style, but when it clicks into place, the story opens up into something that's quite pretty. The story of an Englishwoman who accepts assignment in Naples in a considered effort to escape one-sided emotionally incestuous feelings for her brother, Bay of Noon never seems concerned that the reader won't stay on board through the cold, unbending ending. And considering the brevity of the book, its rapid pacing and relatively compelling supporting cast of emotion-addicted loons, Hazzard probably isn't far off base. Still, this ended up being one of those stories that's more about what-happened-at-the-end and who-fucked-who, and she doesn't seem that interested in dealing out those pleasures in anything more than perfunctory fashion.

Dune
By Frank Herbert, 1965

I can count, on one hand, the number of science fiction books I've actually read. It's a pure kind of disinterest, one that isn't tied into any specific ill will or critical sarcasm--I've just never had an interest in the shelves that contain these books. The copy of Dune that I read has been sitting, gathering actual dust (which I cleaned off with a paper towel), ever since I purchased it, which was right after I read what I remember being a pretty fascinating article in the Believer regarding the series' political philosophy. The book came up in conversation a few months ago with a comic book artist, and it was mentioned again to me by yet another comic book artist about two weeks ago, and it seemed like it might fit the bill as a plane trip book. And so, over the course of a couple of back and forth jaunts in a coach seat between my sleeping wife and an elderly man who smelled like decaying flowers, I finally read Dune.

It's pretty fucking good! It's interesting to see that Herbert has a flat zero of interest in describing the appearances of almost all of his characters--he barely gets into what the worms look like, obsessing mostly over mentioning their length and diameter--and you'll go the entire book without finding out what almost every character looks like, except for when they have a scar that he likes to mention. God bless him for doing more than the role-playing-game style structure that dominates so many comics of this particular genre--Dune never reads like a book created to display All This Great Shit I Made Up; instead, it's a story, a pretty engrossing one about the birth of tyrants and the cruelty of guerilla warfare, the building of a cult from the inside out. Dune starts like a million other revenge epics, but by the end of the book, when the downtrodden unleash a blitzkrieg of scorched earth violence, its gone somewhere much different. I hear these don't stay good for long, and that's fine: for now, I'm good right here, with the Guild receding in junkie withdrawal on the outskirts of Arrakis, praying that the Kwisatz Haderach doesn't decide to eviscerate them as well.

-Tucker Stone, 2010

No Pictures: Clearing House

The Big Short
By Michael Lewis, 2010

Michael Lewis books always remind me of really long magazine articles, which is kind of why it takes me forever to get around to reading them. I keep expecting them to turn up at a doctor's office, for free. Then again, Esquire is really the only magazine I can think of that had articles that might be comparable in lengthy readability to what Michael Lewis does, so maybe I'm being unfair. Guess who cares? Nobody, much less me.

The Big Short is the Lewis barn-burner from earlier this year--I actually bought it like a Harry Potter book, day-of-release and all that, and I read it pretty much overnight. It's a fun book in the way all of his books are, full of powerful people cursing and threatening to eat each other's children, all while they reap massive amounts of money off of other powerful people. Lewis got some criticism from the MSNBC/Huffington Post circuit due to what they perceived as an obsession with "creating heroes" out of his primary protagonists, but those remarks don't really make sense based off of Big Short's actual text. The men he describes rarely come across as people you'd want to hang out with, be inspired by, or learn anything from personally. Across the board, they're either social misfits with severe emotional disturbances or sociopathic assholes consumed with greed, and there's little in the text to make one think any of that has changed. (And why would it? If you're a greedy prick who thinks everybody else in your industry is stupid, and you go out and model a business on that belief, and you make billions of dollars when it turns out that you happen to be completely right, why would you start holding the doors for elderly women? Wouldn't you just knuckle down and find out where the rest of the idiots with too much money are?)

A big part of the appeal of The Big Short has to be that it's a cracking piece of populist take-down. While it doesn't do the best job of explaining the ins and outs of some of the financial machinations that the various players used to buttfuck multinational banks and their scumbag employees, it guides you through a laundry list of dishonest morons, points out how far down the exploit-the-poor highway they went, and then packs out the numbers on how horribly they got creamed by a small club of antisocial cynics. It's one of the rare pieces of financial journalism where you really do get exactly what you want, which is some evidence that smart people can punish stupid criminals where it hurts. Even though it ends with most of the major slimeballs getting away with bonuses and cushy fallback jobs, and even when there's no way you'll forget how completely screwed up the economy still is, you still get to spend a decent portion of the book watching the bad guys lose, over and over again. There will never be a time when that isn't a turn-on.

