I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (AUGUST 2012 EDITION)

[defrog]

Burning my way through the “to read” pile for yr entertainment.

JUST FINISHED

Dracula Lives! by Joshua R Reynolds

Once again I am in a position where I get to review a book written by someone who actually reads this blog (in this case Joshua Reynolds, though I’m not 100% sure he’s still on LJ). As the title might suggest, it’s a pulp-action horror tale starring Jonas Cream, a sort of freelance British agent mixed up in a plot to retrieve a McGuffin that, it turns out, will resurrect Dracula. It’s a decent story, fast-paced to the point where you get two extended action sequences every chapter. There’s also a lot of quipping. I liked it, though my only real complaint is that with something like five or six different parties fighting over the McGuffin, it gets difficult to keep track of who works for who even before the plot twists start kicking in – at least for me.

JUST STARTED

To Say Nothing Of The Dog by Connie Willis

In my quest to try and find more female authors to read, Connie Willis gets name-dropped a lot, and I think I actually read one of her early books, Water Witch, back in the 80s, but I don’t remember much about it. Anyway, I thought I’d give this time travel tale a go, even though it involves a lot of Victorian England, which is usually something that makes me turn away. On the other hand, it’s also influenced by classic British comedy, so I’ll take a chance.

RECENT TITLES

Foundation And Earth by Isaac Asimov

The fifth novel in the Foundation saga, which takes up immediately where the previous novel left off, in which Golan Trevize had been forced to choose who will shepherd the Galaxy to complete the Seldon Plan – the Foundation, the Second Foundation or Gaia, a planet where every organism is part of a collective consciousness. His decision made by intuition, Trevize now has to understand why he chose who he did, and to do that he must find the mythological planet Earth. Like its predecessor Forward The Foundation, I felt this one was padded it out with a lot of intellectual discussion (and arguing), but the story itself is good, and the ending was somewhat unexpected. I don't know if I’ll be reading the two prequels Asimov wrote after this, and in the end I’d probably recommend the original Foundation trilogy, with the two Trevize books being optional, but I still enjoyed them. 

The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists by Gideon Defoe

In which a band of pirates meet Charles Darwin in the Galapagos and agree to accompany him to England to find his brother Erasmus, who has been kidnapped by the Bishop to blackmail Darwin into abandoning his theory that a monkey can be trained to be an English gentleman. This is quite possibly the silliest book I’ve ever read. And as someone that’s read the majority of Robert Rankin’s back catalog (and all of Douglas Adams’), that’s saying something. It’s basically what you’d get if Monty Python did a pirate film and wrote it down instead of filming it – surreal, nonsense humor with irrelevant footnotes and no respect whatsoever for actual history. Or science. Loads of fun, though some monkeys don't fare well.

Deadly Edge by Richard Stark

My third go with Stark’s heist man Parker, who this time robs a rock concert, after which the other members of his crew are hunted down and killed by two drug-crazed hippies. The “drug-crazed hippies” part is a bit much, but Stark manages to milk buckets of suspense out of it as Parker’s girlfriend Claire gets caught in the middle. Well done. 

The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy

This is Ellroy’s sequel to his convoluted JFK-conspiracy novel American Tabloid, which I enjoyed. I like Ellroy, but given his unrelentingly hard-boiled view of mid-20th Century law enforcement and American foreign policy as pathologically violent, racist and sexist, a little Ellroy goes a long way for me. In this case, it goes a really long way. The basic story, which covers fictional events that lead to the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, as well as Vietnam, govt-sponsored drug trade, Howard Hughes’ takeover of Vegas and institutionalized racism in the South (and pretty much everywhere else), is hard to follow, not least thanks to Ellroy writing 680 pages in short repetitive sentences. The “Document Inserts” help bring some clarity, and the conversation transcripts with J Edgar Hoover are very entertaining. And I do give Ellroy credit for spinning a very creative, detailed take on the RFK/MLK assassinations. But overall I found it a case of too much effort for too little reward.

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