I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (JULY 2011 EDITION)

[defrog]

JUST FINISHED

The Spy’s Bedside Book by Hugh and Grahame Greene

An odd duck of an anthology with a format I’ve not seen before – snippets of stories rather than complete ones, grouped together into categories highlighting the various tropes of the spy story. Which, in a sense, makes it more like a literary reference book than a straight read. It didn’t particularly whet my appetite for any authors I haven’t already read, but for anyone planning to write their own spy story, it’s a reasonably handy guide for what elements to include (or avoid).

JUST STARTED

Child Of Fortune by Norman Spinrad

Spinrad’s coming-of-age saga about the interstellar journey of self-discovery by self-centered rich girl Wendi Shasta Leonardo. It’s also Spinrad’s sci-fi take on the Flower Children movement of the 60s, and – like everything else I’ve read by Spinrad – it’s a bit of a slog to start with, but I’m starting to get the hang of it, and there’s enough happening to keep me interested.

RECENT TITLES

Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov

The third book in the Foundation series (if you don’t count Prelude To Foundation as the first book, which I don’t because it was written as a prequel), in which The Mule, having conquered the Foundation with his mutant power of controlling human emotions, is on the hunt for the Second Foundation – as are the survivors of the Foundation itself, who suspect its leaders nay have similar powers to The Mule and are therefore dangerous. Almost as entertaining as the first two books, except that one of the main characters, Arkady Darell, is pretty annoying. But overall, I’m still enjoying the series. 

Everybody Dies by Lawrence Block

The 14th book in the Matt Scudder series that focuses on Scudder’s oddball friendship with Irish gangster Mick Ballou, who has two dead bodies in his storage unit and wants Scudder to find out if it’s anything other than gang-related. It’s not, and Scudder finds it impossible to back out once people he knows start getting killed. Typical for Block, it’s a great read and a good story, and notable for killing off a few recurring minor but important characters, but it’s the character study between Scudder and Ballou that makes it a standout in the series. 

The Android’s Dream by John Scalzi

In which trade negotiations between Earth and an alien race go sour after a high-tech farting incident leaves both negotiators dead, and the only thing standing between them and interstellar war is a rare breed of sheep that State Department man Harry Creek has one week to locate. And it just gets weirder from there. A nice spoof of interplanetary politics and crackpot religions, and while it might seem a stretch to suggest that alien cultures are not much different from Earth when it comes to bureaucratic buffoonery and political brinksmanship, that’s also kind of part of the joke. 

The Soft Cage: Surveillance In America by Christian Parenti

This book claims to trace the history of surveillance in America dating all the way back to the days of slave passes up to the current post-9/11 situation. Parenti riffs off the work of Michel Foucalt and the idea of a panopticon society to make the case that, by design or accident, America was on its way to becoming a surveillance state long before 9/11. But he doesn’t make a very good case, unless yr prepared to believe that mug shots, fingerprinting and immigration records count as “surveillance”. Even then, it doesn’t help that Parenti tends to get pedantic in his arguments – not to the point of relying on conspiracy theories, but enough to play down the benign intentions and even benefits of many of these things. Still, one interesting takeaway is how many of the things we take for granted like fingerprinting and photo IDs were met with the same kind of resistance and paranoia that (say) warrantless wiretapping is today. 

The Doom Patrol Vol 1: Crawling From The Wreckage by Grant Morrison, Richard Case and Doug Braithwaite

I’ve been meaning to read Grant Morrison’s take on the Doom Patrol for awhile after someone alerted me to it recently – I wasn't that familiar with either Morrison or Doom Patrol when it first came out, but the idea of a band of super-powered misfits naturally appeals to me, so it’s a shame I didn’t read this a long time ago. Anyway, the first volume leverages the Invasion crossover to start fresh, with the reformation of the DP with a mix of classic and new characters, and it’s just about as weird as you’d expect from Morrison writing a Vertigo title – madness, William Burroughs tributes, psychedelic riddles, Scissormen snipping people out of existence like coupons, and a storyline about a book within a book imposing its fictional narrative on this reality. And that’s just Volume 1. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series..

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