I know a guy who wrote for the Financial Times--I used to take care of his crazy dog when he went out of town, it wasn't like he respects me as a human being, and he shouldn't--so I asked him what he thought of the negative reviews that The Big Short got from the various financial publications. He hadn't read them, but he emailed me a week later and said "all of those articles are written by people who were in various stages of writing this exact same book, and none of them would've done it half as well as Lewis, so you can basically discount every single thing they have to say." So there's that.

The Big Sort
By Bill Bishop, 2009

This is another book that was on my radar for a long time, but I didn't actually pick it up until quite recently. Beyond the homonym, it's similar to Michael Lewis in that it's very reminiscent of a magazine article, specifically, this magazine article, which was written about...this book, actually.

Unfortunately, the book isn't written very well. That's a shame, because this is probably one of the most important books I've read in a long time if we're talking purely subject matter. But it's really a data collection in search of a stylist. The Big Sort is Bill Bishop's name to describe the way in which American citizens have spent the past two decades "clustering" into like-minded neighborhoods and voting districts. He spends a bit of time explaining how he "discovered" the phenomenon--loosely described, it was through the growth of "landslide" voting districts--and then he attempts to illustrate statistics with anecdotes. (Most of these anecdotes are interesting, including the one that focuses on comic book creators in Portland and consists mostly of an interview with Jeff Parker.)

Clustering is nasty, nasty business. When it gets started, the negative results increase exponentially--Democrats become extreme "Death to Republicans" liberals, Republicans become permissive of racist support in hopes of driving up their numbers, whatever bugs you about people you disagree with, clustering makes it far worse. As discussion becomes non-existent, actual human beings turn into hateful stereotypes, weirder psychological roads get paved, facts bail out in place of fear, and "venting" becomes something given far more respect than it deserves. There's a lot of value in Bishop's description of this change, a lot of which is tied up in his fervent need to document reality, but its still a really difficult book to read, if "engaging writing" is a decisive factor.

The Black Minutes
By Martín Solares, 2010

While it's told in the same sort of shifting perspective style that quite a few other authors use, The Black Minutes is squarely located in the sorta-intellectual niche of the crime/corruption genre. It's rough at times, maybe a little too convinced that revealing the ending (the good guys fail!) near the first chapter isn't going to hurt its chances, but this is a genre that can get pretty far on the strength of style, and Solares has plenty of that. As has become the standard in these King Ellroy times, the unbridled extreme violence comes and stains the brain about midway through the book, warping most of the sloggier parts into a decent cool-down period. I'd like it if the thing had been a bit more of the New Crime Classic its getting pushed as, and even though it fails to be that, it is pretty fun in the end.

Zen Mediatation Plain and Simple
By Albert Low, 1989

This book is pretty hilarious. It spends the entire first half being really prissy, getting in all these passive aggressive jabs at "other" books about mediation and "other" teachers of Zen, most of which boil down to how none of these "other" books know how important the specifics of sitting on a cushion are, and then, right there in the middle of the book, it switches its directions on breathing in the course of two pages. On the left page, it says "count 1 on the intake of air, count nothing on the out, then count again on the intake", and the right page says the exact opposite. Which isn't a big deal, of course, seriously, nobody is ever going to consider that a big deal...except that the author can't go one page in the entire book without talking about how fucking important it is to get the details right, oh jesus in heaven won't you just get the details right, if you don't get them right I swear I'll just scream myself hoarse about These Details! It's like the guy is standing there getting all OCD on you about meditation, and the whole time his wet penis is rubbing along the top of the metal teachers desk.

Lethal Injection
By Jim Nesbit

Although this is basically a crime novel--the State executioner decides to investigate whether or not the condemned man is guilty, drugs and violence follow--it's a lot more Coetzee than it is Thompson. The guy who writes it seems to be one of those writer's writers, in that he's more often mentioned by people like James Ellroy and David Peace than he is talked about by Amazon reviewers, and if you check out his website, he apparently supplements his income by building entertainment centers and bookcases. It's the sort of thing some people might call a shame, but only if you're operating under the belief that being a published author immediately translates into a full time paying gig.

There's something special about this book, but it's hard to put a finger on what that is. It reads quickly, and the twisted, nasty people that fill its chapters are somewhat familiar, and you can vaguely see the end of the book coming. It's larger than that though, poetic and unique, with a weirdly perfect mix of bisexual cravings and mythic, meaningful violence. People bite each other, they burn, there's a physicality to the way each character handles the actions they take. It's a hard book to spoil--there really isn't anything here that surprises, plot wise--but its still something I'd like to leave alone, for whatever that's worth.

