I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (JULY 2013 EDITION)

Just like it says, Jasper. 

JUST FINISHED

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon

I’ve been off and on with Chabon, in part because everything he’s written since The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Klay (the first book of his that I read) has had to live up to that. This book is more than up to the challenge. The basic story focuses on two long-time friends, Archy and Nat, who run a used record store in Oakland, CA and find their livelihood threatened by the planned opening of a huge multimedia chain store a few blocks away. But the book is really more about testing the bonds of friendship and family, especially between races, and digs deep into the characters. The entire narrative is top-loaded with nerd-level pop-culture references (from funk and jazz to Blaxploitation and Tarantino films) that some might find annoying, but for me it worked fine, given the used-vinyl angle. Sometimes (well, more than sometimes) Chabon overdoes it with digressions and back-stories that congest the narrative, and I can’t say I’m all that interested in midwifery (which serves as a parallel plot point), but I have to say it’s well worth the effort to slog through. I can’t imagine too many people getting into this, but I think anyone whose idea of a good time is digging through crates of old records or VHS tapes will probably get it.

JUST STARTED

Maigret In Court by Georges Simenon

In which Chief Inspector Maigret is indeed in court, testifying to his investigation into the murder of a woman and her daughter. The twist: he’s just not convinced the suspect is capable of the murder despite the evidence against him. I enjoy the Maigret novels – they’re a nice French twist on the genre and often, when Simenon is on top of his game, interesting micro-studies of the human condition. So I’m looking forward to this.

RECENT TITLES

They Eat Puppies, Don't They? by Christopher Buckley

Christopher Buckley has to be the best political satirist in America right now, and his latest novel is hard evidence. This time Buckley targets neo-cons and China with a tale of a defense lobbyist tasked to stir up anti-China sentiment in America in order to get Congressional funding for a new weapons system. His solution: team up with a hot neo-con wonk to spread a rumor that China is trying to assassinate the Dalai Lama. Hilarity ensues as things spiral out of control. Buckley is so good at skewering both sides of the American foreign policy debate, especially in regards to China (it says a lot that the most likeable and reasonable character in the whole book is the fictional president of China) that only people who have a sense of humor about their own political views need apply.

The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham

Which you may know better as Village Of The Damned. I’ve read Wyndham before and liked him, so I decided to read this, even though I’d seen the film and more or less know the story – everyone in the village of Midwich falls asleep when a mysterious object lands, and afterwards every woman capable of childbirth is discovered to be pregnant. They eventually give birth to almost identical children with golden eyes and deadly telepathic powers. It’s one of the great ideas in science fiction, and the basic story is good. Unfortunately, with the two main characters being a writer and an academic philosopher, the narrative spends way too much time calmly pondering the intellectual ramifications of an otherwise chilling tale. The style kind of fits in with Wyndham’s “cozy catastrophe” approach, but with everyone’s “keep calm and carry on” attitude for the majority of the book, it’s hard to feel any sense of dread by the climax. That could be because I already knew where all this was going to go, but I thought Wyndham overdid the intellectual ponderings.

Trouble Is My Business by Raymond Chandler

This has apparently been published in a few different versions, some of which mainly include detective stories that don’t feature Philip Marlowe. Anyway, this is the version that collects four Marlowe novellas, including the title story. And it pretty much delivers everything you want in a Marlowe mystery – dames in trouble, dames who are trouble, gats, Scotch, murder, double crosses, Marlowe getting sapped on the head, the works. The fourth novella, “Red Wind” is the weakest of the bunch, plotwise, but Chandler’s fabulous prose still makes it worth sitting through. And in any case, a “weak” Chandler story is still a better deal than most detective stories out there.

The Pirates! In an Adventure With Napoleon by Gideon Defoe

The fourth and (so far) final pirate book from Gideon Defoe, in which the Pirate Captain decides to retire from pirating to raise bees on the grim island of St Helena. Exiled Napoleon arrives, and they end up feuding and engaging in an epic battle for head of the St Helena Residential Association. It’s funnier than I’m making it sound, but not by much. This is easily the weakest book of the series, in part because Defoe makes the Pirate Captain’s buffoonery a little too obvious to the other characters, compared to previous books where his silly behavior is regarded as completely reasonable to everyone else. Also, I didn’t feel as though he really had a good sense of how Napoleon fit into the Pirates! universe, whereas he did much better with Darwin, Captain Ahab, and Karl Marx in previous episodes. It’s still a nice quick read, but something of a relative letdown.

The World Jones Made by Philip K Dick

One of Dick’s early novels, about Floyd Jones, a man who can see one year into the future and becomes a mad prophet at a time when Earth is recovering from World War 3 and giant single-celled aliens are landing on Earth. Soon to be a major motion picture directed by Terry Gilliam, apparently. Anyway, I do like PKD, but despite a lot of neat ideas here (including government-enforced Relativism, genetic-engineering humans to live on other planets, the hell of having to live every year of yr life twice at the same time, etc), the narrative is pretty fractured, with a tendency to just throw stuff at you as though it was already discussed earlier in the book – possibly intentionally or because of hack editing. Either way, I couldn’t really get a handle on the story, though by the third act, events kick into gear. Overall, not one of PKD’s better books.

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This is dF