On Film
By Stephen Mulhall, 2001

This is one of the few (possibly "the only") books in Routledge's Thinking In Action series that got itself an extended second edition, so maybe you want to sit up straight. Despite it's brief length, it isn't the easiest book to blurb out. You could say that Mulhall is writing a smart version of one of those "The Philosophy of the Matrix" books where a bunch of pop theorists describe why Cornel West shows up in the third movie while a couple of Klosterman wanna-be's use five dollar words in an attempt to conceal IGN style genre worship, but that description doesn't really do Mulhall's experiment justice, and it's still only half-accurate if you skip the opening introduction entirely. Mulhall's idea is actually far more interesting than just exploring the sexual and political dynamics of the Alien movies, as he puts it in the opener, he genuinely believes that these kinds of films--genre films, especially sci-fi--aren't just about philosophy, but are philosophical arguments. He loses track of this in some of the supplementary sections (as each of the Alien films have a different director, he stops to focus on their other movies as well, meaning the book also deals with Blade Runner, Terminator 1 & 2, Se7en and City of Lost Children), but overall, his stuff on Alien is smart, succinct and relatively unique in its concern.

ABC of Reading
By Ezra Pound, 1934

Hey, this is a horrible book. It's outdated too, as its mostly about how important poetry is and how useless the Chinese are when it comes to creating art and literature. (And if you read between the lines, he actually means all Asian cultures when he says Chinese, because he was a racist jagoff who figured that all those Eastern countries were the exact fucking same. And even if you don't read between the lines, he still straight up says "China: waste of time".) I guess it's possible he had some good qualities, and I'll still read that copy of Cantos at some point since I did already pay for it, but this piece of trash is going out with the garbagio. More because it's boring and obnoxious than because it's racist though, because the boring pages way outnumber the racist sentences. 

Maxims and Reflection
By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, olden days

If the words in here were written today, they would've appeared on a blog, and few people would've read it. If it was written today by someone who carried with them comparable successes to the one's that Goethe himself delivered, quite a few people would've read them, but it still would've been on a blog. 

It is boring, is what I'm trying to get at.

 The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits & Encounters
By Gal Talese, 2003

There's something about the way he looks at you from the cover, right above the lowercase words "portraits & encounters", that makes you think this is going to be a night in with a non-fiction Decameron. Maybe its because his name is oft-attached to the moment when the Kinsey Report become lyrical, maybe it's just because class doesn't age, whatever the reason, this collection has a quality to it that's probably best described with words like "sumptuous" and "lyrical", a kind of intellectual eroticism.

But it that at all, at least, it isn't just that. This is just an anthology of a man's best known pieces, essays like "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold", "Joe Louis: The King as a Middle-Aged Man" and "The Brave Tailors of Maida." It is, all of it together, a striking dive into other people's lives, made even more attractive by how little of it seems possible. Near the end of the book, Talese succinctly lists the things about non-fiction that he believes matter most: excellent pay, no tape recorders, no phone interviews, plenty of time. It's hard to believe that sort of writing will ever flourish again. For now, at least, a printed document of the time when it did is available. That will have to do.

Even Less Involving Section (hence the title "Clearing House")

L.A. Noir
By John Buntin, 2009

This is basically the non-fiction James Ellroy, although its probably not as extreme as actual non-fiction James Ellroy. Passes the time, but you can't really get off on the violence, because it all really happened.

Hip: The History
By John Leland, 2004

Nowhere near as bad as expected, so who knows what one might think if they go into it without a "i'm certain this will be horrible" preconception. Pretty informative section on blackface entertainment, although the Tosches book "Where Dead Voices Gather" covers the same ground, better.

An Afghanistan Picture Show (or, How I Saved The World)
By William T. Vollman, 1992

Nothing like the rest of the Vollman catalog, which might please those who agree with that "these literary people are terrible" list that the Huffington Post put up. Good book, pretty dated, way more interesting than that Photographer comic, which covered the same topic.

Liar's Poker
By Michael Lewis, 1989

This book has been so thoroughly incorporated by popular culture that I spent most of the time reading it convinced that I must have read it before and forgot about it. Interesting, kind of shallow.

The Black Ice Score
By Richard Stark/Donald Westlake, 1965

The one where he teams up with African nationals, hence the title. Parker as planner is always great, Parker as girlfriend-having teacher/trainer a bit less so. Nice slaughterhouse ending though, so if you grade these books on a violence continuum, this one will end up near the top five.

The Audacity of Hype
By Armando Ianucci, 2009

Not as hilarious as Thick of It, but way better than his sketch comedy show. 

The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture
By Armond White, 1995

Oh, you know its good. Stuff on Tupac, ice-cold acid baths for Spike Lee, weird Spielberg love letters, aggressive, fuck-grammar sentence constructions and a whole essay on what's wrong with Mississippi Burning--this is way more valuable a piece of work to have around than a hundred books full of stuff one agrees with.

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest (is a piece of shit)

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest
By Stieg Larsson, 2010

Some professional book blogger was telling me that the reason the Larsson trilogy is so popular--and yes, that's the original definition of popular, the one you're only supposed to pull out for Harry Potter and Twilight level shit--was because the author was dead. I disagreed: the reason these books are sorely in need of meat cleaver editing is because the author is dead. The reason they're popular is because they're Swedish crime thrillers, which are unexplainably hip right now, and because they have an interesting character that a lot of readers want to keep up with, regardless of what surrounds that character. That doesn't mean Lisbeth Salander is unique--as was pointed out to me by some actual professional crime-writer dudes, there are plenty of successful serials that focus on female protagonists who have suffered some manner of sexual assault and now devote most of their waking hours to hunting down a bunch of over-the-top rape-crazy molestation freaks. (Which she really only does in the first book, but that's how they hook you.) I haven't read them, they have, there's apparently a whole field of this kind of stuff, and some of them are supposedly pretty good. (And of course, there's Andrew Vachss, who--really, never mind. Fuck that guy's books. It's cool that he devotes so much of his money and time to fighting actual child exploitation, but his books are garbage, gross-out rip-off books that keep going "look at how hard this little kid was fucking raped before he was double raped and dismembered by rapists" and when you react, like a normal person, by saying "shit man, is there going to be a plot here or is just a bunch of hammy noir cliches leading up to more kiddie and lady rape scenes" he gets all condescending and says "i guess some people just can't handle real life" which is--gimme a fucking break, creep. A bunch of horrifying evil shit being done to innocent women and children strung together between extreme-o updates on Westlake and Chandler riffs isn't "a brutal confrontation with the realness of reality" anymore than it would be if I started slicing on my testicles with a steak knife right when my dad starts to carve the turkey on Thanksgiving. "C'mon papa. Why you so repressed? I'm just showing you the dark side of this special day."

[In other words, Larsson's publishers has better p.r. agents than other people's publishers, is the point of all that. Also Andrew Vachss irritates me is the other point. Two points!]

Here's the thing: if you've read the first two books in Larsson's "Millennium Trilogy", you're clearly going to want to read this third one. (It is called that because Larsson didn't realize that people only wanted to read about his autistic savant bisexual pierced Olympic-level kickboxing female character, he believed they'd be more excited about his long boring ass subplots about a magazine, and not just any regular dentist office magazine, but the Martin Luther King/Jesus Christ/Superman of change-the-world-for-a-better-place magazine, and that magazine is called "Millennium". I think Larsson expected people to hang out at bookstores and be all like "man, I wish that magazine was real, we wouldn't need to worry about oil spills or 85 Mexican people dying in one day if there was a magazine like that." Seriously, each book ends with the magazine unleashing this amazing issue that totally blows the entire reading population's minds and then there's a part where the writer goes on television and then Larsson tells you how the newscaster who interviewed the magazine guy won some Television Journalism award just for talking to the dude about his magazine article, and the way it's written you can tell this is supposed to be supremely satisfying, because hey: nothing changes the world like a local newscaster winning a journalism award.)

Confession: I knew this was going to be a piece of shit! I bought it at a store where they don't know me personally, because I didn't want my new friends at the cool store I normally buy these kinds of books at to think I was a sucker like all the other suckers. (This actually backfired on me, because it turns out I am already considered a douchebag because I am a big Martin Beck fan and they all think he is overrated and boring.) 

In My Defense: I don't have one, but it seriously only takes like six hours to read one of these books, and I bet you've blown eighteen hours on something you knew wasn't very good just because you wanted to find out how it ended. And if you haven't, you're doing it right now so HA HA on YOU

[Since this is turning into one of those only-allowable-on-the-internet style things, here is some useless information: the original Swedish title of this book is "The Air Castle That Was Blown Up". Some credit is deserved for not using that title.]

One thing is for sure. You'd have to be completely mental to care at all about the other primary character in these books, the Mikael Blomkvist character. He's an obvious author substitute (Stieg Larsson was a writer for a magazine that apparently changes the world into a better place all the time over in Sweden), who becomes a laughable middle aged Don Juan fantasy by the middle of the first book, a smirk-inducing cartoon by the second, and in the third, when he's run out of shit to do but wander from bed to bed through a succession of awestruck women who just can't get enough of his pudgy chalk-white body and prissy complaints that he "doesn't want to be tied down to a relationship", you're just greeting him with a grimace, but not the like the Grimace guy from McDonald's who I still think is a pretty great mascot and wish they would use more often. We got it, Stieg. You wanted to have sex with every woman you met, ever, regardless of age, appearance, intelligence, humor, likability, any actual human characteristics if we're being honest--if they were a woman, you wanted to rub your flaccid muscles all over them in hotel rooms they rented for you to do so in, and then you wanted to have pillow talk about how awesome you were in bed. 

[Supposedly, Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt and George Clooney all want to play the part of Mikael Blomkvist in the upcoming American remix of the Swedish films. If that happens, then maybe they can make the constant bedhopping stuff believable, but it still seems pretty g-d unlikely that there's going to be an American movie where the main male character has seven to nine sexual trysts with different female partners, even if they make the films three hours long, which is what the Swedish ones will be when they come out on DVD. That doesn't leave a whole lot of time for whatever female actress they get to play Lisbeth, and you should remember: she is the only thing that is interesting about these books. It will be pretty funny if David Fincher does actually make the movie (although he probably will choose not to as that will interrupt his favorite hobby, which is thinking about making movies but not making them) because the Swedish films were made by directors who have clearly only seen one movie in their entire life, and that movie was directed by David Fincher and was called Se7en.]

Okay, if you've made it this far you don't care about spoilers and you want to know what's up with Lisbeth. "What's up with Lisbeth?", I can hear you. After all, the second book ended with her on the way to the hospital after being buried alive, which was actually an accident because the people who buried her alive (her father and super-human half-brother) had gone to the trouble of shooting her in the head and shoulder first. (They thought that would kill her, but Stieg Larsson's clearly well-researched version of autism hardens the brain and shoulder against bullets. I guess?)

So here you are, a Lisbeth Salander-interested type person, you've got yourself all steeled up to tolerate the full page descriptions of what characters are wearing (which always precede the part where Stieg explains who these characters are, meaning you get full fashion descriptions including t-shirt and shoe color before you get the "she is a cop" or "he is a spy" kind of information), you're fully aware that Blomkvist is probably going to get lots of lady loving in while passive-aggressively telling his conquests about how many other women he will be conquesting later (to which they always sigh and get kind of like "oh well, you foxy overweight writer, you're worth the heartache"--you're ready, you're prepared. Book three. Bring it on mother grabber.

Here's the math. For the first 80% of the book, Lisbeth Salander is in a hospital bed. For half of that 80%, she plays with a smartphone that has internet access. For the next 5% of the book, she sits in a courtroom wearing "shocking" goth outfits that were dated even before 1996's Antichrist Superstar tour. For another 5% of the book, she gets really drunk and fulfills the masturbation fantasies of middle-aged married male business travelers. (By picking them up, telling them she doesn't care if they're married, and then by fucking their brains out on their schedule.) And then, right there at the end, she gets in a death duel with one of the X-Men (his mutant powers include having the strength of an army of gorillas and being "impervious to physical pain"), and then she balks at finishing the gig herself. 

And so the story concludes, happily, because Blomkvist shows up at her house with some take-out food and she gives him a big old hug. The fight and the reunion take up the last 10%, so that's where it ends.

So yeah, I don't know why these are popular. It sure isn't because they're awesome.

-Tucker Stone, 2010

No Pictures: No Thinking

excerpt
The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T
By Steve Coll, 1986

"I'll tell you one thing. This case is going to be a severed limbs case. We're going to have severed limbs, AT&T limbs, on the table dripping blood. That's the way this case is going to be settled. We're not going to settle this thing with injunctive relief."

"You can't expect me to go back to my board of directors and tell them something like that," Levy answered.

"That's exactly what I want you to do," said Anderson. "I want you to go back and tell them that the next time they send somebody down here to talk about settling, I want to see severed limbs on the table. In fact, if you want to come in the door, you've got to throw a couple of severed limbs in ahead of you, or you don't even get in the door."

A Murder of Quality
By John le Carre, 1962

This is John boy's second slash at the whole writing game, and it's as frayed around the edges as can be imagined, which makes for double trouble as the book was a bitch for the guy to write. (Collapsing marraige, a stressful day job with the Secret Service, take your pick, le Carre was crawling from crisis to crisis.) An attempt to stretch the George Smiley character into the role of Angela Lansbury, the basic plot of Murder comes down like this: the wife of a teacher at a high class (British High Class, so think Really Snobby) boarding school ends up dead, and Smiley heads to the land of the Dead Poets Society to track the killer through the magic of having tea with the various suspects before unleashing a "theory" that he seems to have concocted from the desperation of wanting to leave town as quickly as possible. This book shot to be a mystery and a satire of the upper classes, but it succeeds at neither, which is why le Carre never tried to write a book like this again. Still, if you're desperate to find out what Smiley was doing in the five minutes between being sloppy awesome (in Call for the Dead) and watching other people be really fucking awesome (in Spy Who Came In From the Cold), this is the place where you would do that.

excerpt
The Sour Lemon Score
By Richard Stark/Donald Westlake, 1969

"I have a personal thing I've got to get settled with him."

Pearson gave a sour grin. "You too? Georgy does get around." He was facing the house, with Parker facing the opposite way, and now Pearson looked at the house and said, "I don't know."

"You don't know what?"

"That's why Grace called, huh? To get Uhl's address for you."

"Yes."

"So now you're coming to me direct," Pearson said, and then he said, "Uh," and a small black thing appeared in the middle of his forehead, making him look cross-eyed. His head started to go back, the black thing went deep, burrowing, turning red at the edges, and the sound of the shot finally caught up with it, a flat, echoless clap in the middle of the sunshine.

Parker dove off the chair.

Conversations With And About Beckett
By Mel Gussow, 1996

It's more on the "About Beckett" side than it is "with", and all the "with" stem from a series of (mostly annual) coffee dates where note-taking was frowned upon. Gussow's passion for the subject of Beckett is palpable, so even though the book has a ghoulish quality to it, (as it's never totally up front about how supportive Beckett felt towards the project, or if he really even knew abou it at all) it's still a treasure trove of information about the man. Which, honestly, it would have been simply by being longer than twenty pages. But if the question is whether anybody but a Beckett fan will get anything out of the book, the answer is pretty blatant: no, not at all. There's no real strong argument here for why his writing mattered, why it's influential, nothing like that. It's just a mildly academic version of a gossip-y love letter, from the point of view of someone who spent a healthy portion of his life trying to tell the world why they should care more about someone he believed in completely. Gussow may not have sacrificed a lot, but he did sacrifice something. In these pages, you could easily muster up an understanding as to why.

excerpt
Tokyo Year Zero
By David Peace, 

I itch and I scratch. Gari-gari. My arms and my legs. I turn their shoes to face the door. I itch and I scratch. Gari-gari. My back and my front. I turn their shoes to face the door. I itch and I scratch. Gari-gari. My scalp and my groin. I turn their shoes to face the door. I itch and I scratch. Gari-gari. My nails blood, my hands blood-
    Death is everywhere. Death is everywhere…
    I take the scissors from her dresser. I see black lice. I take the cover off her mirror. I see brown lice. I begin to cut. I see yellow lice. I cut the longer hairs on my head. I see grey lice. I cut the longer hairs on my body. I see white lice. then I take the razor from her dresser. I see black lice. I open up the blade. I see brown lice. I dip the blade in the bowl of water by her bed. I see yellow lice. I have no soap but still I shave. I see gray lice. I shave off my hair. I see white lice. The hair on my head. I see black lice. The hair on my body. I see brown lice. Hair by hair. I see yellow lice. Every last strand. I see grey lice. In my scalp. I see white lice. In my groin. I see black lice. The skin beneath is red. I see brown lice. The skin beneath is raw-
    I see yellow lice, I see grey lice, I see white lice…
    The razor in my head, the blade dull now-
    Death is everywhere. Death is everywhere…
    Black lice. Black lice. Black lice-
    Death follows us as we follow death…
    Yuki is awake. Her eyes open-
    But we’re already dead…

From Doon With Death
By Ruth Rendell, 1964

Reading a series of mystery books from the very beginning is a popular thing to do, especially since it's still the standard for mystery authors to rapidly pump out titles, but it isn't always going to be that rewarding. Following up on the meager le Carre results above, here's example two, Ruth Rendell's first Inspector Wexler story, Doon With Death. It's so much the standard that it seems produced via public domain, culminating with one of those "put everybody in the same room, explain everything" conclusions that feels like stale comfort food. Whether she's a good writer or not--probably, although I don't have actual experience to point towards--is a question this book can't even approach answering, although the afterword is pretty blunt about Doon's interest factor being of a purely archival variety, useful only as the opening burp of a writer's body of work. Oh yeah, the cover. It looks like that because the cops spend a lot of pages trying to find the various owners of an expensive brand of lipstick. If it's any consolation, the book takes about 13 seconds to read.

-Tucker Stone, 2010

No Pictures: Mind The Gap, Pamela

The Best American Crime Reporting 2009
Edited by Jeffrey Toobin
Series Editors Otto Penzler & Thomas H. Cook
Published by Ecco/Harper Collins, 2009

Mark it now, there's a Best American Blogposts Where Arizona Argues Against Race Mixing in the works, because that's what happens when three (for now) publishers figure out they can reprint previously written natterings about just about anything, as long as the word "Best" and "American" pops up before the part where they describe what the thing actually is. The Best American Crime Reporting, or BACR if you feel the need, isn't an official entry in the canon, but now that it's outlasted the for-serious Recipe collection, maybe it can find a home.

There's some decent stuff in this one, no surprise really: it's a book length equivalent of your newspapers Police Blotter/News of the Weird section, if your newspaper covered the world and the blurbs were longer and written by clever people with interesting agendas. There's more than a couple of Law & Order plots here, and since most of those particular episodes were filmed following this things release, NBC might want to bring Penzler & Cook on as data miners. (If they haven't already, since Penzler is one of those types who's more well versed in mystery and crime than wikipedia, and he's a sure-to-die-here New Yorker as well.) The most unnerving pieces aren't as predictable as you might expect--sure, there's the bleak tour into the final days of a spree killing teenager, and yep, there's one of those excellent let's-pretend-this-is-all-their-fault horror stories about the Mexican drug cartel wars, but then there's American Murder Mystery, a bundled slice of controversy and raw data that acts on the reader like an ingestion of foodborne botulism, seeping further and further into the body until the final sections serve as the moment in which the brain violently begins attempting to eject the information as rapidly as possible. While most of the book ends up in the same category as the cheap true crime fetish work that this genre mostly consists of--soul-crushing horror or alt-news pop fodder--there's enough muscle in the chosen few to give the book a dark sociological value that the cornball cover doesn't advertise. It'll be curious to know how much of a future these books might have--if it isn't obvious enough, the book is a print version of a link-blog, with many of its articles available for free from the same outlets that initially funded them--but then again, it's also notable that all of the collected articles were born in print, and that few of them could have found the necessary financial sustenance required in website dollars alone.

Out Stealing Horses
By Per Petterson
Published in English by Picador/St. Martins Press, 2005

It certainly takes way too much long for this Norwegian book to take off, but when it does--with the first of two requisite family tragedies that explain Newsweek's "master storyteller!" blurb--it has a good bit of punch to it. There's yet to be a decent explanation for why American readers have spent the last decade jacking themselves off to Nordic versions of the same kind of family secret novels and crime fictions that their own country produces plenty of already, and Petterson doesn't contain the answer anymore than a Wallander dour-fest. But there's more than a few passages in this book that really sing, and, as is standard with anything set in the snowed in hideaways of a country few of its readers will ever visit, it's an alluring setting to spend time in. If you're going to give it a shot, word of advice: ignore the blurbs. From NPR to the New York Times Book Review, everybody involved has taken the opportunity to praise a critic-turned-novelist who has, at best, produced a decent take on the umpteenth version of Old Man Looks Back, Heavy Heart at the Ready.

On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness
By Jacques Derrida
Published in English by Routledge/Informa plc, 2001

This is one of the books published under the "Thinking In Action" imprint, which publishes a wide manner of "theory junkie" books, including an upcoming one called "On Manners", which is why I'm using the word manner in the earlier part of this sentence. The books are barely ever tied into what their titles refer to--this one is a long form advertisement for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as well as a bio-pic on France's relationship between Algeria, circa ten years ago--and that's probably why 30% of the blurbs describing the Thinking In Action series relate to the way the books are designed, because nobody reads these things. (They have pictures on the front, minimalist design, and orange spines. The Derrida cover is an out-of-focus picture of people, because, you know, forgiveness and cosmopolitanism are things that sort of involve people and is kind of out of their reach.) Derrida had great hair, and he's worth reading for that reason. There's a lot of philosophy out there, and one of the easiest ways to make sure you aren't wasting your time is to check and make sure that the people you're reading are at least as attractive as you are (or more so), because there is nothing you can learn from ugly people except how to suck at life.

Beauty and Sadness
By Yasunari Kawabata
Published in English by Knopf, 1975

Beauty and Sadness leans a lot heavier on the latter, with almost all of its beauty coming with massive strings attached in the form of These Hotties Are Crazy. They might just be sexist staples, but Kawabata is totally up front about how much of a shithead its primary male character is--if ever there was a guy who could only attract women who were all about annihiliating his life, it would be this guy, and boy does he pretty much deserve most of what he's got coming to him. (Most, but not all, because some of the fallout from his whole "I must have sex with young, damaged woman who I will emotionally manipulate into sociopathy through lust and indecisive whining" ends up landing on the innocent family members he treats like shit.) All that gruesome emotional torment aside, it's a pretty compelling story that suffers more from what one hopes is a shitty English translation that turns lucid, dreamy sentences into confusing half-finished fragments of thought. It's probably best not to look for too much of an autobiography in the plot, but it's hard not too when the author of the book about a successful author's illicit love affair apparently took his own life after an alleged illicit love affair--but hey, anagrams. Anagrams can be for grown-ups.

-Tucker Stone, 2010

No Pictures: Begin Again, Start In The Past

The following "reviews" were written in 1990. No attempt to repair them has been made. They remain as they were submitted for grading.

The Stand
By Stephen King

Larry Underwood and Rita Hawywood are together, and they are hiking out of the devastated town of New York City. They are walking along when Rita cries out in pain. Larry turns around and finds out that she was wearing sandals that chaffed through the skin on her feet. She started to bleed. Larry gets very angry. In real life, people would be angry with her. (Rita did feel discomfort, but she is so stupid that she said nothing.)

In this part, everyone who survived the disease goes to Mother Abigal's house. It is really dumb because Mother Abigal is a new character who is a real weirdo. She is really old, but supposedly can walk for miles and miles without tiring. That is absurd! I also dislike how this book is becoming a religious war.

I really like this part because it is the final standoff between the Dark Man versus Larry Underwood, Ralph Brenter, and Glen Bateman. They are all great characters. In a really dumb story, those three guys would be dead. Glen Bateman gets shot, but even then, he really does "beat" the Dark Man. Larry and Ralph are being prepared to be drawn and quartered, but Trashcan Man, a bad guy, comes along with an A-bomb. The A-bomb explodes and every single bad guy dies.

However, so do Larry and Ralph. So much for the good guys too.

Life, The Universe & Everything
By Douglas Adams

I don't understand this because it seems so strange! I am reading about how Ford, Arthur and Slaberfast are supposed to save the universe. It seems all jarbled up. However, it is very relieving to read about Marvin, the depressed robot, who is extremely funny. I think however, that if I read over the passage that I don't get, then I can understand it.

The character I most admire is Arthur Dent because throughout this series of books, Arthur has changed from a weak spirited guy to a gutsy, compassionate and kind person. He has done weird stuff, scary stuff and really dumb stuff. Now he takes on the challenge of being in the real world.

The Solid Gold Kid
By Norma Fox Frazer

I like this writing because it is articulate, and many emotions are very true to life. The characters are angry at the right times. However, the kidnappers are a bit fake. They are just stereotypical kidnappers. A man gets angry easily, and a woman really dislikes what she's doing. I think that it might be better if the woman got angry and the man hated crime.

The Kid In The Red Jacket
By Barbara Park

If I were Howard at this point, I would beat up this little six year old. She is annoying and nasty. For example, she says "Do you have a piano?" The answer is no. She says "Could you get one?" This girl is stupid and ridiculous. Why can't Howard just break her jaw? Then her mouth would be wired shut and I wouldn't have to read her silly comments. This may sound kind of sick though.

The Great Brain
By John D. Fitzgerald

I dislike The Great Brain because he is not always very nice and swindles people out of their money. He is always laying a guilt trip on his younger brother. He seemingly is only nice when he is going to get something out of it. He thinks that fighting is right, and he fights all the time.

Dear Bruce Springsteen
By Kevin Major

I dislike this idea because it doesn't tell the complete story. The real truth filters through what he says, and it comes out all jumbled up. The story should be told from an omniscient point of view, that would make it more understandable. Also, the slang is used to much. Words like "wicked" and "oh man" get pretty stale after a while.

Bunnicula
By James & Deborah Howe

I love this series of books. The Bunnicula books are great, and even though I read them so much long ago, they are not in the least bit old. I enjoy reading the story from Harold's point of view because he never gets too silly or dumb. The plot seems absurd but it is still very enjoyable. If a book was ever forced on a person and that book was a must to read, then Bunnicula would be the logical choice.

Manaic Magee
By Jerry Spinelli

I like this writing because it is funny, extravagent, outlandish and downright silly. The things Maniac does are possible but it is amazing he has the guts to do them. He is completely incredible. He is sometimes sad. I was disappointed when the old man died. I enjoyed the part where Amanda chewed him out. He sort of deserved it. I hope they write a sequel to this book.

-Tucker Stone, 1990

Thanks to Amy Lopp.